Back in September, Malinda Barberio received an email from someone claiming to have a Wollemi pine. 

No way, thought Barberio, the University of Colorado Boulder greenhouse manager. “Because I know what they are,” she said. 

She knew the Wollemi pine to be extremely rare, previously thought to be gone with the dinosaurs, which are believed to have munched on the fern-like leaves. Then came a 1994 discovery in a remote Australian canyon. Then came a conservation effort around the prehistoric trees, which slowly reached some of the finest botanical gardens and research centers around the world. 

As well as someone’s backyard in Boulder? No way, Barberio thought as she read that email. 

“But she had attached photos,” Barberio said. “I was like, ‘Oh, she does.'” 

Now the greenhouse on 30th Street is home to what the university has called a “dinosaur tree.” 

That woman, CU Boulder alum Judy McKeever, had emailed about donating the Wollemi she and her husband came to call Wally. Barberio gladly accepted. And Wally has received curious visitors ever since. 

“It’s a very rare opportunity to see something that most people will never see and will never know about,” Barberio said, “and that we’re just lucky that one guy found.” 

That guy was David Noble, a ranger who was rappelling in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales one day in 1994. 

“He suddenly came upon an extraordinary sight: a canyon filled with strange, massive pines,” reads an account from Australia’s National Parks and Wildlife Service. “The sight would have felt like a scene from The Land Before Time.” 

Indeed, the Wollemi pine has been traced back to the land of dinosaurs, the Cretaceous period. Before Noble’s drop into that strange forest, the tree had only been noted in the fossil record spanning some 90 million years.

Once rediscovered, “conservation efforts started almost immediately,” Barberio said. 

These efforts took a rather odd turn with National Geographic’s holiday catalog, starting in 2006. Saplings were listed at $99.95. The Wollemi was listed as “a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs, a miraculous time traveler and one of the greatest living fossils discovered in the twentieth century.”

And there was a purpose beyond profits. 

The idea was to get the endangered tree “to more botanical gardens, universities, as well as in the private sector,” Barberio said. “By dispersing material, you are allowing it to grow and hopefully grow to maturity, which increases and maintains genetic diversity.”

This was what she later learned upon that email from McKeever. 

The Boulder woman was one customer of that catalog, drawn to what she saw as “a love story about finding a dinosaur in an Australian canyon,” as she explained in a CU Boulder article. 

She thought Wally would be “the perfect addition” to her husband’s bonsai collection. “But he never got bonsaied or really trimmed at all,” McKeever said, “and just kind of grew out of control.”

Wally was no bonsai tree, though the two might share a trait from Barberio’s view: “very funky.” She calls Wally and fellow Wollemi “very charismatic,” quite different from other pines we see in Colorado: broad instead of triangular, with a more round crown instead of a pointy one, and with foliage that brings to mind a much more tropical environment. A comparison easily comes to mind this Christmas season: “Charlie Brown style,” Barberio said. 

But taller than your typical Charlie Brown tree. This was another thing Barberio could not believe while reading that email from McKeever: “She was like, ‘I have a 6-foot Wollemi.'”

Yes, McKeever and her husband watched Wally grow and grow from his south-facing, summertime place on their deck to his sheltered, wintertime place under a light in their basement. 

“We just loved Wally,” McKeever said in the CU Boulder article, “but he grew a few inches every year, and with the soil and pot, he just got to be too heavy to take down to the basement every winter.”

Wally remains in that pot at the 30th Street greenhouse. 

“We’ve just been maintaining very steady. We have not repotted it,” Barberio said. “We’ve put it in a place that doesn’t receive direct sunlight, that doesn’t receive extreme temperature fluctuations.” 

That, she explained, is in taking notes from the McKeevers and also from that ancestral canyon in Australia seemingly protected from such fluctuations. Barberio is thinking sunlight but not direct sunlight, some water but not a lot, along with “very diluted fertilizer.” 

The hope is to keep Wally alive for years to come ー for his story to reach generations of visitors. 

“It’s a really fantastic story,” Barberio said, “and it’s a really good story to tell people who are not botanically inclined.”

Maybe they’ll come for the eye-catching billing ー “the dinosaur tree.” And maybe they’ll leave having learned something about conservation, genetic diversity and a world the Wollemi has watched change for millions of years.

“If they can walk away having learned something, then they have accomplished our goal,” Barberio said. 

There’s another goal with Wally: to one day see cones on the branches. 

“We would be able to harvest those and grow more seedlings,” Barberio said. 

The seedlings could be sent to other collections, she said. And the story could continue.

Visiting Wally

For tours, group visit requests and questions about CU Boulder’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology greenhouse on 30th Street, email ebiogreenhouse@colorado.edu.

Events, open volunteer slots and more information is posted at the greenhouse website: colorado.edu/lab/greenhouse