Cycad Traditional Cache

Cardboard Palm is not a palm, but a Cycad, Zamia furfuraceae. I'm not absolutely sure this is the species, but I know it's a big Cycad. The smaller cycads around it are Coonties, Zamia pumila. Please BYOP and be careful with the plants.

Cycad

Cycads are seed plants with a long fossil history that were formerly more abundant and more diverse than they are today. They typically have a stout and woody trunk with a crown of large, hard and stiff, evergreen leaves. They usually have pinnate leaves. The individual plants are either all male or all female (dioecious). Cycads vary in size from having trunks only a few centimeters to several meters tall. They typically grow very slowly and live very long, with some specimens known to be as much as 1,000 years old. Because of their superficial resemblance, they are sometimes mistaken for palms or ferns, but are only distantly related to either.

The living cycads are found across much of the subtropical and tropical parts of the world. 

The three extant families of cycads are Cycadaceae, Stangeriaceae and Zamiaceae. Cycads have changed little since the Jurassic, compared to some major evolutionary changes in other plant divisions.

Cycads are gymnosperms (naked seeded), meaning their unfertilized seeds are open to the air to be directly fertilized by pollination, as contrasted with angioasperms, which have enclosed seeds with more complex fertilization arrangements. Cycads have very specialized pollinators, usually a specific species of beetle. They have been reported to fix nitrogen in association with various cyanobacteria living in the roots (the "coralloid" roots). These photosynthetic bacteria produce a neurotoxin called BMAA that is found in the seeds of cycads. This neurotoxin may enter a human food chain as the cycad seeds may be eaten directly as a source of flour by humans or by wild or feral animals such as bats, and humans may eat these animals. It is hypothesized that this is a source of some neurological diseases in humans.

Amazing cycads are often called "living fossils" since they have lived unchanged on earth - so the story goes - for over 200 million years, at a time when dinosaurs trampled or grazed on them.

Cycad. The  big  GZ cycad is probably a “Cardboard Palm”, Zamia furfuracea. The smaller ones are Coonties, Zamia Pumila

This cache started out for the fabulous Strangler Fig nearby, but had to be moved. The fig is invasive and will have to be cut down. Until then I hope you'll be impressed by it as I was.

The cache is a tied in, camoed, big "micro" pill bottle, that you have to push hard to open and close. It holds a rolled log with a rubber band around it, to make it easier to retrieve from the bottle. It's in a tiny zip lock bag that needs to be sealed properly before you put it back in the tied in cache. Don't forget: BYOP