This is my cycad, Bastard. So called because it stabbed me when I picked it up, it stabbed me when I lifted it onto the desk so the sales assistant could scan the grossly inaccurate barcode (my "CYCAS REVOLTA" cost me 10p - it should have cost £12.50), it stabbed me when I put it into the car, it stabbed me in the back of the head all the way home, and it continues to loathe and despise me.
It's a Cycas revoluta, one of the toughest and commonest "domesticated" cycads you can get. Cycads just scream "Eaten by dinosaurs!" when you see them, even if they were about as nutritious as cardboard. Unfortunately, in the average garden centre only C. revoluta is stocked, and they can be as expensive as tree ferns (for what you're getting). So for the would-be cycad grower, the best solution is seeds. I blame Tai Haku entirely for pointing me in the direction of the Chiltern Seeds catalogue.
A few weeks ago, Hubster bought me these (they mean so much more to me than cut flowers). Five cycad seeds, unlabelled, but with the proviso that there was one each of Dioon, Encephalartos, Lepidozamia, Macrozamia and Zamia. No species names. Fortunately, a very kind soul on Gardeners Corner identified them for me, and so we have: (top left) Encephalartos horridus, (top right) Dioon edule, (bottom left) Zamia furfuracea, (bottom right) Macrozamia communis, and the big bugger is, by process of elimination a Lepidozamia of some sort. Any advance on this?
I was advised to put them in plastic boxes with moist silver sand. So they've been in old Chinese takeaway containers sitting on the radiator in the kitchen. They have their own tropical greenhouse! All this was three weeks ago. No sign of movement yet, but it could be months, right?
Ironically, I ordered a Jubaea chilensis and the aforementioned stinky Selaginella lepidophylla from Minor Garden (thoroughly recommended - it's an excellent little nursery full of cycads and palms), and Jan put in a little bag of vermiculite with a Dioon spinulosum inside as a free gift. It arrived about a week after I carefully put all the cycads in their boxes. Not having time to put it in a box, I left it on top of the radiator just in its bag of vermiculite, and came back from a work conference to find it had already sprouted. It is now in a pot of sand, and I hope the radicle is burrowing down and that I'll see some shoots soon.
Cycad germination does seem to be a bit like priming one's conker for the autumn conker fight season. Some people recommend heat, some recommend a cold shock. Some say vermiculite, some say under no circumstances use vermiculite - go for sand instead. Some don't bother with that and go straight onto compost. Moisture is hotly debated. In short, I have no idea whether a takeaway box full of moist sand on a radiator is even acceptable growing conditions for cycads, let alone optimal ones.
The one cycad I really want to see germinate is Encephalartos horridus. I saw it on the television a few weeks ago, and WANTED it. I still do. A couple of years ago Tai Haku posted about it, describing it as "a beautiful glaucous blue form of what appears to be razor wire". Heh - if a Cycas revoluta can be given the moniker "Bastard", what on earth am I going to call the Encephalartos?
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