CHENGDU

Wild cycad bred

China has made a major breakthrough in breeding wild cycad, a 280-million-year-old rare plant species.

A cycad forest covering 1,360 hectares has been made in the suburbs of the city of Panzhihua in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, and the forest comprises 237,766 cycads, believed to be the largest number of its kind in the world, said Yang Siyuan, a horticulturist in Panzhihua.

In the forest, 136,000 cycads are fully grown and the rest are saplings. Normally, cycads seldom blossom, however, the cycads in Panzhihua blossom once a year.

"The cycad forest provides ample materials for studying the origin and evolution of living things and the climate and geography of ancient times," Yang said.

China is endowed with 15 kinds of cycads dating back to the Paleozoic era, before the age of the dinosaurs.