Cycad neither fern nor lightening rod

The Western Australian Botanic Garden at Kings Park in Perth is mostly local flora, but around its fringes you find all kinds of interesting plants from elsewhere in Australia and further afield.

Approaching this specimen I did at first think it was a tough fronded fern. Apparently I'm not the first. The species was named as a species of Lomeria, a fern in the same family as well known Hard Fern, Blechnum.

Only when Dr William Stanger sent a living specimen to Chelsea Physic Garden in London, where it 'coned' (as this female plant above is doing), did botanists realise it was cycad, eventually calling it Stangeria eriopus. The genus name honours Dr Stanger's intervention, and the species name refers to the woolly (erio) hairs covering the base of the young leaf stems (pus, for foot). 

There is only one species in this genus and its closest relatives are two species in eastern Queensland (in the genus Bowenia, named after Sir George Bowen, Queensland's first governor). Stangeria and Bowenia have been included together in the rather small, Stangeriaceae, or sometimes in separate families.

Stangeria is what they call a subterranean cycad - without a trunk - growing naturally in forests and grassland in southern Mozambique and eastern South Africa, close - but not too close - to the coast. According to Loran Whitelock (The Cycads): 'no further inland than abut 80 km' and 'no closer to the coast than 1-3 km'. They don't like salt spray. 

Commonly called Natal Grass Cycad or, in Zulu, Imfingo, the plants are widely used in traditional Zulu medicine, and hence heavily collected and traded (one study found 2380 kilograms sold in Durban markets in one month). The root is used as a purgative and for treating headaches, among other things. The Afrikaans name is Bobbejaankes, baboon food.

But the use of the plant that surprised me, was to protect against lightening. You should, they say, plant a Natal Grass Cycad at each corner of your house. A bit hard to test of course given that homes mostly are not hit by lightening.

It is described as both fast and or slow growing, but either way is can be long-lived although the first cones are produced rather early in its life for a cycad, after only five to seven years. Which will have reduced the time it spent masquerading as a fern in London.

That fern-like foliage is of two kinds, depending on where the plant is sourced. The forest form has softer, thinner leaves which are relatively wide and long, reaching more than 2.4 metres in length according to Whitelock. The Grassland form has thicker, stiff leaves, only reaching 60 centimetres at most. 

The form in Kings Park is the forest fern, which is also grown in Adelaide's Botanic Gardens. We don't have it (yet) at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.