Cycads

A single plant can live for more than 1,000 years. Since they're slow growers, they have been crowded out of their habitats by more aggressive plants. This makes them rare and so valuable that they are often torn from the forest or stolen from collectors. In turn, connoisseurs pay big bucks for even the smallest seedlings.

Yet cycad expert and grower Maurice Levin is trying to change all that, working with botanical gardens and growers with mature specimens to reproduce more.

Because they are such slow growers, cycads are generally two to five times more expensive than a similarly sized palm tree.

Propagating cycads

Cycads may look like palms, but they are genetically closer to pine trees. They reproduce by cones (figure B). Levin matches up the male cones that have pollen with the female cones that have seed. If the timing is just right, large cones are produced. Then he harvests the seed — here, the seed of the Eastern cape giant, or Encephalartos altensteinii (figure C).

To test seed viability, Levin places the seeds into a bucket of water. Seeds that sink to the bottom have a greater likelihood of sprouting than those that float. Once he has selected the viable seed, he places them loosely onto a bed of perlite (figure D), where they will stay for six to 12 months.

After that time, some of the seeds germinate and produce a taproot (figure E). Levin gently pulls a seedling out of the perlite and dunks it into a sterilizing mixture of rooting hormone and fungicide.

"Cycads have grown for hundreds of millions of years in Africa, so they are very comfortable with the pathogens in the soil of Africa, but not so with our soils and waters. So what we try to do is to sterilize them every step along the way," he says.

After sterilizing the seedling, he places it on top of the soil mix in another container (mimicing how cycads grow in nature), then waters thoroughly. It can take the plants up to 10 years to mature.

It's easy to divide cycads if a plant has produced offsets, or pups. Dipping his knife into the sterilizing fungicidal mixture, Levin carefully slices the offset away from the mother plant. He gently pulls the offset free from the soil, revealing a healthy taproot and root system. He dips the roots in the mixture of fungicide and rooting hormone, then transfers it to a container with perlite. Then after a few months, he transfers the young plant to a larger pot.

Growing cycads

Don't be fooled into thinking that something this rare is difficult to cultivate in the garden. Cycads have survived everything from volcanoes to droughts. "They are xeriphytic, meaning they can handle very low water usage, so they are environmentally friendly," says Levin. "These things have subsisted on the botanical equivalent of bread and water for hundreds of millions of years. You can bet that in your garden they're going to be happy. Just make sure you don't overwater them."

When planting his cycads, Levin lines the planting hole with ultra-light pumice. This helps to ensure sufficient drainage. Unlike trees and other plants where mulching up right next to the crown of the plants is wrong, the woody, bulbous trunk called the codex like to be swaddled with mulch.