Roger's pick - Cycads of the World

If we turned our botanical clock back millions of years, we would see completely different flora and fauna on the face of the earth.

Around 200 million years ago during the Triassic and Jurassic periods, before flowering plants existed, the earth was covered with giant tree ferns, pre-historic gingko trees, huge herbaceous horsetails and plants of many diverse species that looked like palms but were called cycads.

Cycads and their close plant relatives, mainly conifers, are called gymnosperms, which means “naked seeds” and are more closely related to pines, not to palms. Although one might hea...