confronting vegetation: Archontophoenix cunninghamiana

Brisbane

Australia's "Bangalow Palm," Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, is a graceful feather palm that manages to evoke both tropical lushness and Victorian reserve.

Photo:  J. D. Andersen Nursery

But dense forests of them have quite a different effect.  A month ago I had a few hours in one, in the Tambourine National Park just south of Brisbane.  These rainforests have a simple structure: Bangalow palms everywhere.

The palms grow so close together that a cross-country thrasher would have to turn sideways to get between them.  The mature ones form a canopy of jammed, colliding fronds about 8m high.  Like all palms (and unlike trees) they don't get wider with age.  The juveniles look just like adults but shorter, so that in addition to the solid ceiling of fronds above, complete sets of fronds also appear at various heights, slowly rising into the canopy as if on hydraulic lifts.

The groundcover is mostly sprouts of the same palm.  In fact, the ground is so heavily littered with dead fronds that it's remarkable anything gets started at all.

Here and there are very old, very large trees, suggestive of some larger, older forest that predates the crowding palms ...  

 

... but identifying these great trees is impossible.  The park has put signs on a few, such as this Castanospermum australe or "black bean" ...

 

... but the tree's leaves, flowers, and fruits hang tens of meters above the ground, far above the enclosing canopy of palms, so they can only be identified by their droppings on the ground, such as these spent pods next to the tree above:

The effect is a bit like a modern art museum where a discreet tag on the wall refers to a pile of rubbish or nails on the floor, identifying it as art.  The trunk of the tree is merely the wall, and while the tag may refer to a soaring Platonic form in some idealised realm above the canopy, we can only make sense of it through its shadows and droppings under our feet.

Very rarely, of course, a big tree falls. 

This old fig came down quite recently, tearing a hole in the forest and knocking palms right and left.

 

 

The surviving palms look almost sheepish in the sudden light, like crowd at an accident that it really shouldn't be enjoying.  

 

The blasting invasion of sunlight is hell on photography, of course.  But the great torn trunk, viewed backlit from below, seemed almost on fire, especially as seen by a light-hungry digital camera.

Comments

[Teresa]

Jarrett, are the palms native to that area? or intruders? I love the photos of the old tree that fell. One is almost like a body being drug through the forest.

FA

[Jarrett]

The palms are native to the area, but these dense groves can spread and contract relatively quickly. Most of the old trees are believed to predate the palm forest, since such trees could never get going as saplings in the face of the deep shade and heavy litter of dead fronds.

[dale]

(o)

[Dave]

A very interesting post. Those wild palms are amazing!

[Philip Gleeson]

Hmmm, surely that "old eucalypt" is a strangler fig.

[Jarrett]

Noted and corrected, thanks!