Description:

• Plants dioecious, palm-like with main root or roots tuberous
• Stem subterranean or aerial, occasionally up to 10 m tall, unbranched or branched from base, rarely branched above and then largely due to injury, covered by alternating series of woolly bracts and persistent swollen truncated leaf bases (pulvini)
• Leaves arising from apex of stems, spirally arranged, persisting 2-several years, petiolate, pinnate with a straight or curved rachis; leaflets pungent-pointed, entire, toothed or lobed on one or both margins, reduced in size towards base of rachis, sometimes to prickles, with longitudinal parallel venation and no midrib; leaflets of seedlings of all species with several teeth around apex
• Cones 1-5, sometimes more, from near or around apex of stem, glabrous to densely woolly, pedunculate; peduncle of male cones somewhat longer than those of female cones in same species
• Male cones subcylindric; scales densely packed in many spiral rows, terminating in a sterile truncate apex or beak; pollen cells in dense clusters on lower surface
• Female cones cylindric to oval, broader than male; scales tightly packed, stalked, each bearing 2 collateral ovules, with micropyle directed towards axis of cone, on inner (adaxial) surface, one on either side of and along upper side of stalk, with an enlarged peltate head (bulla); bulla face flat or somewhat protruding and with lateral ridges extending into incurved lateral lobes, having mainly an upper, lower and terminal facet
• Seeds red, yellow, amber or brownish with age, fleshy, oblong, angled by compression, with apical fleshy end variable in length, with a thin, hard, subglobose or oblong-ovoid inner shell encasing copious endosperm, having a long maturing period on cone whether fertile or not; cotyledons 2
• x = 9

Nomenclature:

• Encephalartos Lehm.
  • Lehmann: 3, t. 1-5 (1834)
  • Hutchinson & Rattray: 28 (1933)
  • Dyer: 432 (1965)
  • Dyer & Verdoorn: 5 (1966)
  • Goode: 28 (1989), no genus description; excellent pictures and species data
  • Johnson & Wilson: 373 (1990)
  • Von Breitenbach & Von Breitenbach: 29 (1992)
  • Jones 177 (1993)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 45, central and southern Africa
• Southern Africa: Species ± 30, mainly in the higher-rainfall, eastern parts of the area (Northern Province, North-West, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape)