The wonderfully peaceful and green oasis of the Durban Botanical Gardens lies between the City of Durban and the hills of the Berea and is the oldest Botanical Gardens in Durban, founded in 1849, and modelled on the Gardens in Cape Town. The Cycad Collection is apparently the rarest in the world and has been built up since the gardens were started.
Cycads are apparently the oldest living seed plants but are facing an increasing threat of extinction.
I spent some time with this wonderful plant, poking the camera into odd corners, trying to understand the hardness of the leaves and generally looking odd while everyone else was relaxing or being a wedding guest on a burning hot and humid day!
Aren’t they stunning plants? I had one once but it keeled over one cold winter!
Amazing – and they love to be photographed!
Great photographs, Candy – but just a note on the gardens’ history … Durban Botanic Gardens wasn’t modelled on the gardens in Cape Town, whether you mean the original Company Garden founded by the Dutch East India Company to restock ships with vegetables and fruit in 1652, or Kirstenbosch, which was founded in 1913 as South Africa’s first national botanic gardens and concentrated on indigenous plants. Durban’s botanic gardens is the oldest surviving one in Africa and was founded in 1849 to showcase interesting plants from around the world; to test potential food crops to see whether they’d flourish in the region; and to collect interesting indigenous plants so they could be scientifically examined and introduced to the world.
Thank you for this correction – appreciated