Candy Forests
A speculative biome
Candy Forests are an unique type of subtropical environment found over most of Mediterranean and Iberian Europe, Central and Western Australia, Western Madagascar and most of northern Mesoamerica, with "False Candy Forests" in South America, South Africa, New Zealand's South Island, Indonesia and Eastern Australia. They are dominated by Bennettitales, those strange plants that took the hard scales and fronds of cycads and mixed them with the flowers of angiosperms... and whose relations to either are still unclear.*
Bennettitales are hard to consume, their leaves hard to digest and their trunks well armoured. However, they still rely on animals to spread their pollen and seeds, so to these ends they have created a very edible part of their anatomy: their flowers. Large, multicoloured, often soft-petaled, they cover most of the plants, some species almost entirely fluffly thanks to them aside from their palm-like fronds. This attracts a large variety of insects, from butterflies to kalligrammatids, but also all manner of tetrapods feeding on both the nectar, the petals and the fruits. In fact, some species like stegosaurs and allokotosaurs feed on all of these: licking the nectar out of the larger flowers, eating the petals and then eating the fruits, occasionally also nibbling at the fronds and snatching the smaller animals drawn to the flowers.
Pleasantly smelling and rich in sugars, the flowers offer an alternative to the harder plant matter that otherwise makes up the Bennettitale, thus acting as yet another line of defense. To sustain this diabetes-inducing paradise a lot of water and resources are need, yet Bennettitales do just fine in semi-arid environments. Many Candy Forests are located on the vicinity of either cold ocean currents that bring large quantities of dew nightly or in seasonal Mediterranean and Monsoon habitats, which endure torrential rains, allowing brief lulls to "restock". Most have long roots that probe into underground reservoirs, and their sheer transpiration results in higher precipitation levels anyways (though naturally not the the same extent as in wet forests).
The unappetizing nature of their non-flower parts also means that other plants are more often targetted by herbivores that aren't feeding on the flowers, reducing the competition substantially. However, several succulents and thorny shrubs do supplement the Bennettitales-dominated landscape, as do the occasional grass mats. In some areas the Candy Forests can overlap with seasonal wetlands, and here the alsmot coral reef-like fronds gradually give way to tall reeds and aquatic plants.
Candy Forests came into predominance in the Oligocene as the global climate became drier, and are home to five genera of Bennettitales. "False Candy Forests" dominated by angiosperms and podocarps that decided to follow similar strategies also exist, some home to at least one species of Bennettitale.
*Genetic studies do seem to recover them as near the base of a clade composed of seed-ferns and angiosperms. They diverged from their closest relatives probably as far back as the Devonian.