Lepidozamia peroffskyana

Cycads look adorable when they're small! And it's a good thing, too, because these plants are slow-growing, taking decades to become large specimens, and much longer to achieve the scale of plants in habitat. Cycads flush leaves infrequently, often only once a year, but when they do it's quite the show, as they flush a whole crown of leaves all at once. This cycad reliably flushes each year.

Be sure to fertilize your cycad in the spring to ensure a good flush of leaves. Since cycad leaves are slow to replace themselves, be extra careful not to physically damage them. This cycads leaves will burn in hot inland sun causing permanent leaf damage, but do well in full sun near the coast. As older leaves turn brown, they can be pruned back to the trunk and removed.

Reports of this plant surviving temps down to 14F during the unusually cold Texas winter of 2021 show the amazing hardiness of this plant. The leaves will freeze and die off during extreme cold, and then reflush with warmer weather.

This is one of the tallest cycads. Plants in their natural habitat grow to just over twenty feet tall. This cycad also has massive cones that are almost too big to lift.

Cycads look like palm trees, but they are gymnosperms that bear either male or female cones, making them more closely related to a pine tree than a palm tree. Their similar appearance is created by convergent evolution, whereby dissimilar plants adapt similar forms to survive.

Since they require a male and female plant to produce and are very slow growing, large cycads are usually quite expensive and rare.

The oldest potted plant on earth is a cycad: Encephalartos altensteinii in the Kew Gardens collection. This plant was brought to England and planted there in 1775, when it was already likely quite old.

A Cycas rumphii was planted in the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago to mark its completion in 1890. It was estimated at over a hundred years old when planted, and it still grows in the collection today. It is older than Chicago itself, which was incorporated in 1833.

One of the few cycads without spines.