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Araucaria bidwillii
Also called Bunya bunya, Bunya pine, Queensland Pine, Bunya Bunya Pine, Moreton Bay Pine
In Singapore: Bunya-bunya Pine, Bunya Bunya, Monkey Puzzle (Grown in Singapore)
Bunya pine is a very tall, single-trunked conifer native to southeast Queensland, grown as a large landscape tree. Its key care points are a sunny spot with room to grow, since it becomes huge and is slow to establish from seed.
Araucaria bidwillii, commonly known as the bunya pine, bunya, banya or bunya-bunya, is a large coniferous tree in the family Araucariaceae which is endemic to Australia. Its natural range is southeast Queensland with two very small, disjunct populations in northeast Queensland's World Heritage listed Wet Tropics. There are many planted specimens on the Atherton Tableland, in New South Wales, and around the Perth metropolitan area, and it has also been widely planted in other parts of the world. They are very tall trees – the tallest living individual is in Bunya Mountains National Park and was reported by Robert Van Pelt in January 2003 to be 51.5 m (169 ft) in height.
Bunya nuts are slow to germinate. A set of 12 seeds sown in Melbourne took an average of about six months to germinate (with the first germinating in three months) and only developed roots after one year. The first leaves form a rosette and are dark brown. The leaves only turn green once the first stem branch occurs. Unlike the mature leaves, the young leaves are relatively soft. As the leaves age they become very hard and sharp. Cuttings can be successful, though they must be taken from erect growing shoots, as cuttings from side shoots will not grow upright.
In the highly variable Australian climate, the varied timing of emergence of the seedlings maximises the possibility of at least successful replacement of the parent tree. A test of germination was carried out by Smith starting in 1999. Seeds were extracted from two mature cones collected from the same tree, a cultivated specimen at Petrie, just north of Brisbane (originally the homestead of Thomas Petrie, the son of the first European to report the species).
At the start of British occupation, A. bidwillii was abundant in southern Queensland, occurring in large groves or sprinkled regularly as an emergent species throughout other forest types on the upper Stanley and Brisbane Rivers, Sunshine Coast hinterland (especially the Blackall Range and Maleny), and also towards and on the Bunya Mountains.
Paraná-pine · Monkey-puzzle · Coral Reef Araucaria · Moreton Bay pine · Norfolk Island Araucaria · Araucaria
[Contains information from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Heritage Trees from data.gov.sg (National Parks Board), made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0]
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Araucaria bidwillii by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
