[DIEGO]

when Tending started it kind of felt like stepping into a blank canvas, all it was in the courtyard was a frangipani, 3 tall palm trees and a lot of lawn.

Since spending time there me, Lucas, Betty, Cecilia, Heather, and all the rest of the people involved, increased exponentially the number of species on site.
Yet, as we engaged with Tending we also found out that there was much more there to begin with.

So this post is for the palm trees, tall, old, proud, 3:
The Left, the Right and Back Right.

Recently Left got decapitated.
For some unknown reason it kind-of dropped its living core to the ground. Yes, I am implying that the tree itself, in a desperate attempt at coping with the heat-wave of the past month, cut its own head off!

So there it stand, a bare post, amusing and extreme.
Left is also the tree that sported a scarf, I took a video of it a while back.

While Right, never had a head, it has been a bare post since we stepped in the courtyard, is it dead? is it alive?
Right is the mysterious one.

And then there is Back Right, which is pretty much the only one that I could (with some sort of confidence) name.
It’s alive, is happy, seen worse times, and is native, might even be endemic, as this area might just have been the right environment for it to grow.
It’s a Livistona australis, a Cabbage-tree Palm.
This plant use to be quite popular in early 19th century, as food (you eat the heart of the palm, killing the young tree in the process), and as the fiber source for the Cabbage Tree Hats, a straw-kind hat which became popular at the turn of the century..
So there you have it, the Left, the Right and the Cabbage Tree Hat one..