As I mentioned before, Encephalartos hildebrandtii comes from Kenya and had beautiful yellow confess that can be up to 24 inches tall. They can produce up to 5 female cones at a time which gives an amazing display in the garden, yet alone if you pollinate them, and sell those seeds for an extra $6000, which helps pay for your mulch and fertilizer for your garden. Here again is my male plant in the yard:
Here is a close up of the male cones on this same plant:
Here is a cone on one of my female plants, which in this case is planted right next to the male:
To give you a perspective on size, now, I don't want to hear any cracks on how you can't tell if it is a cone, or me, but here is that same cone with my hat on it.
This species gets large but there are many that are larger than this one. It will get a 15 foot spread and rarely gets taller than about 10 feet tall in an average person's lifetime. The leaves will burn when the temperatures get below 23F, but these were in this location when it got down to 15F. The leaves burned up and they were flushing new leaves by April. Tom
