Did you know that some trees are male and some are female?
It's not true of all trees, because some contain both girly and boy parts. But those are boring. The two I can think of off the top of my head are banana trees and sago palms.
We have sago palms in our yard.
We have a lot of them. When they reach puberty, they grow their sex organs and let them all hang out in the open. We have three females, that look like this:
The seeds are in the "flower" - which is that ball on top.
The boys look like this:
Sometimes the boys get to a certain height and split. We like to refer to them as twins.
And then this happened:
On a tree that last year contained a single male cone. There are 12 cone points (at least). Duodecaplets.
And not just regular duodecaplets.
At least 8 of them are melded together. Siamese duodecaplets.
I don't even want to think about the trimming we will have to do when 12 sets of leaves try to emerge from this poor guy after the cones fall off.
3 comments:
Wow. That's really. Wow.
Huge.
DUDE! You are killing my wonder left and right here...I thought I was just being a twelve year old for feeling "uncomfortable" around those plants this time of year.
Featured on Good Mom/Bad Mom on the Houston Chronicle.
http://tinyurl.com/6mb75y
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