I fired my landscaper yesterday.
It was a long time coming, I have had problems with him for years. Without a landscaper in Key West, your home becomes a jungle or a desert (if the irrigation fails) and every year, I returned to a neglected landscape.
A relative who has worked in HR for years informs me that “people fire themselves.” This was certainly true.
My former landscaper’s final mistake was to “trim” (aka destroy) my Cardboard Palm. Prior to its massacre, it was approaching 7’ height with an 18’ diameter.
The Cardboard Palm was stunning, but that is not what bothered me. He trimmed a cycad!
Cycads are called “fossil plants” because they have changed little since prehistoric times. Indeed, fossils of these ancient plants date back 200-300 million years. Cycads coexisted with dinosaurs, and I imagined when I was looking at this cycad that I was peering into a dinosaur’s world. Cycads have survived cataclysmic events that took down dinosaurs and many other species. My particular cycad was probably 50 years old; but it was no match for an ill-trained landscaper.
Cycads are hard to miss. While they can be confused with palms and ferns, they have distinctive thick, leathery (and often sharp), deep green leaves. Unlike ferns or palms, they emerge from dark brown, feathery, missile-shaped cones. The females produce large, brightly colored seeds (usually orange-red). Cycads only grow in tropical and sub-tropical climates.
If you also wish to walk among the dinosaurs, the cycads: Sago Palms, ZZ plants, or Cardboard Palms can be grown indoors. But be careful, these plants are highly toxic.
But not so fast. In my research for this article, I discovered that maybe my cycad wasn’t so special after all.
Mosses predate cycads. And ferns coexisted with cycads.
Furthermore, it has recently been discovered that today’s cycad species are not the progeny of those ancient cycads. Using DNA, scientists uncovered that they are only about 12 million years old. Way before humans, but not exactly hanging with the dinosaurs.
In fact, an imaginary walk among the dinosaurs can simply include the common ferns or mosses in Maryland. Alas, it turns out, a lot more was murdered than my cycad; including my fantasy of walking with dinosaurs.
C’est la vie.
Angela Rieck, a Caroline County native, received her PhD in Mathematical Psychology from the University of Maryland and worked as a scientist at Bell Labs, and other high-tech companies in New Jersey before retiring as a corporate executive. Angela and her dogs divide their time between St Michaels and Key West Florida. Her daughter lives and works in New York City.
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