A Passion for Cycads

A Passion for Cycads SURVIVORS FROM THE DINOSAUR AGE, CYCADS CONTINUE TO CAPTIVATE COLLECTORS AND RESEARCHERS By Usha Lee McFarling Cycads are squat, woody, and branchless. They have no flowers, just spiky leaves that shred clothes and tear skin. They grow slowly, poison livestock and sometimes people. Despite these liabilities, the strange and primordial plants inspire a fierce, and sometimes inexplicable, ardor in their fans. Once besotted, many collectors can’t stop themselves from amassing the rare, often expensive plants, many of which are severely endangered and illegal to transport across international borders. “I’ve seen wealthy people show them off in walled gardens the way people used to show off Van Goghs and Chagalls,” says Tim Gregory, a cycad enthusiast and University of California Botanical Garden advisory board member who has spent the past three decades studying and propagating the plants. “It’s very weird.” The obsession can disrupt lives: some collectors Author Oliver Sacks wrote about the plant’s neuro- become cycad nurserymen. Others travel cross- toxic properties and nursed three cycads in his New country to scoop up a single plant. The late opera York City apartment. The plants, he said, called singer Ganna Walska, founder of Montecito’s to him “from a former world.” Others appreciate Lotusland botanical garden, sold off nearly a mil- the plants as tough survivalists, bold and sculptural. lion dollars’ worth of jewels to buy cycads. Many Many value their rarity and expense. Living status collectors jokingly refer to their addiction as “the symbols, cycads are among the most charismatic green needle.” plants in the world. What’s the draw? For some, the primordial One early admirer was Henry E. Huntington, plants trigger a deep and ancient connection. who was always on the lookout for ways to dazzle Opposite page: Brian Dorsey, research botanist, kneels before a Dioon merolae that came to The Huntington from the collection of Loran Whitelock (1930–2014), author of The Cycads, the standard guide to the plants. Photograph by Kate Lain. This page: The massive seed cone of a Dioon merolae. Photograph by Kate Lain. huntington.org 19 visitors and promote Southern California’s Edenic properties as he established the estate that today is The Huntington. In 1909, he spent nearly $5,000 (more than $100,000 in today’s dollars) on a lot of “rare and choice” cycads to plant near his mansion— now the Huntington Art Gallery. Many of these original plants survive today. “They’re like parrots,” track loaders, and teasing excess dirt from the roots notes Jim Folsom, the Marge and Sherm Telleen/ by hand. Plants were given bar-code inventory labels Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the and accession tags and implanted with microchips Botanical Gardens at The Huntington. “They to help keep track of their identities and provenance. seem to live forever.” They were then transferred down Whitelock’s Los Angeles was also home to one of the world’s steep, narrow drive to trucks for transport. At The most noted cycad experts. Until his death at age 84 Huntington, a separate crew was waiting for them, in 2014, Loran Whitelock collected thousands of holes already dug. Incredibly, all but 10 plants cycads on his modest hillside property in the north- survived. “Most of the plants didn’t really skip a east corner of L.A. Whitelock, a health inspector, beat,” Roberson says. “They’re doing pretty well. fell in love with the plants in Mexico in the 1960s They’re happy.” and spent the next half-century studying, collecting, Roberson has more recently been working on propagating, and writing about them. Two cycad the new “cycad walk” designed by Folsom to show- species—Encephalartos whitelockii and Cerato- case the plants. It runs behind the Art Gallery— zamia whitelockiana—are named after him. within sight of Huntington’s original cycads—on Whitelock’s 374-page tome The Cycads is considered what was a little-used, hillside lawn. Here, the the definitive guide to the plants. cycads are planted on terraced slopes in tribute to Whitelock’s lush garden was one of the finest Whitelock’s hillside garden. “Loran’s garden was private collections of cycads in the world. A wid- very exciting,” Folsom says. “Plant lovers who ower with no children, Whitelock bequeathed walked through it would drop their jaws. It would nearly 1,500 cycads to The Huntington, along with be fun if visitors could have that same feeling.” an endowment to care for them. Whitelock was a throwback to a time when The task of moving the plants, some of them descriptive science was not conducted by profes- weighing more than 2,000 pounds, fell to Gary sionals but by educated laypeople, often doctors, Roberson, lead project gardener for the cycad who had time and money to travel widely to collect, and palm collection at The Huntington. It was Folsom says. Whitelock’s book, the so-called cycad a gargantuan task. bible, is laden with full-color photos and detailed Roberson’s crew spent four months in the descriptions. “It’s a huge contribution,” Folsom spring of 2015 digging up plants amid buried gas says. “There are several books on cycads, but lines, easing them out of the ground with compact nothing like his.” 20 huntington.org The Whitelock collection is especially valuable, Scientists build phylogenies by grouping subsets Folsom says, because it is a founding population— of species based on which DNA variants they share. many cycads growing in the U.S. today are progeny Work on cycads has been frustrating because there of Whitelock’s plants —and because it is the specific is so little variability between species. “They’re collection of plants upon which Whitelock’s book turning out to be real pains,” Gregory says. was written. “That’s beautiful,” Folsom says. A cycad phylogeny was finally published in 2013, “These plants are the living book.” showing how the 10 genera of existing cycads are related. But many questions remain about the different genera, and about one in particular: Dioon. While cycads inspire collectors, they also beguile The Dioon cycads are interesting because seven of scientists because of their oddity. They look like the roughly 15 species—which are distributed in Opposite page, top: Cycads lining a brick walk in Loran palms but produce cones and are more closely Mexico from Sonora to Chiapas—are clustered in Whitelock’s garden in 2014, related to conifers. They can grow in harsh deserts a small area around the Tehuacán Valley, and sci- shortly before The Huntington acquired his cycad collection. or rainforests, in bogs or on rocks, in full sun or entists are not sure when they diversified. Nor do Photograph by Kate Lain. full shade. They can live for a thousand years. they know why or how much genetic diversity exists Opposite page, right: Loran Whitelock and his wife, Eva, in With no flowers to attract pollinators, these in their populations. One species, oddly, is found front of their home. Photograph gymnosperms (or “naked seed” plants) dazzle only in Honduras. by Jim Folsom. Opposite page, center: In the spring of 2015, a instead with their cones, which can range from Botanist Brian Dorsey came to The Huntington compact track loader eased one bright yellow to fire-engine red and weigh up to from the University of Michigan as a postdoctoral of Whitelock’s cycads out of the ground in his garden. 90 pounds. They are the only type of gymnosperms research fellow to answer some of these questions. Photograph by Gary Roberson. that can generate their own heat, warming male But first, he needed to understand how the different Opposite page, bottom: Crew members Ramon Abelard (left) cones by 20 degrees to repel insects living there Dioon species are related and if current species and Carlos Ceballos remove toward more temperate female cones to spread designations are even correct. excess dirt from one of Whitelock’s cycads before it is pollen. And they have the largest sperm cells of Dorsey’s previous work on Euphorbia re- transported to The Huntington. any plant. quired a consortium of 50 scientists and costly Photograph by Gary Roberson. This page: clockwise (from upper Cycads are also impressive survivors, having collecting trips to Madagascar. At The Huntington, left), the pollen cone of a Dioon existed for nearly 300 million years, outlasting ice getting samples is easier. “When I need more edule, the pollen cone of an Encephalartos woodii, the pollen ages, volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, and mass DNA, I just walk outside,” Dorsey says. “It’s like cone of a Dioon tomasellii, and extinctions. (Sadly, human habitat destruction and reading the collection.” the seed cone of a Dioon merolae. Photograph of the Dioon tomasellii poaching may wipe out what eons of epic devasta- But getting the genetic information out of the cone by Brian Dorsey; photographs tions could not.) plants has been tougher. Unlike the genomes for of the other cones by Kate Lain. Despite intense interest, there are yawning gaps in the scientific understanding of cycads. For ex- ample, cycads long were considered “living fossils”; they are common in depictions of dinosaurs. But a 2011 analysis revealed that while their ancestors coexisted with dinosaurs, the 300 cycad species alive today are much younger. These living species evolved 12 million years ago in what appears to have been one explosive burst. Many outstanding questions about cycads center on their evolutionary history: how plants alive today are related to each other, why so many went extinct, and what is pushing today’s species to diversify. But determining how cycads are related—their phylogeny—has proven to be extremely difficult.

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