Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Loneliest Plant In The World

In 1895 botanist, John Medley Wood, saw an unusual tree. He sent a stem from it to London. It was originally placed in the palm house but was later moved to a bed along with other South African plants at Kew Gardens. 




Named E. woodii, in Dr. Wood's honor, it is a cycad. Cycads are a very old order of tree and it turns out this one, which is still there in London, may be the very last tree of its kind on our planet, the last one to grow up in the wild.
It has grown a male cone which produces pollen but has no female mate to produce seed. It appears that the days of this cycad, once so plentiful, are numbered.


Read more here.
Thanks to frequent NOTL contributor xoxoxo Bruce.


***UPDATE: Commenter Kathleen has pointed me to this Wikipedia article. You can dry your tears now! It appears that this plant is not as lonely as I thought but was merely pretending to be lonely in order to get sympathy.
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4 comments:

  1. Lsamsa9:35 pm

    Amazing how long this type of tree has been around...and so incredibly sad that it might be the last of its species. Lonely for sure. :(

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  2. Kathleen C Baker4:29 am

    Fortunately for us the source article is poorly researched. There are HUNDREDS of E. Woodii plants around the world in robust good health.

    The Wikipedia has a stunning picture of the oldest one, living at the Durban Botanic Gardens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalartos_woodii

    They are even making good progress with making an almost pure female Woodii by hybridising it with the very closely related E. Natalensis.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Nag8:50 am

    Thanks for this Kathleen. I'll add an update on the post.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lsamsa10:01 pm

    Hah...well the sympathy ploy certainly worked. ;)
    This is great news...thanks for the update! :)

    ReplyDelete

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