Podocarpaceae

With fruit being carried hundred of metres away, lone trees are emerging which may never be able to reproduce and are therefore wasted effort.  As the seed must be grown on the female plant, it's up to the male to find a better technique to bridge the gap by sending its pollen further.

Adaptations emerge which are advantageous, and spread throughout the population.

The female cone has already become so highly adapted that it is hardly recognisable as a cone.  Now it is the male's turn.  Cones become longer, thinner and lighter, more able to wave in the wind and throw their pollen rather than simple drop it.  In effect, in an example of convergent evolution (where two or more species solve similar problems in similar ways, but using entirely different genes), the cone has become almost indistinguishable from a catkin.

Pollen grains become smaller and smaller, till they are as light as possible.  At the same time, they develop slight ridges along the sides which will help them catch the wind and spread further, hopefully encountering a female plant.

Reproduction is now possible over greater distances, and your species longevity is assured.  A conifer ('cone bearing') tree which no longer bears recognisable cones on either of its sexes!

That's as far as you can evolve here!  
You can go back to the start with the link above, or share what you became with the icons below.

Yew trees

Yew trees live for very long times.  Some are know to be over a thousand years old, and many are hundreds of years old.

All trees can grow new shoots and branches which replace those damaged by wind.  Similarly all trees can grow new roots, but this still means that damage to the central trunk will be fatal.  Rotten, hollow, trunks mean that a tree is on its last legs.  Unless they are yew trees.

Yew trees, when they become rotten, grow branches which bend back down, through the rotten wood, and grow downwards until they burrow into the soil and become whole new rootstocks.  They can do this as often as needed.

They also express a toxin in all parts of them except their berries, which means almost nothing predates on yew trees.

This apparent 'eternal life' may have been responsible for the yew tree being venerated as a religious icon in western Europe.  Churches traditionally have yew trees in the grounds, and monks are known to have planted yews around their chapels, but recent research has demonstrated that in many cases, the church was built where the yew trees were already, possibly in a pre-Christian sacred grove.

That's as far as you can evolve here!  
You can go back to the start with the link above, or share what you became with the icons below.

Small fruiting conifers

Gondwanaland may be breaking up, but you don't care. Carried away from the far south of the world inside the bodies of birds, you recolonise the remainder of the planet as the ice age ends.  

Your trees grow across the continents and up into the northern hemisphere, but you are still reliant on wind to spread your pollen, so any tree which grows a long way from another of the same kind may never be able to reproduce.  In mitigation, living a very long time makes it more likely that you will find a friend.

You could either live longer, or spread pollen further?

Methuselah.
Live fast, die young, spread my wild oats.

Cephalotaxaceae

You have developed into a wide grouping of fairly small conifers, which produce a few large berries as each of the female cones matures.  As the berries are large, the group has acquired the nickname the 'plum yews' - the fruit really does look remarkably like a plum, which is a wonderful example of convergent evolution.

They are found all across South East Asia, where they have mostly been used for logging.

Recently however, they have been found to produce some toxins (which presumably evolved to stop herbivorous animals predating upon them) which may have some use as an anti-cancer medicine.  Contrary to expectation, this has not led to farming of the plants (possibly because they take so long to grow), but instead to widespread exploitation of wild stock, resulting in the possibility of extinction precisely because they are useful to humans.

Fruiting conifers

Some random genetic mutation causes the scales of your cones to express sugar.  Birds come and nibble at them.  Sometimes they eat a seed too, but the seeds are tough enough to survive the birds gut, and they get deposited many miles away, in a small quanitity of bird muck, which is a good start for a plant.

As time passes, the scales of the cone become softer, and sweeter, and wrap more closely around the seed.  Eventually, they are clearly recognisable as fruit, and it is easy for a bird to eat a whole 'cone' - which is now a berry - and take one or more seeds along for the ride.

Your next decision is simply whether to make clusters of small berries, or take a little longer and make fewer, larger, fruit.  Smaller fruit will probably be eaten by smaller birds who travel further.  Larger seeds will cost more to make, but might get eaten by larger animals who will provide them with more, shall we say, compost.

Expensive big fruit for big beasts.
Cheap little fruit for little birds.

Araucariacea

You don't develop fruit.  You remain, a very tough, long lived, hardy tree.  Possibly due to the genetic drift caused by living in very cold climes for millenia, you have become a slow growing, long lasting, big seed making, very tall tree.

This successful approach to reproduction is exactly at odds with the flowering plants which are your main rivals at this time.  This means that your survival is reliant on not competing for resources with them.

As it happens, once established, you will be around a very long time, which means that you do well in places where intermittent disturbances knock the flowering plant back for a while, allowing your new plants to get to a sufficient size, whereupon they will continue for centuries.

In the new landmasses of New Zealand, for example, with their seismic activity and occasional forest fires, you do very well. Eventually you become the biggest tree in the area, and in fact, one of the biggest trees in the world.

Wingless Antarctic Conifers

Gondwanaland has begun to break up for good, and the antarctic continent is drifting to the bottom of the world.  It's getting colder and colder.

Everything remaining on Antartica lasts a while longer, until South America drifts far enough away to allow a cold current, driven by the winds, to encircle the entire continent.  Warm winds can't break through very often, and the entire continent gets colder and colder until it is entirely covered in ice.  Everything that lived there dies.  You can't evolve sufficiently to live in those conditions in that time frame.

Luckily, as South America and Australia broke off, some of you lived on.  As long as there is enough diversity within a species, unless out-competed for resources, it will live.

In order to improve your chances further, you might like to enlist the help of the new creatures on the block... birds.  Birds can eat your seeds and, if they survive digestion, drop them a distance away.  Obviously the birds will only do this if they get something out of the deal, and you will only benefit if the seeds survive, so you will need to provide tough seeds, in a sweet package.  To put that shortly: fruit.

I'm feeling fruity!
I'm not.

Fruiting Cypresses

Instead of thin, dry scales forming a cone to  protect the seeds, you now want something succulent and attractive to attract your new helpers - so long as it doesn't cost too much.

The scales fill out, the cones shrink, and take on the form of a berry containing a tough seed.

You are a Juniper tree.

Aided by the birds, you are carried around the world.  Your distinctive, slightly sweet, fresh taste is approved of by more than just birds - the berries are collected and used by humans over thousands of years.

The ancient Egyptians collected Juniper berries, and valued them highly enough to use them as burial gifts.  The Greeks used them for medicine.The Dutch use them to flavour gin.

Non-Fruiting Cypress

Slowly slowly, catchee monkey.

You don't need to hitch a ride to conquer the world.  You can take it slow and steady, be the tortoise, not the hare.

So long as you live a long time, don't encourage other creatures to eat you, and drop a few successful seeds every year, you will do very nicely.  And you do...

You are a very successful, famous family of plants.  Cypresses without fruit grow very slowly, but life for an extraordinarily long time, becoming very, very large in the process.

Your numbers include the tallest trees (Coast Redwood), the most massive (Giant Sequoia) and the second widest (the Montezuma Cypress).

Some of your number live for thousands of years.

Cypresses

With one small mutation, giving you two ridges, one down each side of your seeds, you gain a slightly better distribution from each plant than before.  This is enough to help you cross continents, one seed fall at a time, over tens of thousands of years.

But there might be a better way, or at least a faster way.

Time has passed in the animal kingdom too, and there are now creatures called birds.  They like seeds.  Sometimes they eat the seeds, fly a long way, and then poop out the seed still in good enough condition to grow and become a new plant.  That's a lot better than being blown an extra thirty or fifty feet!

You could encourage the birds to help...

Feathered friends.
Sky rats.

Antarctic Conifers

Gondwanaland has gone.  Broken up into two or three pieces, the species found on each section will split and change, and form new, distinct species.

Here, on the southern section, near the bottom of the world, you are fine, adapted for cold mountainous regions, but on an Antarctica which is still warm and not iced over.  It is heading for the bottom of the world, but still attached to what will become South America.

Nearer the south pole, the winds are stronger.  If only your seeds would catch the breeze a bit better, they would get spread further, and could provide you with a small advantage for a tiny cost...

Fly my pretties!
Fall.