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World's biggest pot plant moves into a new home at Kew
Mark Prigg, Science and Technology Correspondent29.07.09
With a trunk more than four metres long and weighing over a tonne, it is far from the average pot plant.
In fact, say experts at Kew Gardens, it is the world's biggest.
Staff at the gardens were today repotting the "don of the Palm House", a Jurassic cycad. Kew's first plant collector Francis Masson found it in South Africa in the early 1770s, and it grows at a painstaking 2.5cm a year.
Staff used a four-metre lifting gantry and metal stilts to move the plant, an effort which took three months to plan.
"Cycads are fascinating prehistoric plants, and this one is the don of the Palm House," said Wes Shaw, a keeper.
Horse chestnuts trees were also being given a new lease of life at Marble Hill in Twickenham today, where English Heritage workers were injecting garlic extract into them to try to cure disease. Garlic can destroy a killer bacterium and repels leaf miner moths.
