Encephalartos horridus

Growing Notes

Cycads look adorable when they’re small! And it’s a good thing, too, because these plants are slow-growing, taking decades to become large specimens, and much longer to achieve the scale of plants in habitat. Cycads flush leaves infrequently, often only once a year, but when they do it’s quite the show, as they flush a whole crown of leaves all at once.Since cycad leaves are slow to replace themselves, be extra careful not to physically damage them. As older leaves turn brown, they can be pruned back to the trunk and removed.Be sure to fertilize your cycad in the spring. Without a good amount of food, your cycad might skip a year of flushing its leaves!Prune off old lower leaves once they begin to decline.Leaf color looks best with as much sun as possible.With time this plant will sucker, creating several pups from the base.If gophers are prevalent be sure to cage this plant.

Special Interest

Cycads look like palm trees, but they are gymnosperms that bear either male or female cones, making them more closely related to a pine tree than a palm tree. Their similar appearance is created by convergent evolution, whereby dissimilar plants adapt similar forms to survive.

Since they require a male and female plant to produce and are very slow growing, large cycads are usually quite expensive and rare.

The oldest potted plant on earth is a cycad: Encephalartos altensteinii in the Kew Gardens collection. This plant was brought to England and planted there in 1775, when it was already likely quite old.

A Cycas rumphii was planted in the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago to mark its completion in 1890. It was estimated at over a hundred years old when planted, and it still grows in the collection today. It is older than Chicago itself, which was incorporated in 1833.