bubba louie said:
Dinetta said:
pepe said:
good list.
pandanus and custard apple are what? trees – grasses??good eating to yus. ms pepe is cooking a curry using her new mortar and pestel. smells great.
can you grow nutmeg/ mace – or is that just a dream?
Whaaaat? Pandanus is a palm! and custard apples are a fruit…surely you jest with that question, Pepe??? yeah?
Is pandanus classed as a palm? It doesn’t look like one.
Leonard Cronin says in “Australian Palms Ferns Cycads and Pandans” that “It also includes members of the interesting and unusual palm-like groups, the pandans and cycads, linked to the ferns and other ancient orders of seed-bearing plants by their mobile swimming sperm which require water to enable them to reach and fertilise the egg nucleus.”
Where Colin Tudge in “The Tree” says “So to the Pandanales, with the single family of the Pandanaceae, colloquially known as screw pines. The “screw” is understandable, since the tops of the stems are twisted and the long, narrow leaves, which in reality are in three rows, seem to form a spiral. The “pine” is incomprehensible. “Palm” would have been closer, since many of the Pandanaceae resemble palms…”
he goes on to say “But screw pines ar enot closely related to palms, and indeed have no close relatives at all.”
later he says “Where screw pines flourish, palms can’t get a look in.”
and he finishes up with “It’s odd that such a significant group of plants – some of them big trees – are so little known outside botanic circles. People probably mistake them for palms.”
I chuckle at the last statement because Tudge’s sense of humour is apparent throughout this book and its comments like these that bring an odd type of reality. I guess several years ago before moving to the tropics I too would have suggested that pandans would be lumped in with the palms, but since have learnt that there is more to pandans that meet the eye and palms they certainly are not.