Tucked away in a corner of London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, there is a very special plant. At first glance, it resembles a stumpy palm tree, but this ancient specimen is incredibly rare. It is, in fact, the very last of its kind on Earth, preserving a species that survived the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs as well as five different ice ages. Meet E. Woodii.
This story begins long before 1895, but that’s where we’ll start by meeting the aptly named botanist, John Medley Wood. He was walking through the Ngoya Forest in Zululand, modern-day South Africa, when a particular tree caught his eye. Wood was a specialist in rare plants, and directed a botanical garden in the city of Durban, yet he had never seen anything quite like this specimen. He collected some of the stems, one of which he sent to London.
It was discovered to be a cycad plant called Encephalartos woodii. Once upon a time, during the Jurassic Period, cycads dominated the planet, yet over millennia their numbers diminished. In the case of E. woodii, we may have been left with only one.
The tree sits alone at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London, where it has been for over 100 years. It was in the Palm House from 1899 until 2004, when it moved to the Temperate House. As a male specimen, he is the loneliest bachelor on Earth, and while there are clones of him dotted in conservation centers around the world, this specimen remains the only one to have ever been found in the wild.
Sadly, despite extensive efforts to discover a female specimen, there has been no luck, making it unlikely that E. woodii could ever reproduce naturally.
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Like all cycads, E. woodi’s seeds develop in cones and pollination in the wild occurred between nearby trees, largely via insects.
Though it is extinct in the wild, there are efforts underway to cross E. woodii with its relation, Encephalartos natalensis. It wouldn’t be a perfect match, but it could eventually produce a female very similar to E. woodii. According to Kew Gardens, “This works by successively backcrossing the female hybrid offspring with male Encephalartos woodii… Currently, the project has created second-generation crosses.”
Aesthetically, there are several features that make E. woodii special. Its illustrator, Lucy Smith, told Kew Gardens: “This cycad does something strange in that it tilts away from you, and that allows us to see a few more of the leaves on the opposite side.
“The leaves come out of the center of the cycad in a spiraling arrangement,” she continued. “Once the leaves have died off they leave their petiole bases behind and then these form a pattern.
“These eventually become the diamond shapes that we see on the lower part of the trunk. Each diamond on that trunk represents an old leaf. You could count every single diamond on that trunk and you would know how many leaves it’s produced in its life.
“Those leaf bases create Fibonacci spirals. On the trunk, there’s a spiral going from left to right – a spiral going downwards and a spiral going upwards. And where they intersect, you get the diamonds. It’s not until the leaves fall off that the pattern is revealed.”
From the world’s loneliest tree, to a Great Big Story all about trees and together friendships. In the video below, meet the two friends who have planted thousands of trees around their village – and that’s just the start of what makes them special.
