So needed in the sex life
Of the idiot tree.
Idiospermum australiense, the idiot tree.
Photograph courtesy of Tony Rodd.
Link to photo
For the pollination story, see Williams, G and Adam, P. (2010) "The Flowering of Australia's Rainforests A Plant and Pollination Miscellany", CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria.
I have taken the following from
BlackDiamondImages
Idiospermum australiense, is the most famous of the primitive North Queensland rainforest plants having been considered extinct until it was found again just south of Cairns near Noah Creek in 1971. It has been called the Green Dinosaur Tree or otherwise,Ribbonwood. It belongs to an ancient 120 million year old family of plants only previously known from fossils. The fruit is very large, as big as a tennis ball and toxic to birds and animals. It is brown in colour and descibed as a woody nut by Cooper. It is believed however that the seeds were dispersed by extinct animals and birds. The tree produces fruit with some interesting characteristics. All modern flowering plants produce seeds which have either one seed leaf (monocots) or two seed leaves (dicots) but the seeds of the Idiospermum can have between 2 to 6 seed leaves! Normally seeds will germinate and send up a single shoot but the Ribbonwood can sprout more than one shoot per seed. The fruit is large at 80mm (3 inches) and globular, splitting into four segments on the ground. The spirally arranged flowers can range in colour from white or cream aging to pink, red or orange and are fragrant. The fruit contains alkaloids which can disrupt nerve transmission to the brain. This rare species is only found from Noah Creek to the Daintree River and from the Mt Bellenden Kerr Range to the foothills of Mt Bartle Frere in lowland rainforest up to 260m altitude.
Source-Plants of Tropical North Queensland by John Beasley p.106 plus Cooper and Cooper 2004, P.232
4th Annual Hexapod Haiku Challenge
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