Grass trees...

This is Xanthorea, sometimes known as the Grass tree: as kids we used to call them yaccas. They are very common in parts of Australia, for instance Kangaroo Island where I grew up, on Eyre pensinsula, the Grampians where this was taken. This is the western edge of the national park, in a degraded paddock. These plants grow very slowly, less than half an inch a year, so these maybe a hundred years old. They have been used to provide fodder for animals, and resin for the furniture trade. My father, in common with many bush bred men, spent some time in his early years collecting the gum, yacca gum, which was used as the foundations of shellac type varnishes.

The flowering spike grows quickly, and to 1-2m in length. It is a course fur with parrot beak like seed capsules. Fire was, in common with much of the Australian bush, a trigger for flowering.
Flowers are white star like, with some scent, but not particularly useful as nectar sources. The flowers are attractive, but ephemeral, lasting only a week or so. This spike is in the early stages of flowering, when the spike is in full flower it is a mass of these small flowers, and very noticeable in the bush.
The trunk has a concentric form, with a sponey mass inner, a hard shell and layers of closely interlocking elongated plates that are gummed together with a dark red resin, the yacca gum.
This photograph shows the trunk in cross section. The root ball consisted of a mass of protruding fibrous roots that held the trunk firmly in the ground.

The plates were trimmed off with a sharp axe to a few cms outside the hard shell, collected, and threshed in machines, usually home made, rather like a wheat threshing machines, and the gum collected. Being farm boys, the men who did this dirty task were adept at improvising, and most would have worked on large threshers in their youths, so building one out of timber and old iron would not have been beyond them.