Tourist rainforest

Just up the road from me is Sea Acres Rainforest Centre, which has a boardwalk through it, and is a big tourist attraction, with a semi-outdoor café and a rather good souvenir shop.

To my shame I haven’t been in there for years, except for the café.

Yet despite the tourists, and the briskly walking lappers, the walk is a coastal rainforest delight.

The Reserve has masses of Australia’s most common palm, the Cabbage Tree Palm (Livistonia australis), which survives all but the worst fires. Growing up to 30m, they are mostly tall here, but these young ones show the fanned spiny leaves. Those leaves were woven into the once-popular Cabbage Tree hats, and the palm hearts were eaten; the cream flowers are said to resemble cabbages. 

The other palm here is the Bangalow Palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana), tall and slender, growing to about 20m. You’d notice them more when the bright red bunches of fruits are hanging up there; birds love these.

Amongst the palms, there were some species new to me, like the Giant Water Gums (Szygium francisii), their distinctive trunks usually buttressed.

As you saw in the first photo, there are plenty of trees being enveloped by Strangling Figs, at all stages. The Reserve has four species of figs that can be stranglers; they are hemi-epiphytes, and although they do eventually kill, ‘strangle’, the host tree as they use it to climb to the light, they are not parasites. This one seemed to be clasping the host to help it get higher, not strangling it.

On the same host tree is a Bird’s Nest Fern (Asplenium australasicum), an epiphyte, which is just the botanical name for a plant that grows on another plant.

Epiphytes too are these Elkhorns (Platycerium bifurcatum), with Ribbon Ferns (Ophioglossum pendulum) growing from it, hanging below.

This unusual ‘collar’ held several baby epiphytes. Cute, eh?

No rainforest post would be complete without some vines, from mammoth and muscular (and a bit scary) to dainty and looping.

While there is more than one post’s worth to show and tell in Sea Acres, I was entranced by this perfectly posed vine, just starting to make its way up.

So entranced that I bought an annual pass to be able to wander through at leisure, in different seasons.