Tropical Zone Gardening: Restless natives of the Top End, 0 by tropicbreeze

tropicbreeze wrote:
Back again to continue with the natives. My time is a bit in short supply of late. In May I'm doing some trekking in Papua New Guinea so I'm spending time training, as well as all my other activities on top of my full time (mortgage paying) job. But I'm really looking forward to PNG, it's been pretty much a life long dream to go there, surprising thing being that's it's taken me so long to do it. So anyway, that's why there's often time gaps in my posting on this thread.

The next lot of plants come from the wetter edges of the sand plain country. The sand plain acts like a sponge in the wet season. The water emerges in swamps, seepage areas and finally into creeks which drain it away. So while out on the fauna survey last week I wandered a bit and found some of these wetter areas.

This is Banksia dentata, Northern Banksia. Although there are many species of Banksia in Australia, in the north we only have one. Grows as a small tree in wet or swampy areas. Aborigines call it Mankoybuk and used the furry cones to carry fire. The cones burn slowly for a long time.

Photo 086

This message was edited Mar 31, 2009 10:34 AM