Life lessons from a 2,000-year-old plant

East of the gulps of cormorants along the Skeleton Coast by the Ilha da Baia dos Tigres, Atlantic mists are rolling in across the Angolan desert. A red, alien sun dips towards the horizon and I’m crouching down on the sand, with my face close to the oldest living thing on our planet.

Some say the Welwitschia mirabilis plant, which can grow for 2,000 years, looks like an octopus, with its green leaves spreading like tentacles in a circle. In Afrikaans it’s apparently known as the ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ – two leaves that will not die. Though it can grow to be as large as a discarded tractor tyre, it really does have just two leaves that grow a few millimetres each year out of a woody meristem, fraying and splitting and dying as they work their way across the sand.