Ancient Tree of Africa: Welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis).

Ancient Tree of Africa: Welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis).
by Joan Zimmerman, Ph.D.

Discover the Namibian survivalist tree, Welwitschia mirabilis, which keeps most of its trunk below ground, grows without rain for 3 years in every 4, and can live over 2000 years.

Recommended books.

Purchase Remarkable Trees of the World through our link to Amazon (whose fees support our site so you will help us keep bringing you information). This new great book by Thomas Pakenham is a treasury in words and photographs of 60 trees of unusually strong personality. Pakenham visited and photographed them around the world, in North America, remote regions of Mexico, Europe, Japan and other parts of Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Ancient Trees: Trees that Live for a Thousand Years by Anna Lewington and Edward Parker.

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Welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis): Description.

• Leaves:
  1. Yellowish-green leaves, to 6 feet long.
  2. Leaves die to brown and tear to shredded ribbons in the desert winds.
• Shape and Trunk:
  1. Its sprawling ground-level mass of long dry leaves look as much like a dehydrated monster octopus as a tree.
  2. "Trunk" is an inverted cone, up to 4 feet in diameter, which descends 10 feet below the desert, but rises only 3 feet above ground-level.
  3. This trunk stores water for the tree. (Rain is absent from its Namib Desert for 3-out-of-4 years. A typical rainy year has about 1" of rain.)
  4. Trunk is hard (like hard wood); covered in a cork-like corrugated bark.
• Reproduction:
  1. Each tree is either male or female, and both have cones.
  2. A male tree has erect scarlet cones that rise 1 foot above the trunk.
  3. Pollen-producing flowers sprout from the flowers of the male cones.
  4. Insects carry the pollen to the female trees.
  5. After the plumper, erect female cones are pollinated, they produce small, winged, wind-borne seeds.
  6. Seeds can lie dormant for years.

Facts.

• Grows wild and half-buried in northern gravel plains of Namib Desert.
• Regarded as a "living fossil" connected to the ancient flora of the Gondwanaland super-continent that existed millions of years ago.
• Has its own genus as it is so unlike other plants.
• Carbon-14 dating has found some Welwitschia mirabilis to be over 2,000 years old.
• Special pores on its leaves help it uses the dense sea fog and heavy dew that occur year-round.
• Its tangled torn leaves also help to condense air-borne moisture and guide it into the soil around its roots.
• Bitterness of leaves and bark deter predators.
• Emits a colorless resin that helps protect it from disease and insects.
• Plants may fuse together, either all male, all female, or a mixture. Groups of five have been found.

Links and References.

• Some of the above data are abstracted from the beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated Ancient Trees: Trees that Live for a Thousand Years by Anna Lewington and Edward Parker. We highly recommend this book.
• Home and Index of Articles.
• Baobab, the world's widest tree.
• Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)
• Fig (Ficus), sacred to many in Asia.
• Ginkgo.
• Pines: Pines.

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Copyright © 2001-2003 by Joan Zimmerman.