The Botanical Garden Cycad

The botanical garden's logo is a portrait of one of its own residents, and this is the resident: a Cycas circinalis under glass in the palm house of the Jagiellonian University's Botanical Garden, part of what the city calls the oldest cycad collection in Poland. It was recorded here in 1864. That is a first mention rather than a planting date, which makes it a floor and not an age: at least 162 years on this site, and probably more, since the record marks when somebody wrote the plant down rather than when it started growing. No source offers an upper figure, so none is given here. A cycad is not a tree and is not closely related to one. The lineage was already old when the first flowering plants appeared, and what looks like a trunk is a caudex, a squat storage column that thickens very slowly. The register measures it at 108 centimetres round, a number that stands for a great deal of time rather than for a large plant. The garden says it flowers every year, which for a cycad means a cone rather than a blossom, and it is that annual performance that put the plant on the institution's own letterhead.