This greenhouse is our first encounter with the seasonal cycle. We are very familiar with yearly climate conditions of our own area, but here we see that they are also to be found in other parts of the world, such as South Africa, Australia and California.

Here the vegetation changes with the seasons. Autumn forests become brightly coloured, ranging from yellow to brilliant red. In winter, temperatures fall and water is scarce. In some plants, leaves fall.

The man fern (Balantium antarcticum) looks like a palm or a tree, but as the name tells us, it’s a fern. In our area, ferns are grassy tufts, many appearing in the undergrowth during spring.

The man fern, however, can reach 15 metres in height! Like all ferns, it reproduces not by flower, but by spore. Its young leaves are rolled up like curls but as they grow, the leaf unrolls. The unique trait of this fern is that the leaves are borne as tufts at the top of the brown stalk and can even be over 2 metres.

Try looking for circular structures on the underside of these large leaves. If you find them, remember they’re called sori and contain the spores for reproduction.