A large nut!

Every day I take my camera out and use it. "My camera" could be the Olympus 500E with either of the two lenses that came with the camera or it could be my son's Nikon D70S that he no longer takes away with him when he leaves home for his long distance touring. This time it was the Olympus I was playing with and marched down into the back yard to see what I could find that was interesting.

Living on and acre of land with a waterway at the bottom does give me plenty of subjects for photography. Today was no different.

Lying on the lawn that Colin had only just finished mowing was a most "ginormous" football sized pine cone.

There were two of them, I wanted Samson, my Curly Coated retriever to pose beside one of them to give an indication of the size of it but he would not sit still long enough for me to focus! So you will have to believe me when I tell you that each one is the size of a rugby ball and more than twice as heavy.

When my youngest son was travelling to Brisbane to do his apprenticeship he would park his car in the shade under the trees and catch a train from the Gold Coast to Brisbane. One day he returned to find his windscreen smashed and the bonnet of his beautiful blue commodore, his pride and joy, dinted in a couple of places. To begin with he thought it was children who had been throwing missiles at the cars but looking around he found - you got it!!! - he found a pine cone from the Bunya pine not far from his car. That would account for the green smear on the bonnet! Up to that moment he had not realised that he had been parking his car under a Bunya pine - to him it was just a shady tree among a row of shady trees!

The tree in the back yard is now quite huge - it is over 30 years old and is still growing. The trunk has split quite some way up and the tree has two main trunks now which is why it looks as if there are more than one tree in this picture. The leaves are incredibly hard and every leave has a sharp point so they are not the sort of leaves you would pick to use in floral arrangements!

AJ