Cycads in South Africa

(page 3)

Our stop that night was just outside the town of Nelspruit in the Lowveld, an area rich in plantations of banana, Musa cavendishii. The hotel was ideally placed to enable us to head for one of South Africa's national botanic gardens. With such wide variations in climate across South Africa, several regional gardens exist, all pulled together administratively under a national botanic garden scheme.
The Lowveld garden is destined to become one of the major cycad holding collections in South Africa, given its favourable climate.

We arrived on a drizzly, dull morning and were given a tour of the extensive and expanding collection. Many of the cycads here have been confiscated from illegal collections and gradually; 'orchards' of cycads are being built up for seed production. One such contained Encephalartos cerinus; a beautiful species only discovered a couple of years ago, yet already thought extinct in the wild through illegal collecting.

There are problems to be overcome with this concept though. For instance, accidental crosspollination must be avoided to prevent hybridisation. In addition, if eventual reintroduction into the wild is planned, the source of collection of the parent plants must be known and they must be kept separate from other individuals of that species to retain genetic purity of the various populations within the species.

In the seed house, a germinating bench filled with moist sand at 25¾C was crammed with seeds of many species. Many plants are raised here, some are sold and others distributed to gardens within Africa.

I can't leave the subject of this garden without a mention of a beautiful species growing here: E. inopinus, the African 'Dioon', so named because of its resemblance to plants of this Mexican cycad genus. Rare and wonderful, this was my first sighting of this species.

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