Endangered pine trees sprout bounty of pinecones at Kunming Botanical Garden

Pinus wangii, an endangered five-needled pine tree that is endemic to southwest China’s Yunnan Province, recently started sprouting pinecones at a botanical garden of the Kunming Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the province, signaling the botanical garden’s success in the ex-situ conservation of the plant species, according to the institute.

A total of 12 individual specimens of this species have sprout pinecones at the institute’s Kunming Botanical Garden this year.

The botanical garden began to carry out the ex-situ conservation of the species of tree in 1988. One year later, some of the five-needled pines were planted at the botanical garden for the first time. In 2015, 25 saplings of the species were transplanted into the botanical garden, the garden featuring wild trees and plants with extremely small populations.