My mother and I went walking last Sunday in the Adelaide Botanical Gardens.

The Amazon water lily, originally planted in 1868, has its own new glasshouse. The flower is about a foot across (larger in the wild) and the leaves are as big as a dinner table - and with huge, inch-long thorns underneath! The leaves have been known to grow to 165 cm wide (5'6") when the water is deeper, but here they're only about 3-4'.




The old palm house from Bremen (1875) is dedicated to Madagascar.

The Palm House was opened in 1877 and has been a focus in the garden since that time. It features a fascinating collection of plants from the island of Madagascar, once part of the great supercontinent Gondwana. About 150 million years ago, Madagascar and Australia were still part of Gondwana, its evolving flora producing the ancient ancestors of today’s modern native plants. Many of the plants are at risk or endangered in their natural habitat.

The plants are from the dry southwestern part of Madagascar and, if they are related to anything Australian, it would probably be on account of their water retention abilities and the grey-green colour of the palm. I certainly couldn't find anything else familiar. Thorns are the dominant theme in this glasshouse.








From the Amazon, to Madagascar to... New Caledonia, or Nouvelle Calédonie, whence, apparently, comes the genus Araucaria. For many years I thought Araucaria was a cryptic crossword setter for The Guardian, until I discovered that it was a botanical genus which includes the 'Monkey Puzzle' tree. Here we see the Araucaria known locally as the Norfolk Island pine on the left and right, and the Araucaria Columnaris from New Caledonia in the middle.


Here is another Araucaria, known as the Bunya Pine:


Norfolk Island is out there in the Pacific, somewhere north of New Zealand, east of Australia and south of New Caledonia. The trees are bizarre. Here's a young one from my walk around La Perouse a couple of weeks ago.