The scrawny trunk and dull leathery spiky leaves of one of the rarest plants in the world will soon be admired in a new light at Kew Gardens, as Encephalartos woodii flourishes again at the north end of the restored Temperate House, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world.
As the £41m restoration of the Grade I-listed building nears completion, the gardeners are dodging the diggers and cranes still trundling through the enormous space, and planting out hundreds of specimens into the new beds. More light than when the house was first built in the 1860s pours in through acres of new glass, and the plants are visibly responding: the bitter orange tree is covered in fruit, and Bauhinia blakeana has thrown out a charming pink flower.
A few of the plants were so large the decision was taken to box them in and leave them in place through the five years of building work. However Encephalartos woodii, which arrived in Kew in 1899 is now so rare, extinct in the wild and probably the only specimen in Europe, that after balancing the risks of damage if it stayed or moved, it was found a temporary home in another nursery house in the gardens, and is now among 10,000 plants being returned to the Temperate House.
It was named for John Medley Wood who discovered a single clump of the plants growing on the edge of a forest in South Africa in 1895. The plant is male, like all those now in botanic gardens, and apart from clones from it which are also male, it cannot be propagated without a female. Repeated plant hunting expeditions have failed to find a single female plant in the wild.
“It may still be that there is still one other there, so our duty is to keep ours alive and in good health until it is found,” Scott Taylor, supervisor of the Temperate House, said.
Only an ardent horticulturalist could regard the plant as beautiful, but Taylor loves it. “They are spiny so and sos,” he said fondly. “Cycads are such ancient plants the spikes are said to have evolved to stop the dinosaurs from eating them.”
Some of the tallest plants that were bashing against the roof of the glasshouse will be replaced with smaller specimens, which will let more light through and allow a greater variety of specimens lower down. Others will not be replaced because they can now be grown outside the shelter of the house, a rare benevolent result of climate change.
The oldest part of the Temperate House, begun by Decimus Burton in 1860, was regarded as one of the wonders of the age. Crowds flocked to walk the winding paths through plantings recreating exotic environments they could only have seen in books.
However the project ran wildly over budget, and its entire 628ft length was not completed for almost 40 years. Georgie Darroch, project coordinator, explained that more than a century later Victorian cost-cutting, including poorer cheaper materials in places, caused many problems.
The condition of the structure, including leaks which had caused ironwork to corrode and timbers to rot, was much worse than the initial survey suggested. Work including replacing all the glass, restoring decorative ironwork, repairing terracotta baskets of flowers, which were actually the chimneys for the original boiler, and reopening ventilation slots painted closed for half a century, took longer than expected, hence the gardeners scurrying to try to complete the replanting in time for the reopening on 5 May.
“Some of these plants won’t be seen at their best for many, many years,” Taylor said. “We are planting now for 25, 50, 75 years ahead – that’s what lets me get to sleep at night, that we are planting for the future.”
