Malta Cross plant attributes

I must send my thanks to Robert Caruana after his letter of July 20 about the Maltese Cross Flower.

His letter coincided with mine when I related my own experiences as a very young boy in the early 1950s being shown the fruit of the Maltese Cross plant by my dad.

Mr Caruana has absolutely correctly identified that plant as the Tribulus Terrestris and although, as he says, it is known by many names, the correct botanical name helped me get to the bottom of a mystery more than 55 years ago.

A quick search on www.google.com produced some pictures and I recognised the Maltese Cross-shaped fruit immediately even after all those years; and now I know what its flower looks like as well...

One can see from the shape of its fruit how easily it can be imagined, with a little bit of poetic licence from my practical joker father, to be a Maltese Cross plant grown from the blood of the heroic knights. My dad would have easily doctored a few parts of the fruit with a wee nip to make it look like a perfect eight pointed Maltese Cross and then he would have helped us "find" the perfect ones.

And, speaking of doctoring, I have found many references to the plant's attributes as a tonic, a testosterone builder and an aphrodisiac. If these claims are true and if the knights used it as such, no wonder those Turks didn't have a hope against those knights. Or if the Turks used it, it didn't do them any good.

I wonder if dad took those fruits home... I must ask him; he's still a bit of a prankster.

Now that I know what to look for and it is reportedly found in Northern Australia, I will get in touch with the local botanical society and see if and where I can see it when I go there next month.

I'd love to play the same trick on my own kids and grandkids - the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree!

But that is out of the question unless I find it in Victoria as it is illegal to carry any type of seeds across Australian state borders.

The pictures can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puncture_Vine