This is crowned with dark or metallic green, semi-glossy, arching leaves up to two metres long and moderately keeled.

[4] This species is found in coastal regions of Eastern Cape Province, South Africa growing at heights of up to six hundred metres.

[3] In their book on South African trees, published in 1972, Eve Palmer and Norah Pitman wrote: This was the first cycad seen by the early colonists pushing eastwards.

This was Thunberg's breadtree; and this species almost changed the course of South African history for its seeds nearly killed General Smuts and men of a Boer commando in the eastern Cape during the Anglo-Boer War.

Colonel Deneys Reitz writes in his book Commando how Smuts and his men, camping on the Suurberg, were poisoned after eating the seeds of Encephalartos altensteinii.