Lehmann, a German botanist who studied the cycads and published a book on them in 1834.

[1] This cycad grows up to two metres tall with a trunk diameter of up to forty five centimetres and may be branched or unbranched.

The leaves are up to one hundred and fifty centimetres long, blue or silver and strongly keeled.

[4] This species is found in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa mainly on dry sandstone slopes and ridges where it grows amongst low succulent herbs and shrubs.

[4] By flourishing in such an arid environment it demonstrates how the cycad race has endured through the ages, seemingly immune to drought when many other tree species such as the cabbage trees and taaibos are leafless and sometimes dead.