The Cycad Where Sperm Was First Discovered

In 1896 a botanist in Tokyo looked into a cycad ovule and saw something swim. Until that afternoon, motile sperm belonged to ferns and mosses; seed plants were supposed to have given them up. Ikeno Seiichiro's finding put a swimming sperm cell inside a gymnosperm and moved the line between the two groups, and a few weeks earlier at the same university Hirase Sakugoro had found the same thing in a ginkgo. The plant Ikeno worked from is this one, according to the signboard the Kagoshima Prefectural Museum has set beside it, and an offshoot was later sent to Tokyo and planted at the Koishikawa Botanical Garden. It is not much like a tree. Cycas revoluta is a cycad, a lineage older than any flowering plant, and this one is a low thicket of stiff ferny crowns on a knot of trunks about 5.9 metres tall, put at roughly 400 years old. Kagoshima Prefecture designated it a Natural Monument in 2008 under its full formal title, the cycad in which sperm was discovered for the first time in the world, which is long even by the standards of Japanese heritage names. It sits in the open in Terukuni Park, a two-minute walk from the shrine, with nothing to mark it out but the board.