How is a welwitschia plant adapted to life in the desert
Welwitschia of the Namib desert is truly a bizarre plant, a living fossil
200 miles to the west of the Kalahari
lies an even hotter drier desert the
Namib very few plants indeed can survive
in these parched sands patches of grass
sprouted after a rare shower of rain and
lived for a few weeks but that was over
four years ago and now only the dusty
withered stems are left there is one
plant that grows here though and indeed
nowhere else and one that is very odd
indeed the scientist who first described
this extraordinary plant was an Austrian
called dr. velvet who came to this part
of Africa in the middle of the last
century he discovered many plants in
Africa but this perhaps is his most
famous and the one that bears his name
being called welwitschia there are male
plants and female plants this one is a
female and these are the female
structures these are young ones which
sprouted this year and these are the
fully developed ones from last year in
structure they're very like the cones of
a fir tree the male plant has growths
rather like stamens which produce pollen
so welwitschia seems to be a kind of
link between coniferous trees and true
flowering plants but the oddest thing
about it perhaps ides leaves they grow
from the top of its central trunk and
once more do so extremely slowly so that
this length of leaf would have taken
about 70 years to be produced but if it
hadn't frayed at the edges it would be
about 400 yards long because this
individual plant is thought to be about
1,500 years old
it's these amazing leaves that enable a
plant to collect water in this rain this
country the NAM embolize close to the
western coast of an
a dawn fogs regularly roll in from the
Atlantic as they swirl around the
welwitschia their moisture condenses on
the plants huge leaves some droplets are
absorbed through cracks in the leaves
skin the rest of the water is channeled
down to the ground where it sucked up by
roots just below the surface of the sand
