Araucaria angustifolia

Araucaria angustifolia is a living relic, one of the last of an ancient conifer family that shaded the dinosaurs across the supercontinent of Gondwana. The Paraná pine belongs to the Araucariaceae, kin to the Chilean monkey puzzle, the Norfolk Island pine, the Australian bunya, and the famously rediscovered Wollemi pine, a lineage once spread worldwide and now scattered mostly across the Southern Hemisphere. Despite the common name, the tree is no true pine at all, but something far older and stranger, holding stiff, sharp, dark green leaves on the branch for a decade or more.

In the wild, Araucaria angustifolia crowns the highland forests of southern Brazil, reaching into northern Argentina and Paraguay, the defining emergent of the Araucaria moist forests within the greater Atlantic Forest. A century of logging for that pale, valuable timber, together with clearing for farms and plantations, has taken an estimated ninety-seven percent of the original range, and the species is now listed by the IUCN as Critically Endangered. To grow one is to keep a piece of a vanishing forest alive, and to plant a tree that may outlast the gardener by generations.

The genus name honors the Arauco region of southern Chile and the Araucano, or Mapuche, people in whose homeland the first-known species grows, while angustifolia simply means narrow-leaved. In southern Brazil the tree means winter food. Female trees, quite separate from the males, ripen enormous cones packed with a hundred or more large seeds called pinhão, gathered by the ton and boiled or roasted through the cold months, ground into flour, and celebrated at seasonal festivals. The harvest is shared with the forest, for the azure jay caches the seeds and, forgetting some, plants the next generation, a partnership on which the tree's survival partly depends.

Given room, Araucaria angustifolia grows tall and columnar, self-pruning to a clean trunk topped by whorls of upturned branches that flatten with age into the candelabra or umbrella crown that names the tree, well over a hundred feet in habitat and more slowly in cultivation. For Southern gardeners the appeal is practical as well as romantic, since this species tolerates the region's heat and humid summers far better than the Chilean monkey puzzle, asking mainly for full sun and well-drained soil. Site the tree in the open as a rare specimen and living fossil, where the bold, prehistoric silhouette can stand alone against the sky.