Barter's cycad

About the plant

Cycads look like palms and are nothing of the kind. They are gymnosperms, relatives of conifers that dominated the forests of the Jurassic, and the fossil record shows plants almost identical to this one being browsed by dinosaurs. Encephalartos barteri grows on the savannas of West Africa, from Nigeria to Ghana, and copes with the yearly grass fires by keeping most of its trunk underground; after a burn, a new flush of stiff, glossy, pinnate leaves comes up from the ashes.

Charles Barter, a young gardener from Kew, collected it as botanist to the Niger Expedition of 1857 led by William Baikie. He died on the river two years later, and the plant was named in his memory. The genus name means 'bread in the head': across Africa the starchy pith of cycad trunks has been eaten in famine years, but only after days of soaking to leach out toxins that otherwise cause liver damage and paralysis.

Separate male and female plants carry cones, and the female cones break up into seeds coated in red flesh that baboons and hornbills carry away. Every cycad is now protected by CITES because collectors have stripped so many wild colonies.