What plant lives a thousand years and has only two leaves?
By Chelsie Vandaveer
November 1, 2001
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It is called the Skeleton Coast, a place of shipwrecks where the vast Namib meets the Atlantic. This is the oldest desert on Earth, an uninhabited land, an uninhabitable land. The Herero call it the Kaokoveld,
the coast of loneliness.
In September 1859, Friedrich Welwitsch was in the Kaokoveld. He was the first outsider to see what the Afrikaans call the tweeblaarkamiedood, the two-leaves-cannot-die. Welwitsch wrote of the encounter, "could do nothing but kneel down on the burning soil and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of my imagination." John Dalton Hooker named Welwitschia mirabilis for the man who brought it to the world's attention.
The Welwitschia is unlike any other plant on the face of the Earth. There is only one species in the genus in its own family and now in its own order, Welwitschiales. There are Welwitschia in the Namib estimated to be over a thousand years old. The Welwitschia has two strap-like leaves which grow for the lifetime of the plant. They become frayed and twisted over the centuries.
Most of the plant is underground, a taproot said to be up to several meters long. The root is no more than an anchor and storage vessel. It takes no moisture from the soil for there is none to take. The Namib receives about 100 mm of rain in a good year, none during others. The Welwitschia survives on the heavy fogs that roll in from the Skeleton Coast.
Welwitschia are dioecious, producing cones—microstrobili (male) or megastrobili (female). The seeds are flattened with a surrounding wing, designed to be carried on the interminable winds. The seeds germinate only in the wet years.
It is fitting that Welwitsch should discover such a singularly odd plant in a place of desolation. He left Austria, never to see his family again. He gave his life to the discovery of plants and suffered the ravages of tropical diseases and political rumors. He spent the last nine years of his life in London, in poor health, with little funding, and unaccepted by many of the scientists. He labored alone and died working on his African collection.
The Biology Department of the University of Hamburg has an excellent collection of photographs of the Welwitschia taken in the Namib.
Click here to view the photographs
killerPlants Tendrils: ~~1~~2~~3~~4~~5~~
Suggested Reading:
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National Geographic®
This survivor from the age of the dinosaurs is one of the greatest living fossils discovered in the 20th century. The Wollemi pine is one of the world's oldest and rarest tree species, belonging to a 200-million-year-old plant family thought to have been extinct for more than two million years.
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