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.
Cycads in South Africa
