I don’t suppose many readers will have the problem of repotting a 240-year old plant in a 150-year old conservatory, but that’s exactly the problem faced by the keeper of the Palm House at Kew Gardens.
The ancient cycad was collected in the early 1770s from the Eastern Cape in South Africa by Kew’s first plant-hunter Francis Masson and is believed to be the oldest pot plant in the world.
It grows outwards by 2.5cm a year and is currently 4.4m wide (14.4ft) and has outgrown its pot. It’s not a simple job of cracking the old pot and placing it in a larger one with new compost! This one will take a team of five gardeners to change it.
They will use a specially constructed four-metre-high lifting gantry to hoist the plant, which weighs one tonne. Then the trunk will be supported on stilts while craftsmen build a mahogany pot around the cycad’s root ball.
The cycad family comes from the Jurassic era, predating flowering plant-life. They can live more than 500-years and provide botanists with clues about the nature of early plants.
Plant one in your conservatory today and create a problem for your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren!
