There are countless palm trees and banana plants growing in and around Bad Radkersburg, Austria, both on public and private ground. Many of these derive from the plants grown by Johann Cziglar, who has been experimenting with the cultivation of palms and banana plants since the 1970s and is well-known in the area.

The three charred palm trunks in this piece come from Cziglar's garden, and were originally three tall washingtonia palm trees that failed to survive a hard winter due to their size, which made it impossible to protect them from frost. Their charred root stocks were converted into three sculptures reminiscent of bird heads for the exhibition "Palmen und Stauden" (Palms and Plants). The glowing eyes on the trunks call to mind the visual phenomenon of perspective shift as encountered in reversible figures, which are images that can trigger a spontaneous shift in perception. Famous examples of reversible figures depicting faces first appeared in humorous publications during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and nowadays they are regularly featured in psychology textbooks and popular-science accounts of spectacular phenomena of perception. The backdrop to the bird heads was a glass plate painted with the outline of a tropical forest – though when viewed close-up, the foliage transformed into the silhouettes of a number of comic book-style characters engaging in lively discussion.