Spiky things

These are spiky things that once had seeds inside them, but they had all been exiled. They were on a plant called the Australian grass tree. A lot of it looked like grass but it was HUGE and had a very tall flower spike coming out from the middle of lots of grass.

I was on a course about plants at Eden today. Fascinating stuff. There were lots of these plants in the dome but because of so many other plants in there I had been walking past them for weeks without ‘seeing’ them. We weren’t allowed to take any of the seeds because it’s not a native plant so can’t be allowed to be ‘let loose’ in this country . (Look what happened with rhododendrons!)

I would like to have made a photo collage showing more bits of this plant but I don’t know how to do that on my phone!

Edit: Thanks to suggestions I have now managed a photo collage. The ‘trunk’ of the plant looked like elephant skin!