Plant species have seen a huge loss in biodiversity over the past decades, largely driven by climate change and deforestation. This article focuses on a rare species of pine that was discovered to exist in the wild in an Australian national park. The Wollemi pine is hundreds of millions of years old, but is now close to extinction, only being found in one area. Climate change is a major threat to it, with a megafire in 2019 killing many of them and destroying the surrounding forest despite active efforts to protect the trees. While in-situ conservation is considered the best scenario for most threatened species, as we learned, an ex-situ approach is important to take as a last resort in case they cannot survive in the wild. For this reason, many endangered plants including the Wollemi pines have been archived in meta collections at botanical gardens across the world. With this approach being the only way to guarantee preservation of genetic diversity for many rare species, many experts are concerned about what we will lose if we only have these species ex-situ. One ecologist interviewed explains that these trees can be 500 years old and feature huge, structurally complex bodies that we can’t really replicate in a botanical garden. Furthermore, if the native habitat a plant once occupied is changed forever by our actions, even if we have its seeds, there will be nowhere for them to grow and we will effectively lose that species. With a shocking 2 in 5 plant species being threatened with extinction, meta collections are a great tool to preserve important species, but they cannot replace environmental conservation and don’t change the reality of what climate change is doing to the natural world.