Encephalartos schmitzii

Encephalartos schmitzii is a small central African cycad whose stem stays almost entirely underground, native to the south-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the Kundelungu plateau in Haut-Katanga, and to northern Zambia. This species of the genus Encephalartos was found in 1955 by the forester André Schmitz and described in 1969 by the Belgian botanist François Malaisse, who knew only three plants at the time. In 1990 it became the first cycad recorded in Zambia. The IUCN lists it as Vulnerable.

Key facts about Encephalartos schmitzii

  • Accepted name: Encephalartos schmitzii Malaisse (1969), according to The World List of Cycads
  • Former names and synonyms: none
  • Family: Zamiaceae, order Cycadales
  • Common names: Schmitz’s cycad in English (Species+); no vernacular African name is documented
  • Natural range: Democratic Republic of the Congo (Haut-Katanga) and Zambia (Muchinga Province)
  • IUCN status: Vulnerable (VU, criterion B1ab(iii,v)), assessment by J.D. Bösenberg dated 7 April 2020 and published in 2022
  • CITES and other protection: CITES Appendix I since 1977, like the whole genus; Annex A in the European Union
  • Documented hardiness: no data (see Cold hardiness)
  • Light and soil: steppe savanna, orchard woodland with Protea petiolaris and open woodland on the Kundelungu plateau (original description); requirements in cultivation not documented
  • Habit and adult size: trunk entirely underground or rising a few centimetres above the soil; a rosette of about nine leaves 45 to 59 cm long; female cone 26 cm long (original description, 1969)
  • In the UK, US and Australia: two accessions at the Montgomery Botanical Center (Florida); also declared to BGCI by the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley and by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria
  • Toxicity: not studied for this species; a documented risk for the genus (see Toxicity and precautions)

How to recognise Encephalartos schmitzii

Encephalartos schmitzii is recognised first by its stemless habit, which Malaisse considered enough to identify it, then by its narrow leaflets with fewer than 17 veins and by the angle of the scales of its female cone. The original description, published in 1969 in the Bulletin du Jardin botanique national de Belgique, gives the following characters (measurements on fresh material unless stated):

  • Trunk: entirely underground or rising a few centimetres above the soil;
  • Leaves: in a rosette, about nine, 45 to 59 cm long; petiole 1 to 2 cm long and 0.7 cm wide; petiole and rachis hairless;
  • Leaflets: 44 to 52 on each side of the rachis, subopposite to alternate, linear-lanceolate; the median ones 10.5 to 13.6 cm long (sometimes only 9.5 cm) and 0.8 to 1 cm wide, hairless when mature, narrowed to 0.3 cm at the base, with 12 to 16 parallel veins; none to three small side spines (rarely four or five) 1 to 2 mm long, and a terminal spine in line with the leaflet;
  • Male cones: two or three, ellipsoid to subcylindrical, 10 cm long and 3.5 cm wide when dry; scales stalkless, their upper face concave and strongly wrinkled;
  • Female cone: on a short stalk, ovoid-cylindrical, 26 cm long and 12 cm wide, dark green; central axis 4 to 5 cm across, with eleven ribs; scales on a stalk 2 to 2.5 cm long, angled at 50 to 60° to it, rhomboid, the median ones 2.5 cm high and 5 cm wide, hairless;
  • Seeds: ovoid, irregularly truncated and angular, 2.5 cm long and 2 to 2.5 cm wide, orange when ripe and ochre-brown as they dry; Malaisse gives the colour with reservations, as the cone ripened in the laboratory.

The original description gives no diameter for the trunk and mentions no bluish or glaucous tint of the leaves; figures of this kind found in some popular profiles do not come from it.

Hybrids

No natural or cultivated hybrid of Encephalartos schmitzii is documented.

Possible confusion

Confusion is possible with the other species of what Turner, Sclavo and Malaisse (2006) call the “Encephalartos poggei complex”: Encephalartos poggei, Encephalartos marunguensis, Encephalartos schaijesii and Encephalartos delucanus, all from south-central Africa and all with no trunk or a short one. According to these authors, the species look alike in habit but are told apart without ambiguity by their cones (colour, shape of the scales) and their leaves (leaflets, angle of the leaves and leaflets).

Malaisse (1969) separated Encephalartos schmitzii from Encephalartos marunguensis by its underground trunk, its leaflets and the scales of its cones. His two keys to the Encephalartos of the Congo give the most useful characters. On dry female cones, the outer face of the scales is angled at 40 to 60° to the stalk and its terminal facet does not project, whereas it is angled at 70 to 80° in Encephalartos poggei, Encephalartos septentrionalis and Encephalartos marunguensis. On dry leaves, the median leaflets have fewer than 17 veins and the leaves are 40 to 55 cm long, against 17 to 25 veins in Encephalartos marunguensis (spineless leaflets, leaves 60 to 75 cm) and in Encephalartos poggei (one to four spines, leaves 70 to 150 cm).

The trickiest case is in Zambia, where both Encephalartos schmitzii and Encephalartos schaijesii occur. The latter now includes Encephalartos flavistrobilus, described in 2006 from a single site east of Solwezi, in North-Western Province, and remarkable for its yellow cones, male and female alike. The World List of Cycads gives only Muchinga Province for Encephalartos schmitzii in Zambia, so a Zambian plant of unrecorded origin should not be named without its cones.

Taxonomy

Encephalartos schmitzii Malaisse is accepted by The World List of Cycads. François Malaisse described it in 1969, under the title “Encephalartos schmitzii Malaisse, Cycadacée nouvelle du Congo-Kinshasa”, in the Bulletin du Jardin botanique national de Belgique (39(4): 401–406); the article is dated 31 December 1969. The type (holotype), a female cone collected by Malaisse under number 6286 on the Kundelungu plateau, in Katanga, is kept at Meise Botanic Garden (BR). Malaisse also cites the male cones of the plant found by Schmitz (Schmitz 5417, BR) and a further collection (Malaisse 6461, BR and LSHI). The species has no synonym.

In 1990 Malaisse, Sclavo and Turner recorded it in Zambia in a paper entitled “Zamiaceae, a new family for Zambia” (Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 57: 162–168): according to Turner, Sclavo and Malaisse (2006), it was the first Encephalartos known from that country. In 1998 Hurter and Whitelock devoted a review article to it in Encephalartos, the journal of the Cycad Society of South Africa (55: 4–8). No genetic study clarifies its position within the Encephalartos poggei complex; Turner and his co-authors note that biosystematic studies would help to settle the rank of these taxa.

Etymology and history

The epithet honours André Schmitz, forester and plant collector at the Institut national pour l’étude agronomique du Congo belge (INEAC) from 1946 to 1963, later director of the Laboratory of Silviculture at the University of the Congo, who discovered the species on a botanical expedition in 1955 (Haynes, 2022, followed by The World List of Cycads). Malaisse, his successor at the head of the forestry and fish-farming service of the Université officielle du Congo, dedicated the species to him as its first collector.

The original description tells the story. In August 1955 Schmitz found a plant at the southern end of the Kundelungu plateau, in open steppe savanna, some 200 m from shrub savanna and 500 to 600 m from open woodland. Transplanted to the Kipopo garden, 20 km from Lubumbashi, it produced two male cones. In 1959 Devred described these cones but declined, without a female cone, to assign the plant to Encephalartos marunguensis, from which it differed by more slender, hairless petioles and rachises and by narrower leaflets set closer to the rachis. In August 1966 Malaisse found a second plant under an orchard woodland of Protea petiolaris; watched in the field, it produced a female cone only in the 1968–1969 rainy season, which at last allowed the species to be described. A third plant, reported about ten kilometres north-north-east of the Lualala post, could not be found again despite a whole day’s search. Fourteen years thus separate the discovery from the description, and the entry of the species into the flora of Zambia, in 1990, added the family Zamiaceae to that country’s list.

Common names

The only English name, Schmitz’s cycad, is given by Species+, the CITES database; it is a simple rendering of the scientific name. No vernacular name in an African language is documented.

In the wild

According to The World List of Cycads, Encephalartos schmitzii occurs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Haut-Katanga, and in Zambia, in Muchinga Province; Species+ gives the same two countries. The type locality is the Kundelungu plateau.

Turner, Sclavo and Malaisse (2006) describe the habitats of the Encephalartos poggei complex: shrub to wooded savannas, open woodland and steppe savannas on Kalahari-type sands, under a climate with a dry season of four to seven months, on permeable or rocky soils. In 1969 Malaisse refused to follow Schmitz, who regarded the species as characteristic of steppes and steppe savannas on often sandy soils: the three plants then known grew respectively in steppe savanna, under orchard woodland and under open woodland.

The IUCN action plan for cycads (Donaldson, 2003) estimated the population at 5000 to 10,000 plants, in steep decline, threatened mainly by over-collecting. It also noted that in Zambia bush clearing for agriculture had reduced populations of the species. Phenology, pollinators and seed dispersers are not documented.

Conservation status and regulation

Encephalartos schmitzii is listed as Vulnerable (VU) on the IUCN Red List. The assessment by J.D. Bösenberg, dated 7 April 2020 and published in 2022, is the one cited by The World List of Cycads, under criterion B1ab(iii,v): a restricted extent of occurrence, a small number of locations, and a continuing decline in habitat quality and in the number of mature plants (author and date on Crossref, category on GBIF, consulted on 26 October 2026). The species had been listed as Endangered in 1997, then Near Threatened in the 2003 action plan.

Like every species of the genus, it has been listed in CITES Appendix I since 4 February 1977, and in Annex A in the European Union (Regulation (EU) 2026/1383, applicable since 29 June 2026). For imports from South Africa of artificially propagated plants (source codes A and D), the EU Scientific Review Group issued a positive opinion for caudices no more than 7 cm in diameter (2011) and a negative opinion above that size (2013). Species+ consulted on 26 October 2026: check the regulations in force before buying or moving a plant, and ask for proof that it was raised in cultivation.

Growing Encephalartos schmitzii

The cultivation of Encephalartos schmitzii is documented by a single reliable source, from Thailand. At the Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden, the curator of the cycad collection wrote in 2022 that all the “seasonal deciduous species”, Encephalartos schmitzii among them, are thriving there with annual coning; most of the collection grows in raised, bottomless brick beds filled with half sand, a quarter compost and a quarter coarse gravel. The plant therefore loses its leaves each year, and watering should be cut back during this rest.

Outdoor and in-ground cultivation

Outside the tropics, no outdoor planting is documented. The species comes from tropical savanna and open woodland with a long dry season; no source gives a temperature limit, and a raised, very free-draining bed like those of Nong Nooch is the only documented planting method.

Container cultivation

No container-growing report has been published. The general rules for grassland Encephalartos with an underground stem apply: a deep pot, a mineral, free-draining mix, and reduced watering while the plant is leafless.

In cultivation in the UK, US and Australia

  • United States: the Montgomery Botanical Center, at Coral Gables in Florida, lists two accessions of the species in its online catalogue, whose numbers point to 2006; the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley declares it to BGCI.
  • Australia: Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria declares it to BGCI, but the species does not appear in the Zamiaceae lists of its online living collection census, downloaded on 19 October 2026.
  • United Kingdom: no botanic garden declares it to BGCI, and no other source mentions it there.

Four institutions in all declare the species to BGCI, the fourth in South Africa. A BGCI listing records a declaration by the garden, not a living plant on display today. No English-language grower’s report has been found.

Propagation

Propagation is by fresh, fertile seed. No data specific to the species is documented on germination or on offsets. Seeds, like plants, fall under CITES Appendix I.

Pests and diseases

No disease or pest specific to Encephalartos schmitzii is documented. As with other Encephalartos, root rot threatens plants kept too wet, particularly during rest.

Cold hardiness

No cold-hardiness data exists for Encephalartos schmitzii. As with other Encephalartos, survivals in cold areas often concern young plants whose caudex is still underground, protected by the thermal inertia of the soil and sometimes by snow; nothing of the kind is documented for this tropical species, whose stem stays buried even when adult, and adult plants of other species with an aerial trunk do not benefit from this protection.

Mediterranean and European experience

No outdoor result is documented in France or Italy, and the species is absent from the published lists of the Italian botanic gardens. Readers in Mediterranean climates, or in comparable climates such as coastal California or southern Australia, should treat it as a plant for a heated glasshouse, kept dry during its leafless rest, until outdoor trials are documented.

United Kingdom, United States and Australia

The only published observation comes from the lowland tropical climate of Nong Nooch, in Thailand, where the species thrives. In southern Florida, Montgomery holds it without saying whether it grows in the open. No cold value is documented elsewhere, and no USDA hardiness zone is given for the species in any source.

Toxicity and precautions

No toxicity data specific to Encephalartos schmitzii is documented, but the risk is documented for the genus: Encephalartos are toxic, and their seeds particularly so. The toxicity of one species of the genus, Encephalartos horridus, was demonstrated as early as 1944 by Van der Walt. Cycads contain toxic glycosides (cycasin, macrozamin), from which methylazoxymethanol is derived, a compound that affects the liver, the digestive tract and the nervous system. For another cycad, the sago palm (Cycas revoluta), the ASPCA reports vomiting, black stools, jaundice, bleeding gastroenteritis, liver damage and deaths in dogs, cats and horses.

Wear gloves to handle the seeds and their fleshy coat, pick up fallen seeds and keep plants and seeds out of reach of children and pets. If any part is swallowed, contact a poison centre, a doctor or a vet without delay.

Traditional uses

No traditional use of Encephalartos schmitzii is documented.

Frequently asked questions

Where does Encephalartos schmitzii grow?

In Haut-Katanga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it was discovered on the Kundelungu plateau, and in northern Zambia, in Muchinga Province. It lives in savannas and open woodland with a long dry season.

Who was Schmitz?

André Schmitz, a forester and plant collector in the Belgian Congo, at INEAC from 1946 to 1963, then director of the Laboratory of Silviculture at the University of the Congo. He found the species in 1955; Malaisse described it in 1969 and named it after him.

Is it threatened?

Yes. The IUCN lists it as Vulnerable (assessment published in 2022). In 2003 the population was estimated at 5000 to 10,000 plants, in steep decline because of collecting, and bush clearing for farming had reduced the Zambian populations.

Can it be grown outside the tropics?

Only under glass, as far as is known, and the species is rare in the trade. No outdoor result has been published outside the tropics; the only reliable report comes from a tropical botanic garden in Thailand, where it thrives and cones every year.

Is it hardy?

No, or at least nothing suggests it: no cold data exists. As a tropical African species, it should be kept frost-free.

How can it be told apart from Encephalartos marunguensis?

By its leaves and its female cone. Encephalartos schmitzii has shorter leaves (45 to 59 cm fresh) with narrow leaflets carrying fewer than 17 veins and often a few small spines, and on dry female cones the outer face of the scales is set at 40 to 60° to the stalk. Encephalartos marunguensis has longer leaves, spineless leaflets with 17 or more veins, and cone scales set at 70 to 80° to the stalk.

Is it poisonous?

Yes, it should be treated as poisonous. No study deals with this species, but toxicity is demonstrated in the genus and cycad seeds contain cycasin.

Further reading on Succulentes

Sources

Reference sites

Bibliography

  • Malaisse, F. (1969). Encephalartos schmitzii Malaisse, Cycadacée nouvelle du Congo-Kinshasa. Bulletin du Jardin botanique national de Belgique 39(4): 401–406. https://www.cycad.org/documents/descriptions/Encephalartos/Encephalartos-schmitzii.pdf [Protologue: Latin and French description, measurements, types, history of the discovery, habitats, keys to the Encephalartos of the Congo. Primary literature.]
  • Malaisse, F., Sclavo, J.-P. & Turner, I. (1990). Zamiaceae, a new family for Zambia. Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 57: 162–168. [First record of the species and of the family in Zambia, according to Turner et al. (2006).]
  • Hurter, P.J.H. & Whitelock, L.M. (1998). Focus on Encephalartos schmitzii. Encephalartos 55: 4–8. [Review of the species, cited by The World List of Cycads and by Donaldson (2003).]
  • Turner, I., Sclavo, J.-P. & Malaisse, F. (2006). Un nouvel Encephalartos Lehm. (Zamiaceae) de Zambie. Biotechnologie, Agronomie, Société et Environnement 10(3): 181–183. https://popups.uliege.be/1780-4507/index.php?id=1014 [First cycad of Zambia, Encephalartos poggei complex, habitats, site of Encephalartos flavistrobilus.]
  • Donaldson, J.S. (ed.) (2003). Cycads. Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan. IUCN/SSC Cycad Specialist Group, Gland and Cambridge. [Statuses of 1997 and 2003, numbers, threats, clearing in Zambia.]
  • Bösenberg, J.D. (2022). Encephalartos schmitzii. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2022: e.T41938A51042764. https://doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2022-1.RLTS.T41938A51042764.en [Current assessment (VU), dated 7 April 2020; cited by The World List of Cycads; author and date read on Crossref, category on GBIF.]
  • Lindstrom, A. (2022). The cycad collection at Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden, Thailand. CYCADS 6(1): 5–9. IUCN/SSC Cycad Specialist Group. [Growing in a tropical climate.]
  • Haynes, J.L. (2022). Etymological compendium of cycad names. Phytotaxa 550(1): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.11646/phytotaxa.550.1.1 [Etymology of the epithet, via The World List of Cycads.]
  • Van der Walt, S.J. (1944). Recent investigations into the toxicity of plants, etc., in the Union of South Africa. Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Science and Animal Industry 20(1). [Toxicity of Encephalartos horridus; genus-level data.]
  • Calonje, M., Stevenson, D.W. & Osborne, R. (2026). The World List of Cycads, version 2026.08.15. Montgomery Botanical Center, Coral Gables. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21958524 [Reference checklist; consulted.]