08 Feb 2016 KEEPING MY EYES OPEN

A few days ago I told Jaap that he could photograph a cycad (an ancient and slow-growing palm or fern-like form of plant life) across the road from the Eagle Heights Post Office. I thought no more about it until I opened my eyes and saw, to my horror, that in the intervening sixteen years since I filmed its companion next to the footpath, a White Cedar tree had all but smothered this cycad. I had simply walked by day after day, year after year without registering the unwanted intrusion of a non-native on one of Australia’s glorious endemic flora species, Lepidozamia peroffskyana. It has the largest (reproductive) cones, about 1 metre long, of all the earth’s cycads.