Friday, January 09, 2009

Meta + Lehmann's blue - the Karoo cycad

Argh! My laptop charger cable has died so I'm having to feed you prepared posts until the new one arrives on monday. There is so much cool stuff sat on the laptop waiting to be unleashed but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait to see new island amphibians and a feast of strange trees and marine mammals.
Thanks to everyone who has done the ten best moments meme - if i haven't got back to you yet its because of the above. If you haven't done it yet by all means please do and please send me a link in the comments or to the email address in the sidebar. At the end of the month I will prepare a meme accumulator/carnival type post to share everyone's experiences.
Anyway here's a blue cycad, again an Encephalartos, again South African but quite different to E. horridus (which we've seen) or E. trispinosus (which we'll see in the next month). This is Encephalartos lehmannii named for its discoverer German botanist J.G.C. Lehmann. Presumably Herr Lehmann was delighted to discover this absolute peach of a cycad.

encephalarots lehmanii

Its main attraction is obviously the rather gorgeous powder blue but this is also a much neater plant than the other blue Encephs. Note the entire leaflets on each frond. As it gets larger this plant will push out longer thinner fronds than the other blues and retain a more symmetrical shape. E. lehmannii is probably common enough in gardens to be safe as a species but its beauty means large and small plants remain highly valuable.

1 comment:

Julia said...

That's a pretty one. Looks less like living barbed wire than E. horridus, but then I quite like the evilness of that one.