Plants of the Wet Tropics - more from North Queensland: Paperbark, palms, curtain fig tree

This is a giant red paperbark, botanical gardens Cairns. The point of the boardwalk, we discovered, is to stop the leeches which do lurk everywhere in a rainforest.

Paperbark

Strange lack of roots. Eaten away?

Plants of the wet tropics - North Queensland - ferns and cycads

Here you can see a number of epiphytic ferns growing on a tree in the rainforest

Ferns growing on a palm tree, North Queensland

The plants of Queensland: Bill Bryson explains:

The Daintree forest is a remnant of a time when the world was a single land mass, the whole covered in steamy growth. [The single land mass is called Pangea.] As time passed, continuents split up and drifted off to the far corners of the globe, but the Daintree [and the rest of N.Queensland], through some tectonic fluke, escaped the more dramatic transformations of climate and orientations that spurred ecological change elsewhere. In consequence, there are plants out there - whole families of plants - that survived as nowhere else. In 1972, scientists began to appreciate just how ancient and exceptional Australia's northern rainforest is when some cattle mysteriously sickened and died after grazing in the jungle's lower slopes. The cows, it turned out, had been poisoned by the seeds of a tree called Idiospermum australianse. What was unexpected about this was that Idiospermum was thought to have vanished from the earth 100 million years ago. In fact, it was doing very well in the Daintree, as were eleven other members of its family, a primitive outpost of botany called the angiosperms, from which all flowering plants are descended.

Campsite, Cairns. I think this is an Elkhorn Fern. These grow in rainforests and other moist forests on trees and rocks from a rhizome which is protected by nest leaves that enclose the base of the plant. The shield fronds are deeply lobed, whilst the fertile fronds stand semi-erect or nodding, and become pendulous with age.

This could be a Bird's nest fern or it could be the same as the above. It shows how they get started. 

I think this one at the bottom is a scaly tree fern. These fast-growing ferns grow up to 15m and have very slender woody trunks thickened at the base with distinctive oval leaf scars. The leaves can be up to four metres long.

What kind of cycad is this? Not sure but these have separate male and female plants with the reproductive structures arising from the centre of the plant. This, I think, is a male cone.

These pictures are from Rockhampton Botanicals which are gorgeous and very informative and entirely free to visit. I am copying information from a field guild by Martin Cohen and Julia Cooper. Sadly only one picture per plant which isn't ideal.

This is the information board in the botanicals in Mackay - very helpful, hope you can read it.

Another cycad (on the left)

Bald blokes talking about gardens

The first bald bloke is rather good. His subject is the history of botany and he really loves his story. He is  twinkly and fun, but a bit staring.

The flowers in the prog are lovely (the ones he doesn't rip up). The lucky man goes to see where Linnaeus worked in Sweden, Chelsea Physick garden, Oxford Botanicals and Cambridge, and he takes his camera and his thermos with him. To me, he doesn't seem the thermos type, and I am as unconvinced by the thermos as I am by the long shots of Linnaeus's ship sailing back to Sweden.

The second bald bloke is called Michael Collins. He wears a black suit like an undertaker in order to ask people how they feel about their suburban gardens. He wants to capture the joy of gardens to people who moved out from the city to the suburbs, but he does this in an academic, non-smiley way. It's interesting social history but they should have got a better bald bloke. It's here for a few more days but you have been warned.

First bald bloke has done another episode, better than the first! Here it is! He wants to share with us the history of understanding photosynthesis, and he has some good stories. Mean old Calvin, eh, with his cycle that he wouldn't share with Nicholson! The actual cycle is too Advanced level to explain to we non-scientists, and if I want to look at the chemistry, my daughter has a diagram of it on her bedroom wall. I will post a picture of this as soon as I find my camera. I'm a bit lost today after the Lechlade trip.

Science