I heart WOTD

indo-dreaming wrote:

Okay heres a distinctive palm and one the odd poster might know if have been to this country, pic is in natural habitat.

I thought maybe a Kiwi poster might know, yep there is a palm species native to NZ the most southern growing palm in the world, about as far south as Christ church and even out in remote chatham island.
Rhopalostylis sapida or common name Nikau palm or Shuttle cock palm.

Despite how people picture palms as purely tropical there is a fair few palms from cooler regions mostly high elevations, but these grow in habitat right to the coast and wont actually survive in tropical climate's as too hot and humid for them even real hot summer days and warm nights in Vic can knock them around.

Heaps in the Melb botanical gardens and i have a few in my garden, fairly slow growing, but steady all year round even in winter.

Heres a pic for scale of how chunky they can get pic is from a grower in Southern California and the Chatham island form, one of mine was grown from this individuals seed (got from a guy in Tas) but i also have two other varieties one of the more common varieties and great barrier island form which is a much slower grow.

This palm in pic would be 15 to 20 years old from seed.

Cheers AW and nice one Indo.

Plenty of palms in NZ, and mostly looking very out of place. Here are two examples looking from our place, along with another bloody Norfolk Pine.

Not a fan of the Norfolk Pine IB?

(I have a soft spot- they make great line-up markers!)

I love Norfolk Pines, and there are two huge ones on the foreshore that are crucial line-up markers for the Bar. But a lone one stands out like the dog's bollocks among NZ natives.

The palm in left corner is your native NZ palm Rhopalostylis sapida the one to the right is the very common Phoenix canariensis from Canary Islands.

BTW. Nice view/location

Cheers, ID. The Phoenix palms (quite a few of them here) were apparently planted ahead of the young QE2's visit in the 50s.

And today's WOTD - holy smokes!

Yeah that would make sense i was going to say it looks very old as in real life they are huge, not a fan though they are so big with such nasty spines, good for public areas though i guess.

mattlock wrote:

That be some sort of hakea.

H Laurina or the Pincushion. Wattlebirds love them to the point they become territorial with your garden. A very showy plant when in flower.

Andy always seems to be in the right spot when it's on. Great shot.

Nice to see a lineup shot sparked a botany discussion haha!

Now there's a lineup shot to get your heart pumping.
Looks vaguely familiar.
I do believe there is some of them South African weeds.

blackers wrote:

To be fair Alfred, it wasn't the clearest of photos. Here's one you should know

Hakea laurina. AW

Indeedy Alfred, as Guy and mattlock id'd earlier. Stunning blooms and the highlight of my winter backyard.
Now to return to the original theme of this thread, the highlight of the Vicco winter backyard in full bloom.

Ok, can we get some sub-tropical action in here.

freeride76 wrote:

Ok, can we get some sub-tropical action in here.

Waves or plants?

Bit of both.
Plants- I want to see if we can stump AW.

There's a nice bit of graminoid heath up the road with some exquisite flowering shrubs at the moment.

freeride76 wrote:

Bit of both.
Plants- I want to see if we can stump AW.

There's a nice bit of graminoid heath up the road with some exquisite flowering shrubs at the moment.

Any of you living up in the northern rivers know Eupomatia Laurina or the Bolwarra Beauty? It’s a beautiful plant with the most delicious scent. Native to your region.

Yep, native guava.
There's a couple in the paddock here along the creek bank.

freeride76 wrote:

Yep, native guava.
There's a couple in the paddock here along the creek bank.

Easy propagated from cuttings FR, interested to see a picture or two if you can be bothered

I will GS. We had rain this week and now warm N'lies which means the first hatch out of paralysis ticks is highly likely.
I'll get covered up and aeroguarded up over the weekend and get out there.

The African bush daisy is also really thick and hard to move through after 3 yrs of La Niña.

I think there is a native guava growing near the fence line. That might be the easiest one.

Cheers FR, I grow it here on the MP but they’ve die after about 5 years, hence the need to propagate. Ticks are horrible, know someone with Lymes disease, to be absolutely avoided

Looks like you may need to stump Guy as well. All over it.

Guy stumped me- I had a little look in the paddock this arvo and ended up with a nice juvey tick burrowed into me.
Luckily, still nymphs , adults yet to show up.

I'm sure you guys up there are all over this, but I got Lymes after a Scotland trip once, if you have deer anywhere nearby and you get a pronounced ring around the tic-bite after a couple of days, you have about 3 - 5 days to get some antibiotics into you.. shit of a thing.

freeride76 wrote:

Guy stumped me- I had a little look in the paddock this arvo and ended up with a nice juvey tick burrowed into me.
Luckily, still nymphs , adults yet to show up.

Crikey

Bit of a walk to the beach for this one, which has some unique properties.

It's poisonous and kills cattle ?

Distracted wrote:

Bit of a walk to the beach for this one, which has some unique properties.

Coastal salt bush of some type?
What beautiful grey green foliage

Distracted wrote:

Bit of a walk to the beach for this one, which has some unique properties.

Distracted Hi mate. You in West Oz ?

It’s obviously a plant in the Fabaceae family . Possibly Templetonia retusa AW.

GuySmiley wrote:

Distracted wrote:

Bit of a walk to the beach for this one, which has some unique properties.

Coastal salt bush of some type?
What beautiful grey green foliage

Hi GuySmiley. Loving this bit of plant fun. Agree, it was the foliage that grabbed me as well. Coastal saltbush locally in Victoria is the genus Atriplex sp. On yours and my coast, Atriplex cinerea is most commonly found. Plants have a much different floral arrangement than the aforementioned posted photo.
Atriplex can be monoecious or dioecious. Historically placed in the Chenopodiaceae family but thats now defined as a sub-family, currently finds itself in Amaranthaceae.

Hope you are keeping well.AW.

freeride76 wrote:

Ok, can we get some sub-tropical action in here.

Freeride76 . Hi mate. Ive got photos of plants for your region and further north that id love to post.

Blackers gave me the info to upload photos from ImageBB , I’m crap on computers , cant get it to work, dinosaur keyboard warrior at this end.
My ears pricked up when i read graminoid heath vegetation in your area.

Heathlands are great places to spend lots of time in. I spent all day Thursday in the Anglesea Heath observing birds and plants. AW.

@TS and Guy Smily, yep Central Australia and poisonous to livestock. It is the genus from where the 1080 dog/cat/fox poison bait is derived. Being an indigenous plant, native animals seem to have developed tolerance towards it which is why it is so widely used.
Gastrolobium brevipes is the species, saw it last year on the Larapinta walk.

I'm a bit late to the party, but nice plants discussion.

re the 'Bolwarra', also sometimes named native guava. Common names.... they can get confusing. The other (I'd argue real Native Guava) is Rhodomyrtus psidiodes - now critically endangered due to damage/death from Myrtle Rust. Effectively already extinct in some areas where it once proliferated. It was a go-to for rainforest reveg - quick-growing pioneer. Could be lost entirely very soon, along with others

and those damn ticks - yep, very active here too. I reckon they are a year-round thing now. But then I wonder if I brought in a heap with a big batch of straw bales delivered and spread recently. Had a shocker run, probably 15 or more over about 10 days, all through the groin, joy... I tend to get a lot of the nymphs/tiny ones, often dont even see them unless you get a microscope on them, but you know what the bite is. Even got one up the eye of the old fella recently, that was obviously no fun

and the Bolwarra is a special one - ancient, dinosaur-era genus

60+ million years?!?

haha, i think GJ was just giving an effect.. like the bloke who said they played jet-noises at 500 db outside council offices in byron ; )

Gotcha

AlfredWallace wrote:

GuySmiley wrote:

Distracted wrote:

Bit of a walk to the beach for this one, which has some unique properties.

Coastal salt bush of some type?
What beautiful grey green foliage

Hi GuySmiley. Loving this bit of plant fun. Agree, it was the foliage that grabbed me as well. Coastal saltbush locally in Victoria is the genus Atriplex sp. On yours and my coast, Atriplex cinerea is most commonly found. Plants have a much different floral arrangement than the aforementioned posted photo.
Atriplex can be monoecious or dioecious. Historically placed in the Chenopodiaceae family but thats now defined as a sub-family, currently finds itself in Amaranthaceae.

Hope you are keeping well.AW.

Gday AW, yes all good here hoping you’re likewise. During covid I took 2years of online zoom art classes with a great Australian realist landscape artist. One of the revelations of my time with him was that the Australian bush is grey before any other colour …. soooo, we were taught to mix a neutral grey as the “mother colour” and from that pool of paint all other colours were created to create the required harmony …… greens, yellows, reds, blues. Cheers

Distracted wrote:

@TS and Guy Smily, yep Central Australia and poisonous to livestock. It is the genus from where the 1080 dog/cat/fox poison bait is derived. Being an indigenous plant, native animals seem to have developed tolerance towards it which is why it is so widely used.
Gastrolobium brevipes is the species, saw it last year on the Larapinta walk.

Thanks for your reply Distracted

Distracted wrote:

@TS and Guy Smily, yep Central Australia and poisonous to livestock. It is the genus from where the 1080 dog/cat/fox poison bait is derived. Being an indigenous plant, native animals seem to have developed tolerance towards it which is why it is so widely used.
Gastrolobium brevipes is the species, saw it last year on the Larapinta walk.

Thanks for your reply Distracted

haha, good caption.
the move goes well with winter vincent's elegant dab.

Island Bay wrote:

60+ million years?!?

Island Bay. Hi. How’s Raglan ?

You bet, 60mill is young in terms of Angiosperm (flowering plants) evolution.

In FNQ there is a tree called the Idiot Nut (Idiospermum australiense ) unchanged morphology for approximately 129million years, meaning what it looks like today is what it looked like when it evolved, the fossil record highlights that. This tree is a true vestige of the past.

It was long thought to be extinct, rediscovered some time ago when mysteriously, cattle were found dead. Autopsy results highlighted particular fruits found in the digestive system belonged to the tree, rediscovered but with quirky NON-traditional plant seed/leaf biology.

The two main groups in current Angiosperm biology, monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants have been the long accepted norm.

When you sow a seed from a monocot plant the emergent shoot has one seed leaf, from a dicot, the emergent shoot has two seed leaves, pretty self explanatory .

In the case of the Idiot Nut, it was revealed that the seeds of the plant were polycotyledonous, throwing out all convention. Some seeds produced one, two, or even multi seed leaves, with no particular recurring theme.

This case is no surprise when Australia is home to the oldest rainforest on earth.

NZ has plenty of plant remnants in the first mentioned age group.AW.

You learn something every day! Thank you.

And to answer your question: huge, onshore, shite. But very, very good for a while until yesterday.

wow, you do learn something every day, cheers AW. It also occurred to me that the Byron guy who said they played jet-noises at 500 db, may not of been being hyperbolic, he may simply have meant watts.

GuySmiley wrote:

AlfredWallace wrote:

GuySmiley wrote:

Distracted wrote:

Bit of a walk to the beach for this one, which has some unique properties.

Coastal salt bush of some type?
What beautiful grey green foliage

Hi GuySmiley. Loving this bit of plant fun. Agree, it was the foliage that grabbed me as well. Coastal saltbush locally in Victoria is the genus Atriplex sp. On yours and my coast, Atriplex cinerea is most commonly found. Plants have a much different floral arrangement than the aforementioned posted photo.
Atriplex can be monoecious or dioecious. Historically placed in the Chenopodiaceae family but thats now defined as a sub-family, currently finds itself in Amaranthaceae.

Hope you are keeping well.AW.

Gday AW, yes all good here hoping you’re likewise. During covid I took 2years of online zoom art classes with a great Australian realist landscape artist. One of the revelations of my time with him was that the Australian bush is grey before any other colour …. soooo, we were taught to mix a neutral grey as the “mother colour” and from that pool of paint all other colours were created to create the required harmony …… greens, yellows, reds, blues. Cheers

GuySmiley. How are you ? . Those art classes sound like they are very fulfilling, must be very enjoyable to produce work and see your finished products.

Remember Prue Acton ? Once labelled the golden girl of fashion design from the 60’s. She once remarked something like, ‘the colours of Australia are not confined to the traditional mindset of ’green & gold’ and the way we see our country’.

She remarked, the real true colours of Australia are ‘versions of grey, magentas, soft pinks, carmine ,burnt orange & ochre, all of the greens in various moods and the straw like colours of introduced grasses.’ Something like that.

Aboriginal people had limited pigments to use for their paintings, imagine if they had had the full set of ‘Faber Castells’. AW

I found this colour palette interesting - zart art is a slick company that preys on lazy teachers who like pretty catalogues - but the 'aussie colour' choices in this pack led to some creative primary-student colour blending and a great class convo about whether sand is actually yellow.
https://zartart.com.au/product/PT213-KIT

Basesix. I bet your students love their classes. How good, mucking around with colours and conversation. “Sand is Yellow”
Well, herein lies the challenge for you to convince them that all sands are not yellow. You’d know this, it’s mostly geological, basically all to do with parent rock material, ocean sands derived from sea floor or onshore geology erosion of shoreline cliffs and parent material returning to the sea, deposition of invertebrates, (i.e White Cliffs of Dover, Foramniferams or Forams) ,volcanism and subduction, the melt that occurs in the asthenosphere where the crust and mantle battle it out ,ranges of pressure and temperatures altering chemistry and mineralogy, external influences, oozes, pigmentation from other sources, acidification, alkalinity, grey sands are grey due to the presence of carbonised organic matter. Saying that, other influences can affect the external colour of sand but not its mineralogy. I love in the tropics, rubbing a handful of white coralline sand and thinking about the process that got it there, essentially wave action on the coral atoll is producing the sand and ultimately destroying the island. Locally in OZ, the red sands of the interior past geologic time a huge wide sea (Tethys) ) basically flowed between say todays Darwin to Adelaide containing iron which slowly made its way to the sea floor due to its specific gravity thus creating the banded iron formations of the Pilbara which we know accumulated over billions of years ago. Gave rise to the colour in that region. In WA in the early 80’s Ive seen light green, pink, brown, black, grey, light red and other colours of sand, they are all out there.

Off topic, from one fellow book nerd to another. I have a non-fiction book, not too long in pages, well worth reading and it would be spot on to really get the attention of your students.
‘A Fish Caught In Time’ a great read, all about the rediscovery of the presumed extinct so called walking fish Coelacanth from the Comoros Archipelago and a part of Indonesia. For some reason i have two copies in my bookshelf, id love to give you one, but how could we do it. AW.

Beautiful sand and dirt passage AW, every surfer loves their sand, so much time spent in it frothing, contemplating, recovering and reflecting. I have ordered the book Costermans wrote with Vandenberg, I live further west than you, but all still relevant, and any such books are super absorbing. I sometimes use gmail and there is a group I am involved with that promote cold-climate northern hemisphere music in australia - there are people that focus on japan, karelia region, inuit, etc, my particular moniker is scotstralia in that group, and if you stick an at between my moniker and the above mode of transmitting the written word, I would like to take you up on your generous offer. I am also looking forward to reading Wallace's annotated Malay, I read it (unannotated) when I was younger, but so many things we do in our youth reflect the adage 'I had the experience but missed the meaning'. Looking forward to it from a halfway-wise person's perspective.