After inspection of a few seedling Cycas at a Collinsville property, I decided to look further afield for the Cycas in the nearby Normanby Range. There having been a revision of Cycas by Ken Hill, the Sydney botanist, no clear picture emerged of this particular Normanby Range plant, except to grade it as one of the many crosses of Cycas media.

When our early taxonomists were doing work on Queensland Cycas, C. media was lumped into one variable species from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Queensland/New South Wales border. John Maconochie, of the Northern Territory, did do very extensive study on the N.T. species, but his untimely death left a gap in their study.

There has been no great rush to continue his work, as the thought about these plants is always eradication, not conservation. We, in Australia, are very lucky that at last Ken Hill has taken up the cudgel and botanically described many, enlarging the field left behind by Maconochie.

My main chore on this particular day was to open and shut many gates and I almost lost count of them. The Range road is good, but winds constantly, going ever upwards.

My companion was the then Curator of Bowen District Parks, late of Cairns, Vince Winkel. Vince has a good all round knowledge of the genus Cycas and knew the one in the Normanby Range. We drove for a good two hours until, according to Vince, we were approximately level with Proserpine and not very far from the old goldmining town of Normanby.

Finally, we sighted a few Cycas specimens on the hill slopes to our right. The largest were possibly 2 metres high and growing in small clumps. I photographed these, noticing that the base of all emerging petioles was yellow, unlike C. media.

Just around the corner we were amongst quite a large colony on each side of the road. Many sported clusters of green ovules, larger by far than any seen in C. media. The arching fronds varied from grey-green to a metallic blue hue.

These had so many visible differences to the low coastal growing C. media. Being so high in the Range, I reckon it deserves the Range name, which was once given - Cycas normanbyana. Since that August day, Vince Winkel has ventured further up the road and he tells me there are many plants reaching 6 metres in height.

It is now obvious that the planted stand of Cycas at a coastal resort north of Proserpine is an intergraded cross with C. media.

These Normanby Range plants so differ from C. media that they warrant the name C. normanbyana.

(Len Butt passed away on 8th April 1997, after a lifetime of growing, photographing, writing about, lecturing and just loving Australian native plants.)