There are just six remaining examples of the mongarlowe mallee left in the wild, in several patches of private bushland in southern NSW. Scientists now have a rare window to breed the trees, in the hope of saving the species from extinction.
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00:00 We're on the hunt in southern NSW for what could be Australia's rarest and loneliest
00:07 tree. But locating it is like finding a needle in a haystack.
00:13 We're in an area called Mongalo. What we're standing in here is called Alacazarina nana
00:20 heath. And there's a lot of species in here that sort of grow in here and not in other
00:24 places.
00:25 This is what we came for, the Mongalo mallee, known to science as Eucalyptus recurva. It
00:32 may not look it, but this tree is thousands of years old. Each time it's knocked back
00:38 by fire, it re-sprouts again.
00:41 We don't have a lot of species around that have their origins 6,000 years ago. And I
00:48 think they hold really important information and keys to the ecology of Australia.
00:55 Since the last ice age, the Mongalo mallee has been sliding towards a natural extinction.
01:01 There are now just six of them left.
01:03 Now the remaining individuals are all separated by at least two kilometres and are no longer
01:09 getting cross-pollinated, so they're no longer producing seed. It is an incredible story
01:14 of loneliness, yes, indeed.
01:18 Because there are so few of these special trees left in the wild, their precise location
01:23 will always be kept secret. But what makes them all the more vulnerable is that each
01:29 tree grows on private land outside the protection of a national park.
01:35 Last year ecologists had a once in a generation chance to cross-pollinate two of the trees
01:40 and soon they'll try and germinate the seeds, something that hasn't happened naturally for
01:46 thousands of years. Their end goal, to save the Mongalo mallee in Australian gardens.
01:53 Many people would love to have this plant in their garden, being such a rare species.
01:58 I think many people would value this just because it is such a rare species and it's
02:02 such an unusual eucalypt. So it would be a tragedy to lose it.
02:08 One last desperate roll of the dice for a species that was headed for an evolutionary
02:14 dead end.
02:14 [BLANK_AUDIO]