Posted by Tom Broome on 11/17/2007, 7:40 pm, in reply to "Cycad Reference Book"
64.12.117.67
--Previous Message--
: Tom,
:
: Is there a book similar to
: "Betrock's Guide to Landscape
: Palms" written for cycads? Same
: type of format, dedicated to
: landscape uses.
:
No, there is not. The number of people who are interested in growing palms compared to the amount of people who want to grow cycads are probably 100 to 1. One of the main reasons we haven't seen more material on cycads is that it is hard to sell cycads in general, and also, the books would not sell as well either. All these years, I dealt with questions I had about cycads and when I asked the know experts these questions, most of the time they said "nobody has ever tried that before to find out" This is the main reason why I started writing articles in the first place, becasue there was a great void of cycad information. I have tried to educate as many people as possible over the years, but cycads are still, no where near being a mainstream landscape plant, except for the king sago, that most people think is a palm anyway. Now, if you tell someone a sago is a cycad, that just makes it worse to try and show them other cycads because people are now afraid of cycads because of what the Asian scale is doing to the sagos. I do have a few more people asking for dioons now though. Anyway, I think a cycad book that is just like the book you mention will be a long time coming. Truly, I have not seen a large cycad book that covered cold hardiness and cultivation of each species very well, but in a small handbook form, Willie Tang wrote a nice book on cultivation that had the general cultivation preferences and expected sizes of about 150 species. Willie had some great ideas and one of them was to put out nice information that was inexpensive to buy. At that time, those books could be had for around $2 each, but I don't know how much someone would sell one for now. I know a few people who have extras though, so I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to find a copy.
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