The Cycad of the Hortus

This plant was already growing in South Africa when Amsterdam's Hortus Botanicus bought it in 1850, and the two have been growing together ever since. It is an Eastern Cape giant cycad, estimated today at around 300 years old, kept potted under glass in the garden's Palm House for the 175 years it has lived here. Cycads as a group have barely changed in 300 million years and survived two mass extinctions that wiped out most of the plant kingdom around them, which makes one specimen's three centuries look almost brief by comparison. A younger female cycad, roughly 200 years old, grows opposite it, and Hortus staff hand-pollinate the two every year because the specific wasps and beetles that pollinate cycads in the wild do not live in an Amsterdam greenhouse. A few meters further into the same glasshouse stands a specimen of Encephalartos woodii, a cycad extinct in the wild since the early 1900s; every plant of that species alive anywhere today is a clone of a single specimen found in South Africa in 1895. The Hortus has been growing rare and difficult plants since 1638, and this cycad has now been part of that project for nearly half the garden's history.