Recently, in the in-situ conservation area of pen holder trees in Dayu Town, Cangnan County, the new pen holder tree seedlings have straight stems and stretched leaves. The reporter learned that the pen holder tree is a rare species that originated in the age of dinosaurs 60 million years ago, and the population has grown steadily after local systematic protection.

As one of the main foods of dinosaurs during the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic Era, the pencil holder tree is known as a "living fossil". After the Quaternary glacial period, it has only a small number of plants left in southern China and parts of Southeast Asian countries, and has been included in the list of rare and endangered plants in China. In 2015, the first wild plant of Pencilstick tree was discovered in Dayu Town, Cangnan County, which filled the gap in the distribution of this species in the northern edge of China.

At present, the 2500-meter-tall mother plant has died naturally. Faced with the challenge of limited natural reproduction of mother plants in the wild, Cangnan County and Zhejiang Subtropical Crops Research Institute launched a special protection action. Dr. Hu Qingdi from the Zhejiang Subtropical Crops Research Institute said: "We collect the spores and breed them artificially. After overcoming the technical problems of artificial breeding, the spores of the pen holder tree were constructed to achieve the precise cultivation from spores to seedlings, and more than 0 stocks of pen holder tree seedlings have been bred. ”

At the Xiongxi Scientific Research and Innovation Base of the Zhejiang Subtropical Crops Research Institute, the pencil tree seedlings cultivated in the nursery are growing well, and these seedlings will return to the wild when they grow up. Zheng Jian, deputy director of the institute, said that in recent years, nearly 200 pen holder trees have successfully returned to the wild at many points in Cangnan and are growing well.

The reporter was informed that the current conservation achievements of the pen holder tree are being transformed into multiple benefits, and its unique tree fern gene not only brings great value to scientific research, medicine and other fields, but also makes the pen holder tree a landmark species for biodiversity conservation in Cangnan. In the future, Cangnan plans to add 5000 new breeding seedlings, and prepare to build the first exclusive conservation area for pen holder trees in southern Zhejiang, and explore innovative models of ecological protection and sustainable use.