Many Years Ago,

Laural and Hardy,

sang a song in one of their adventures, On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, well this is a post about the story of a lonesome palm which is housed in Kew Gardens in London, one day in 1895, while walking through the Ngoya Forest in Zululand, southern Africa, a British botanist, John Medley Wood caught sight of a tree, it sat on a steep slope at the edge of the woods and looked different from the other trees, with its thick multiple trunks and what seemed like a splay of palm fronds on top, from a distance it looked almost like a palm tree, and Dr. Wood, who made his living collecting rare plants (he directed a botanical garden in Durban) had some of the stems pulled up, removed and sent one of them to London, that little tree stem was then put in a box and left in the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, it sat there, alone, for the next 98 years, named Encephalartos woodii, in Dr. Wood's honour, it is a cycad which are a very old order of tree and it turns out this one, which is still there in London, may be the very last tree of its kind on our planet and this is why, these trees cannot fertilise themselves, some plants contain male and female parts on the same individual,

 not E. woodii, it is, as the botanists say, dioecious, it needs a mate, you can of course own one of these, many botanical gardens do as clones can be made from this one plant, but only male clones, researchers have wandered the Ngoya forest and other woods of Africa, looking for an E. woodii that could pair with the one in London, they haven't found a single other specimen, so unless a female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never mate with one of its own, the one and only last of it's kind, you can read more about the lonesome palm in Oliver Sacks book, The Island of the Colorblind.

for an update on the palm, (which it is not), in 1997, the London cycad was moved out of Palm House and planted in a bed along with other South African plants at Kew Gardens, seven years later, in 2004, for the first time ever, it produced a bright orange/yellow male cone, the old boy still has what it takes, if only we could find a lady E. woodii, think of the children!