One day in 1895, while walking through the Ngoya Forest in Zululand, southern Africa, botanist John Medley Wood caught sight of a tree. It sat on a steep slope at the edge of the woods and looked different from the other trees, with its thick multiple trunks and what seemed like a splay of palm fronds on top. Dr. Wood had some of the stems pulled up, removed, and sent one of them to London.
That little tree stem was then put in a box and left in the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. It sat there, alone, for the next 98 years.
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