A WONDERFUL PLANT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 55, 6 March 1935, Page 20

A WONDERFUL PLANT.

(Sent in by Dorothy Cnlvey, Milton House, 323, Gladstone Road, Glsborne; age 16.)

Many people may think that the cactus is the most wonderful plant in the world, for it will flourish in places so dry that nothing else is able to exist. But there is one plant which will grow where even the cactus would not be able to exist. This is the welwitschia, which is found in the rainless deserts to the north-west of the Cape of Good Hope. Here is a part of the world where rain is almost unknown, and many years go by without a single drop falling on the parched ground. The welwitschia is a most singular plant, and, although it lives to a great age, probably more than a hundred years, it is rarely more than a few inches above the ground. Yet the strange, short trunks may be as much as ISin round. This remarkable plant has only two leaves, the first pair with which it started. These leaves are never lost and each year they grow a little. In appearance they look more like some old leather sprawling out on the sand than anything else. From the centre of the plant there are, every now and then, sent out curious scarlet cones which contain the flowers, and finally these develop into seed-bearing arrangements not unlike fir cones.

All botanists agree that it is wonderful how the welwitschia manages to exist at all. During the day the plant has to put tip with a sun temperature which may be as milch ae 170 degrees Fahrenheit. At night a hot, dry wind sweeps over the desert, and there is little or no dew. No other vegetation of any kind Is able to exist in such situations, yet the welwitschia seems to get on very well in its slow way.

Attempts have been made in various botanical gardens to grow the welwitschia, but so far none of these have been successful. It has been found impossible to make the conditions of growth hard enough for this weird plant, which cannot seem to flourish save on the smallest amount of everything required by ordinary vegetation. —Copied.