Pulling the old leaf-bases away from our silver palm tree this morning here in Thailand gave me a good chance to look more closely at them. The tree itself is impressive with its enormous fan-shaped leaves of silvery-green but these dead sheaths were full of much less obvious textures and patterns. Up close they were well worth exploring for a few minutes. The rich browns of decay were blended into the lighter shades of drying with leathery wrinkles and cracks, flakes and fibres. It was a fascinating combination of the organised structure in the plant and the chaos of its slow disintegration.
This palm is native to Madagascar but is grown throughout the tropics as an ornamental. As typically happens with palms, the older leaves droop downwards against the trunk to eventually fall off and I have started wondering how easy this will be to manage when it has doubled in height to ten metres or more. It's only six years old and I already have to be careful with it being a bit too close to our overhead electricity wires. It was planted before the house was built and I had no idea just how big it can get!
I love having the natural, organic patterns of things like these dead leaf bases around. Abstract beauty on a different scale and not in the obvious structures like flowers.
I used a Canon 5DMkII with 50mm macro lens for most of these photographs but my iphone11 was used for a few.
