A Start

I have decided to attempt to chronicle my new found hobby of tropical botany.  I am attempting to acquire, grow, and hopefully cause to flourish, an assortment of plants that tend to not fare well in the pass area.  The extreme range of temperature experienced by this area greatly narrows the species of plant life one can sustain here.  This temperature climate, along with strong wind gusts, cause the garden collector or enthusiast to scrounge on for the hardiest of species found in tropical or subtropical areas.

My main area of focus will Palms and Cycads, but I do maintain plants of other orders and will occasionally post on their progress as well.  As I assume everyone knows of Palms, I need not go into too much detail describing their appearance, mechanisms of reproduction, or growth.  Cycads however, are rarely understood or known of by your average person.  Many people confuse the most common Cycad, Cycas revoluta, with palms because of its common name, The Sago Palm.

As Phil Bergman of Jungle Music Nursery states,

"Cycads are a family of plants that predate the Jurassic era. One can find primitive fossils of Cycad species still extant today. In other words, many cycads have changed very little over the last 200 millions years or more. They were here when the dinosaurs were; but unlike the dinosaurs, many cycad species persisted nearly unchanged and are observed around the world growing in the same fashion that they grew in millions of years ago. In the Jurassic period there were many more species of cycads than there are today. Cycads were a dominant plant type found during that era. Because they have continued to survive, cycads are referred to as living fossils. No doubt, there  has been evolution to accommodate this family of plants to many diverse habitats, from tropical rainforests to dry grasslands and desert climates."
I think I shall start with Cycas Revoluta, commonly know as the Sago Palm.

*for more information on cycads, I suggest you check out Dr. Bergman's website at junglemusic.net