The Loneliest Plant In The World : Krulwich Wonders... Millions and millions of years ago, the world was full of strange looking trees. Now, one of these tree species has dwindled to a single male plant who is desperately in need of a mate.
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The Loneliest Plant In The World

An 1857 illustration of Encephalartos woodii. Library of Congress hide caption

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Library of Congress




Look behind the dinosaur, those are cycads. Courtesy of John Sibbick hide caption

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Courtesy of John Sibbick

Two hundred million years ago, cycads were everywhere. Cycad forests reached from Greenland to Antarctica (though the continents were not where they are now). Pterodactyls flew through them. Big dinosaurs munched on them. During the Jurassic period, small, stumpy palm-looking trees — the ones you can see in John Sibbick's painting — made up about 20% of the world's plants.

Illustration of a Jurassic landscape.
Courtesy of John Sibbick

Somehow these E. woodii survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs, got through five different ice ages, learned to live with bigger, newer trees, conifers, leaf bearers, then a profusion of fruiting and flowering plants, got pushed into smaller, then even smaller spaces until there were merely tens of thousands, then thousands, then hundreds and then, perhaps, just this one.

The extremely rare Encephalartos woodii at the KEW Royal Botanical Gardens. Andrew McRobb/RBG Kew hide caption

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Andrew McRobb/RBG Kew

The problem is, these trees cannot fertilize themselves. Some plants contain male and female parts on the same individual. Not E. woodii. It is, as the botanists say, dioecious. It needs a mate.

When a cycad is ready to reproduce, it grows a large colorful cone, rich with pollen or seed. It signals its readiness by radiating heat or sending out attractive odors to pollinators, who travel back and forth. Once fertilized, the seed-rich cone is ripped apart by hungry seed carriers (who've included over the years, not just birds and insects, but dinosaurs, pterosaurs, bats; these trees have been eaten by just about everybody).

But what if you can't find a mate? The tree in London (and its clones that are now growing in botanical gardens all over the world) is a male. It can make pollen. But it can't make the seeds. That requires a female.



Illustration of a cycad and an Ent.
Josh Kurz for NPR

J. R. R. Tolkein, in his The Lord of the Rings series, imagined this situation in a different way. He wrote of a race of "tree spirits," who could move (slowly), talk (even more slowly because their lifespan was so long, they never had to hurry). He called them "ents" and they too lost their females; their "entwives" had wandered off to a distant, devastated and unreachable place, and now the male ents were unable to mate, and like the last cycad, they were doomed. Unless...(there's always an "unless...").

In 1997, the London cycad was moved out of Palm House (it isn't a palm) and planted in a bed along with other South African plants at Kew Gardens. Seven years later, in 2004, for the first time ever, it produced a bright orange/yellow male cone. It can still do what it has to do.

But it can't do it alone.

The great British biologist Richard Fortey talks about the London E.woodii in his classic Life: An Unauthorized Biography (Vintage, 1997). Oliver Sacks describes his personal encounter with the Kew cycad in The Island of the Colorblind (Vintage, 1997). Illustrator Josh Kurz regularly contributes to this blog. He recently created an enormous stack of fish cans to illustrate acceptable ways to spell the word mackerel.