Phyllocladus aspleniifolius
Sponsor
Kindly sponsored by
members of the RHS Woody Expert Group
in memory of Seamus O'Brien (1970-2025).
Credits
Tom Christian (2026)
Recommended citation
Christian, T. (2026), 'Phyllocladus aspleniifolius' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Synonyms
- Phyllocladus billardierei Mirb.
- Phyllocladus glaucus Carrière
- Phyllocladus rhomboidalis Rich.
- Phyllocladus serratifolius Nois. ex Henkel & Hochst.
- Podocarpus asplenifolius Labill.
Trees to 20 m tall in forests with a clear bole, or shrubs to several metres tall, particularly in sub-alpine conditions. True leaves on seedlings 10–15 mm long, 1 mm wide, with a midvein and stomata on underside. Phylloclades mostly simple, bifacially flattened, leaf-like, (1.5–)2.5–5(–8) cm long, cuneate or rhombic in outline, margins creantely to obtusely lobed, sometimes more or less pinnatifid; phylloclades on old trees smallest and least dissected, on seedlings often pinnatisect. Flushing phylloclades reddish or rust-brown; then bright green maturing lustrous deep green or dark green above, pale green below, occasionally glaucous. Pollen cones on a short branching system from a terminal bud, solitary or with up to 5 cones together, 5–8 mm long, 2–2.5 mm wide, pink or reddish at first, ripening yellow. Seed cones axillary to reduced scale leaves on margins or at base of reduced phylloclades, or on terminal short branching systems without phylloclades, solitary with 2–4 together, each consisting of several bracts, 2–5 of which are fertile and merge to a red or purplish structure 3–5 mm long, which becomes slightly swollen and pinkish red (drying brown). Seeds 2–5 per cone, 1 per fertile bract, each in a white aril covering the lower two thirds of the seed; distal part free, 5 mm long, semi-ovoid (laterally flattened) with a lateral ridge and a small protrusion at apex, greenish-black to black. (Farjon 2017).
Distribution Australia Tasmania
Habitat Temperate rainforest, from near sea-level in the west of Tasmania to 1200 m asl in the central mountains. At lower elevations Eucalyptus spp. are common associates, replaced above c. 750 m by E. coccifera, Nothofagus cunninghamii, and Athrotaxis spp. At the tree line it is reduced to a shrub and occurs with taxa including Orites and Olearia spp., and the conifers Diselma archeri, Pherosphaera hookeriana and Podocarpus lawrencei.
USDA Hardiness Zone 8
RHS Hardiness Rating H4
Conservation status Least concern (LC)
Taxonomic note Keng (1980) transferred the New Zealand Alpine Totara, P. trichomanoides var. alpinus, to P. aspleniifolius, based on cladode morphology. This view was not widely adopted in the botanical community but it is still possible to encouter the name P. aspleniifolius var. alpinus in old texts and on some labels, etc. The taxon is treated here at species rank, as P. alpinus.
Like all members of the genus, the Tasmanian Phyllocladus aspleniifolius has always been more or less restricted to specialist collections in the northern hemisphere. It is only at all frequently encountered in mild oceanic gardens on the western seaboard of the UK and across the island of Ireland. It would seem to be very rare in North American collections, even on the west coast where one might imagine conditions would suit it: it is not reported from the University of British Columbia Botanic Garden in Vancouver (University of British Columbia 2026) nor the San Francisco Botanical Garden (which apparently grows the even rarer Phyllocladus hypophyllus, q.v. – San Francisco Botanical Garden 2026). A single accession is recorded from the University of Washington Botanic Garden in Seattle (University of Washington Botanic Gardens 2026) but an image in a 2020 blog post (Matin 2020), which may or may not be of the Seattle plant, looks more like P. alpinus from New Zealand.
The largest example in cultivation in the northern hemisphere is probably one recorded by Aubrey Fennell in 2015 from the walled garden at Mount Usher, Wicklow, Ireland; 11 m tall, twin-stemmed from the base, the larger trunk 19 cm dbh (Tree Register 2026). This is somewhat taller than the beautiful example noted by Bean, which had reached 9.75 m tall in the pinetum at Bicton, Devon, UK, but which died before he did (Bean 1950–1951). We do not know when Phyllocladus aspleniifolius was introduced to cultivation but writing in the second edition of Veitch’s Manual of the Coniferae Adolphus Kent remarked ‘[P. aspleniifolius] has been in cultivation in the open ground for many years in the pinetum…at Bicton’ (Kent 1900). Indeed, this is the species the French Botanist L.C. Richard founded the genus on in 1825 (Kent 1900), and other icons of the Tasmanian flora were already in cultivation in Britain by this time (e.g. Eucryphia lucida) and it is conceivable that P. aspleniifolius could have been in Britain from a similarly early date.
There has been a steady trickle of new, wild-collected material into UK and Irish collections in the past half-century or so as most collectors and expeditions to Tasmania have targeted the species. The earliest of this new wave prominent in databases appear to be the introductions of Chris Page to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1976, and which are established in several sites including on the Tasmanian Ridge at Benmore Botanic Garden, Argyll (pers. obs.). More recent introductions include several numbers under the DTAZ collector code, gathered by Dan Luscombe in 2004. These are establishing well in multiple UK sites including Bedgebury National Pinetum, Kent, RBG Edinburgh’s gardens at Logan, Benmore, and Edinburgh itself in Scotland, and at Wakehurst Place, West Sussex (where one from DTAZ 4 was planted in 2008 and was 3.5 m tall × 10 cm dbh in 2022 – Tree Register 2026). P. aspleniifolius remains well represented in Irish collections following multiple introductions there, including several by the late and lamented Seamus O’Brien, in whose memory this account of the genus is dedicated.
