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Science

Couple plants real-life 'money tree' and its first seeds are worth over $6,700

The species is at least 200 million years old.

via Daderot/Wikimedia Commons and C T Johansson/Wikimedia Commons

A Wollemi pine and one of its cones.

As the old adage goes, money doesn’t grow on trees. However, what if you had a tree that was so rare that people would spend good money for its seeds? Then you could honestly say that you have a money tree growing in your yard. Such is the case for a retired couple in England, Pamela and Alistair Thompson, both 75, who in 2010 paid £70 ($98) for a 46cm-tall Wollemi pine sapling that a friend bought on the Shopping Channel. It’s believed that it was the first ever endangered tree species to be protected by making it available to the general public.

What is the Wollemi pine?

The Wollemi pine is valuable because it appears in the fossil record as far back as 200 million years ago and was thought to have gone extinct about 70 to 90 million years back. However, in 1994, a bushwalker in Australia came across a Wollemi pine in a secluded gorge. Biologically, it was a discovery as significant as coming across a living dinosaur in a hidden part of Australia in the ‘90s.

Wollemi is an Australian Aboriginal word that means "watch out—look around you."

wollemi pine, endangered trees, australian trees, seattle, washington, rare trees A Wollemi pine in Seattle, Washington. via Brewbooks/Wikimedia Commons


The tree may have made its way to Eurpoe, but the wild trees are under threat from wildfires and climate change. It’s believed that only about 90 exist in the wild today. In 2006, it made its European debut when Sir David Attenborough planted one at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. “How exciting we should discover this rare survivor from such an ancient past,” Attenborough said.

After 15 years of special care, the Thompson’s tree began to bear fruit for the first time in August 2025. “This year has been so ­unusually dry, it happened earlier,” she said, according to The Times. The couple now plans to package the valuable seeds from the tree and give the money to the National Garden Scheme. The National Garden Scheme is a government program where people open their gardens up to the general public, and the money that is generated is donated to the Queen’s Nursing Institute.

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How much does a Wollemi pine cost?

“I saw a small tree for sale for more than £1,000 ($1352), which shows how rare they are. We’re planning to package the seeds five or six at a time and sell the bundles online for £5 ($6.76). We’ve seen some retailers sell them for much more, but we want to make them accessible for people, as well as raise money for charity. We don’t yet know how many will be healthy and produce trees. Only time will tell.”

"We have around five large cones, which have produced about a hundred or so large seeds each. It would be lovely to see just how many seeds we can produce, but I have been very surprised by the numbers so far this year,” she said, according to Unilad. So, if you do the math, 100 seed packs at $6.76 each would go for $676. Not bad for just collecting seeds.

But they could make a lot more money off the seeds if they chose to do so. It’s believed that one seed can go for as much as £10 ($13.52). If they sold all 500 seeds produced by the five cones, they'd make $6,760.

This tree could net them thousands of dollars a year in perpetuity. “It really does prove that money can grow on trees,” Mr. Thompson said, according to The Times.

wollemi pine, endangered trees wollemi pine cone, australia trees, money tree, dinosaur tree A female Wollemi pine cone.via Adrian198cm/Wikimedia Commons

Preserving the Wollemi pine for the future

In 2023, over 170 young Wollemi pines grown by the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, in Australia, were shipped to be planted in 28 botanic gardens with climates that could support the pines, across the UK and Europe. One Wollemi was sent to Atlanta, Georgia, in the U.S.

“Discovering the lost Wollemi pines in the wild was a truly astounding moment for international tree conservation, and to be a leading partner nearly thirty years later in launching this important new metacollection on UK soil is an exciting moment for Forestry England,” Mike Seddon, Forestry England Chief Executive, said in a press release. “As we care for the Wollemi pines we plant today, we’ll be able to study the way they grow, learning with the other botanic gardens how they flourish outside Australia. The climate crisis means that across all continents, many trees like Wollemi pines are facing urgent threats to their survival. We know that 34 per cent of conifers are now endangered, and our ongoing work to research, propagate, and save tree species is more vital than ever.”

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Sustainability

Last time America faced a man-made climate crisis we planted trees — hundreds of millions of them

via USDA

The Dust Bowl was the worst environmental disaster in American history. Throughout the 1930s, severe dust storms ravaged the Great Plains states, claiming thousands of lives and causing over two million people to leave the region.

The devastating storms destroyed farm houses and crops, choked livestock and, at times, blocked out the sun.

Much like the climate crisis we face today, the Dust Bowl was man-made. In the early 1920s, farmers began using new mechanized farming techniques that ripped up the prairie's natural drought-resistant grasses and fertile topsoil.

After a drought struck the region in 1931, huge dust storms known as black blizzards ravaged the plains. By the end of 1935, roughly 35 million acres of farmland had been destroyed and the topsoil covering 100 million acres had blown away.

the Dust Bowl in the Texas panhandle. Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahom

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Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons

Wind erosion carries topsoil from farmland during the Dust Bowl.via NRCS photo Gallery

To provide a natural barrier against the dust storms, President Franklin Roosevelt mobilized the U.S. Forest Service, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps to create a shelterbelt of trees that ran in a 100-mile-wide zone from North Dakota to the Texas panhandle.

via U.S. Forest Service / Wikimedia Commons

The planting began in 1935 in Greer County, in southwestern Oklahoma, and the new trees were very effective at protecting the top soil and stabilizing the land. They also provided a natural barrier for blocking the dust from sweeping across the plains.

U.S. Department of Agriculture


via National Archives

By 1942, 30,233 shelter belts had been planted, stretching over 18,600 square miles, and containing over 220 million trees. It was "the largest and most-focused effort of the [U.S.] government to address an environmental problem," in the nation's history.

RELATED: Planting 1.2 trillion trees could reverse a decade of climate change. Here's how to do it.

Today, the shelterbelt is slowly being removed from the Great Plains. In Nebraska alone, an estimated 57% of "FDR's trees" have been cut down or burned as farmers try to maximize their land for planting.

Could we do it again?

Climate change is an ecological disaster on a scale that dwarfs the Dust Bowl in every way imaginable. However, it seems that in this century, America has lost its ability to do big things.

Planting 220 million trees seems like an impossible feat in a country that has neglected big infrastructure projects for decades.
But if America came together, could we plant enough trees to combat the country's contribution to climate change?

Tom Crowther, a climate change ecologist at Swiss university ETH Zurich estimates that if 1.2 trillion trees were planted across planet Earth, they would absorb 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

While that number wouldn't come close to the 1,000 gigatons that must be removed before the effects of climate change begin to reverse, trees are one of the few ways to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

RELATED: He photographed Nazi atrocities and buried the negatives. The unearthed images are unforgettable.

Other countries are doing it, why can't we?

The Australian government announced it will plant one billion trees by 2030 and, since 1970, China has planted more than 50 billion in an anti-desertification program known as the "Great Green Wall."

The "Billion Tree" campaign by the UN has already planted 15 billion trees since its inception in 2006.

The American government was once able to do big things and rise to the occasion whether it was the Great Depression, World War II, or the Cold War. Hopefully, that will didn't die with the onset of the new Millennium, and we can come together for the greatest fight of all — the battle to save the planet.

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Heroes

Brazilian couple planted 4 million trees within 18 years to form a large forest.

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has seen a lot of devastating things in his life, but the state of his family's land in Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1994 likely ranks at the top.

He had just returned from reporting on the genocide in Rwanda which was traumatizing in its own right, but seeing his family's land that has previously been a fecund rainforest stripped of vegetation hit him at his core.

“The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,” Sebastião told The Guardian.

What happened to Sebastião's land is far from unique. Over the last 30 years, the world's forests have been disappearing at an astounding rate. Between 1990 and 2016, approximately 502,000 square miles of forest have been lost, according to the World Bank, largely due to agricultural and industrial development. That's about the size of South Africa.

Not only does deforestation account for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions, it's responsible for countless species of animals and plants losing their habitats, which ultimately endangers their survival.

Sebastião and his wife Lélia knew they could turn the deforestation on their land around. So, for the next 20 years, with the help of a small group of volunteers, that's exactly what they did.

 

In 1998, the Selgados founded Instituto Terra, a nonprofit dedicated to "ecosystem restoration, production of Atlantic Forest seedlings, environmental extension, environmental education and applied scientific research."

The nonprofit's theory is that trees produce oxygen and life, so the best way to re-invigorate land is to bring its native trees back. That's why they've spent the majority of the last two decades planting over 4 million tree seedlings from plant species found in the Atlantic Forest in the Rio Doce Valley.

Photo via Instituto Terra.

The results speak for themselves.

With the return of the rainforest came many species of animals that had previously abandoned the area. This includes 172 bird species, six of which are threatened with extinction, 33 mammal species, two of which are endangered, 15 amphibian species and 15 reptile species.

Photo via Instituto Terra.

Their re-forestation work is incredible, but it will only last if people in the surrounding areas learn to respect the importance of such ecosystems. That's why they started the Center for Environmental Education and Recovery (CERA).

By December, 2012, CERA had developed over 700 educational programs reaching up to 65,000 people. The aim is to educate farmers, teachers, businesses and government officials about environmental recovery and conservation methods and why they're vital to keeping lands (and the people living on them) healthy. The hope is that they'll help inspire those working on and near the land to adopt more sustainable practices.

Deforestation will affect animals and humans in a significant way if we let it continue at such a rapid pace. Organizations like Instituto Terra are doing their part to protect their revitalized jungle, but that's just one small area of the 30% of forest that covers our planet. It's going to take more individual support to save the rest.

If you want to learn about what you can do to help, the Rainforest Alliance offers several great ways you can get involved and make a difference.

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How India managed to plant 66 million trees in a single day and why we should copy them.

One and a half million volunteers planted a record-shattering 66 million trees in India on July 2, 2017.

The campaign took place along the Narmada River in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Volunteers young and old gathered together to plant more than 20 different species of sapling.

This top's India's 2016 record, which saw 50 million trees planted.

It can feel like it's hard to make a difference, but this is an incredible example of what people can accomplish together.

Forests provide food, shelter, and jobs to billions of people around the world. Despite that, we lose more than 45,000 square miles of forest every year to industry, agriculture, and other human activities.

Reforestation can help reverse that trend.

Volunteers planting a tree in Honduras on Earth Day 2012. Photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP/GettyImages.

Even better, reforestation can help take a bite out of climate change.

Trees breathe in carbon dioxide, the main gas responsible for climate change, turning it into, well, wood.

Here in the United States, reforestation projects have helped reforest old coal mining land. In Australia, a start-up company is testing drones that could plant a billion trees a year. In Chile, seed-carrying border collies are helping plant seeds after forest fires.

Open fanny packs full of seeds mean the dogs deposit the next generation of forest with each jump and bound. Photo by Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images.

This also shows that other nations are still committed to the Paris Climate Agreement, with or without the United States.

While Trump's decision to renege on the Paris agreement essentially removes the United States from the negotiating table on climate change, other nations are stepping up. (As well as state and local governments too.)

India, for example, has promised to spend $6 billion reforesting 12% of its land under the Paris agreement.

Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Madhya Pradesh's chief minister, said in a tweet that "by planting trees we are not only serving Madhya Pradesh but the world at large," The Independent reports.

But the best part of this whole endeavor may be that just about anyone can take part.

Chouhan said that people both young and elderly took part in the July 2 project.

Thanks to these volunteers, there are now 66 million more wild, animal-sheltering, carbon-scrubbing machines pumping away in India.

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