In the southwest corner of London's Third Arrondissement in the United Kingdom is a beautiful Royal Botanic Garden, called "Kew Garden". One-eighth of the world's plants can be found in Kew Gardens, which is home to nearly 50,000 species and has the largest collection in the world. However, because the local climate in the United Kingdom is not suitable for growing so many plants, Kew Gardens has built dozens of large greenhouses of different shapes in order for these plants to flourish. Planted in these greenhouses is one of the loneliest trees in the world, wood cycads.
Wood Cycads, endemic to KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, are among the rarest plants in the world and are currently listed as extinct species in the wild.
The only wild Wood cycad previously found worldwide is on a slope on the edge of noyer forest in South Africa.
In 1895, when the botanist John Medley Wood was on an expedition to South Africa, on a steep slope to the south near the edge of the forest near the coast, he found four trees that he had never seen before, which were tall and graceful, very similar in shape to palms, about 6 meters tall, with thick trunks and leafy branches. Wood later transported the buds of one of the trees back to England and planted it in Kew Gardens. Bud sucking is one of the vegetative organs of plants, which grow on the underground bulbs of plants. If there is no seed or spore to sow, just cut off the suction bud and plant, it can grow into a new plant.
Wood cycads in the wild have now all been transplanted indoors by bud absorption and grown around the world, including durban botanical gardens in South Africa, Kew Gardens in the UNITED Kingdom, longwood gardens in the United States, and so on. But even though Wood Cycad has grown in many botanical gardens, it is still the loneliest plant in the world. Because the four trees that Wood first saw were actually branches of the same Wood cycad, the Wood cycads that were later transplanted around the world were all "twins" from the same tree. Therefore, although the nutrient reproduction of bud sucking can produce new individuals, it is always a clone of the self.
What is even more regrettable is that because Wood cycad is a hermaphrodite plant. That is to say, there must be both male and female Wood cycads, this plant can reproduce sexually and produce offspring, and continue to reproduce. The only Wood cycad that has been found in the world is now a male tree, and scientists have spent more than a hundred years without finding another companion, let alone a female Wood cycad.