Welwitschia

The cold greenhouse contains a collection of desert plants among which it might be difficult to spot the small plant with two ribbonlike leaves emerging from a tuber; this is the Welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis Hook.f.), one of the world’s most fascinating plants. Following its discovery in Namibia in 1859 by Friedrich Welwitsch, a specimen was acquired by The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London: The director William Jackson Hooker is said to have described it as “the most extraordinary plant ever brought into the land, and also one of the ugliest”. Charles Darwin is said to have called it the “duck-billed platypus” of the plant world given the Welwitschia shares characteristics with both conifers and more evolved flowering plants. This living fossil produces only two leaves that grow continuously throughout the plant’s exceedingly long lifecycle which sometimes exceeds two thousand years.