The cycad by the Palm House door arrived in 1874 as a trunk the length of a forearm, packed in straw in a tea chest from the Eastern Cape. It has been repotted three times since. This October was the fourth, and the first time anyone on the current team had done it.
Cycads grow slowly and dislike being disturbed, so the rule here has always been to leave them alone until the pot gives up. The old teak tub had split along two staves, and roots were coming out of the gap at the bottom.
Two days, one gantry
The plant weighs a little under a tonne in its pot. We hired a gantry and a chain hoist, built a ramp of scaffold boards over the bed and closed the east side of the house for two days. The trunk was wrapped in hessian and foam, the crown tied up with soft rope, and the whole thing lifted twenty centimetres at a time.
The new tub is larch, made by a cooper in Stroud, and a hand’s width wider than the old one. Cycads want sharp drainage: the mix is loam, grit and composted bark in equal parts, with a layer of broken terracotta at the bottom.
You get one go at this every forty years. Nobody wanted to be the person who dropped it.
It will sulk for a season. If it puts out a new flush of leaves next summer, it has forgiven us. You can see it, roped and slightly lopsided, just inside the Palm House door.