It Is Called ‘Tweeblaarkanniedood’ In Afrikaans,

but is better known as Welwitschia,

or to give the plant its proper name Welwitschia mirabilis, photograph Muriel Gottrob/Wikimedia Commons, it is a remarkable plant for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it only has two leaves! also the leaves grow annually an average 13.8 sm. therefore the plant can produce up to 150 metres of leaf tissue over a growth period of 1000 years,

carbon-14 dating one of the largest plants have shown that some individuals are over 1500 years old, Welwitschia is essentially a 100-million-year plant fossil that managed to adapt and thrive in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, the Namibian dessert, named after Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who discovered it in Angola in 1859, the name ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ translates to “two leaves that cannot die”. That’s a surprisingly accurate name for a plant that grows only two leaves and can survive thousands of years in the world’s oldest desert, some parts of the Namib Desert receive less than two inches of precipitation a year, but that’s apparently all Welwitschia needs to survive, thanks to its extremely “efficient, low-cost genome”, “When we see that the plant is able to live in this environment for so long and preserve its DNA and its proteins, I really feel like we can find hints for how to maybe improve agriculture,” plant biologist, Dr. James H. Leebens-Mack told the New York Times, what a truly amazing plant.