Cycad finally out of the pot

A few years ago we bought the complete inventory of a garden center that went bust. That is... what was left of it. Still enough for 25 truckloads of stuff and numerous trips with our VW Transporter van. Only the strongest and most drought resistant plants and trees were left. Among the survivors were bottle trees, ginko bilobas and one other fossil plant, a Cycad. Cycads grow very slowly and therefor mature plants are very expensive, up to a thousand euros or more for one single plant. You wonder if it's a palm or a fern, well it's neither of the two. As stated it was more dead than alive, but after a year or so it suddenly produced a new crown of leaves. The new leaves grew very rapidly to full grown leaves. The plant has always been in a pot and we could not find a suitable permanent place for it, so it stayed in the pot. Finally we did move it towards the upper gate and the idea came up to put in in a concrete ring of over a meter in diameter. This ring was in fact half of a main sewer pipe which we cut in half with a grinder. One half has been used at the end of the 'catwalk' near our home and the other half was still available for another project.

Once put in place with some mortar Ans started to glue pebbles on the outside of the sewer pipe with tile adhesive mortar. A laborious job as each pebble has to be placed on it individually. After a few weeks the whole outside and top side of the ring was covered with the pebbles. To masc the white tile adhesive and to give it a nicer look she used brown joint mortar. Once done we finally put the cycad in.