My iPhone, sleek and neat in its azalea-colored bumper, is the linkage to my past and present worlds. Two weeks ago I published a blog post featuring snaps from my iPhone, one picture about a sago palm tree on our patio.

©MLB

 

Now I’m musing about another encounter with a sago palm tree, this time at a previous residence with two sago palms. Back then, I was taking a family history course offered by Dr. Ben Vogt. As I listened to his seventh lecture, I heard the passion in his voice full of invitation to move past the stale draft of my first memoir on my desktop, “I’ll have to insert more sensory detail,” I decided. “And dialogue too!” The lecture was intense and  I felt the need for air after the instruction and walked out into my patio garden where I snapped a photo of both of our sago palm trees, one flecked with fallen live oak leaves – an image of a deciduous tree merging with tropical shrub.

©MLB

 

I was worn out from keeping my writing chair warm, neck tendons and shoulder muscles taut and sore. And so, cell phone in hand, I got my body moving from sedentary to upright, walking from my office desk just three steps through the French door out to the shady patio, adorned on all sides with evergreen, palm, late-autumn impatiens, and a parlor palm that needed light and air, stuck in the corner as it was with the diminishing light of the approaching solstice.

Snap, snap. A photo of the large sago that months ago bore a penis-like cone, long and drooping as it aged toward maturity. The other smaller one had a mass of red-orange berries snuggled into the wiry pubic hair nested bull’s eye in the center of the palm.

Sago Palm cone – Dreamstime image

 

©MLB

 

Now I am wondering about the sex life of the sago palms on our previous property. One may have been female and the other male. I probably had one of each, but I will have to find out via research, so I queried Google.

Oh, for gosh sakes – I had no idea sex was going on so flagrantly in my own back yard. Yes, I have noticed the long golden cone structure, somewhat reminiscent of a pinecone in the center of one of the larger palm plant. And the other one, younger and smaller has produced a round, fuzzy mass, orangey red-gold in color. Either the wind or bees has blown male matter over to the receptive female center about 20 feet away. Oh, and according to Nikki Phipps, author of the Bulb-o-licious Garden, what I have referred to as a the sago palm is actually not a palm tree at all, but a Cycad.

And according to Susan Patterson, master Gardener, Cycad plants are hardy, evergreen gymnosperms (cone-bearing plants) that grow in sand or hard rock. Cycads are dioecious plants; there are separate male and female plants. The female plant produces seeds, and the male plant produces cones filled with pollen.

Who knew?

Naturally, I have observed these differences between our sago palms over the last ten years, but somehow they never registered in my conscious mind – until now.

Wow!

 

Fresh foliage evolving

©MLB

 

And then, unfolding . . . !

©MLB

 


He hath made every thing beautiful in his time . . . .

 


 

What plants (trees, bushes, flowers) do you admire in your own agricultural zone?

What plants have surprised you with their growth, or lack thereof?