Tahina Palm (Tahina spectabilis)
Carossier Palm (Attalea crassispatha)
I love palms. Partly because there is something so romantic about a tropical beach where coconut palms cast their thin shade over fine white sand—it reminds me of a long-ago holiday when I first went to Kenya. But more importantly because, on the very first night I spent in Gombe, I pulled my little cot out of my tent and slept under the rustling fronds of the oil nut palm that grew in the center of the camp clearing. These palms grow plentifully in Gombe, and because different trees fruit at different times, the nuts are a staple in the diet of the chimpanzees who may sit on the lower fronds, poking the fruits from their prickly casings for hours at a time. They also eat pith from the fronds. And in West Africa they crack open the seeds with rocks to get at the kernels, one of the many cultural variations among populations. Elephants like the fruits of the doum palm (Hyphaene thebaica)—I have actually seen them drunk when the fruits have fermented.
I am smiling as I sit here writing this because it has triggered a funny little memory of my late husband, Derek. Every time I, or anyone else, talked about a palm tree—as one does—he would become frightfully pedantic and explain that they are not trees, per say, but are related to grasses. And thinking of a forty-foot palm as a “grass” is—well, amusing!
Tahina Palm
Coconut palms, oil nut palms, and doum palms are not at all endangered, but other species have come close to extinction. I saw several of these, such as the bottle palm and the hurricane palm, when I visited Kew. The first thing John Sitch wanted to tell me about when he led me into Kew’s palm house was a newly discovered species from Madagascar. He picked up one of the row of pots that sprouted young specimens, holding it almost reverently. He is not a demonstrative man, but the excitement was clear in his voice as he explained that this was a completely new species of fan palm, the largest ever found in Madagascar—the adult leaves have a fifteen-foot diameter. Apparently, the full-grown palm is so massive that it can actually be seen on Google Earth! I can just imagine the amazement of Xavier Metz, the French manager of a cashew plantation, when, as he and his family were exploring a remote area in the northwest of the country, they came upon this huge palm. He had never seen anything like it, and was sure it was a new species, so he took photos.
It was even more exciting than anyone had thought—not only an undescribed species, but actually the single species of a new genus. And this genus was from an evolutionary line that was not known to exist in Madagascar. It was named Tahina spectabilis—tahina is Malagasy for “to be protected or blessed” (the given name of Anne-Tahina, daughter of the discoverer), and spectabilis is Latin for “spectacular.” An intensive survey showed that there was just one population of ninety-two individuals tucked away at the foot of a limestone outcrop.
This palm has the most extraordinary life cycle. When it is about fifty years old and has reached a height of sixty feet, “the stem tip starts to grow, and changes into a giant terminal inflorescence sprouting branches of hundreds of tiny flowers,” John told me. These flowers ooze nectar and are soon surrounded by birds and insects. It is a spectacular flowering, “and each flower, once pollinated, can become a fruit,” said John. Once the fruits have ripened, the palm is utterly exhausted. The flowering and the fruiting are its swan song, and it collapses and dies.
About a thousand seeds from this palm were carefully collected and have been sent to the Millennium Seed Bank. Seeds have also been distributed to eleven botanical gardens around the world, so that the palm can be conserved in living collections—one of the goals of the seed bank. Because the tahina is limited to just the one area on the island, and because flowering and fruiting are such rare occurrences, conservation at the site will not be easy. However, the villagers have become involved. A village committee has been set up to patrol and protect the area. And some of the seeds have been sent to a specialist palm seed merchant in Germany so that he can raise and sell palms to create funds for village development as well as conservation.
I told John that I look forward to seeing the tahina in Kew’s Palm House, a spectacular public exhibit of species from around the world. But alas, I shall not be alive when the first Kew plant is fifty years old and has its first burst of flowering!
Carossier Palm
I love the look of the carossier palm because it is so similar in appearance to the African oil nut palm. But I have chosen to discuss it because I want TO HIGHLIGHT (ed to mention, in this book,) the terrible plight of Haiti—the poorest country of the Americas, repeatedly devastated by hurricanes, controlled for years by the presence of the US military, and now in the grip of HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis—and hunger. It is an example of how poverty together with political unrest and revolution can destroy the natural environment of a country.
Attalea crassispatha (credit: A Henderson).
The carossier palm is found only on the southwestern peninsula of Haiti on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. It was my friend Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Gardens who suggested I include this palm, saying it was of “outstanding botanical interest.” It was first described by the French priest and naturalist Charles Plumier more than three hundred years ago in 1689. And in the wonderful tradition of those early explorers of the natural world, he contributed detailed illustrations. It has a unique flower structure and also an unusual distribution—all other species of Attalea are confined to Central and South America.
Its nut is a rich source of fat and is highly prized as a food and for cooking oil. The trunk is durable and insect-resistant and is used occasionally in construction. The longevity and architecture of the species means that any solitary palm often becomes a favorite landmark and boundary marker for farmers.
In the late 1990s, botanists learned that this palm was highly endangered due to the conversion of its habitat to agriculture. Mike Balick, who is vice president for botanical science at the New York Botanical Garden, went on one of the expeditions to Haiti, led by Dr. Andrew Henderson. Working with Haitian foresters, they first conducted an intensive survey in the area—and found only twenty-six individual carossier palms, and of those “less than a handful mature enough to bear fruit.” And even as they worked, its habitat was in the process of being cleared; much had been converted to other uses. The practices of slash and burn and free grazing had in many places prevented natural regeneration.
The expedition identified three habitats where this palm grew: fields, shrub forests, and courtyard gardens. Fields consist of mixed annual crops that are converted to pasture after several years, so the palms there had little chance of survival. In shrub forests, again there was little hope for the palms due to heavy local demand for the land, and the likelihood that the forest would be harvested for charcoal and then converted to fields. Much as they would have liked to, it was impossible, wrote Mike, “for a group of palm specialists to demarcate a preserve and off limits area. The local people, desperately poor, needed to grow more food to feed their families.” Thus it seemed that courtyard gardens provided the best chance of survival for this unique palm—and even there, overharvesting of the nuts could be a problem. There is one final threat to the palms from the periodic severe storms that affect the area. Young carossier palms seem to find it hard to cope with flooding, and in 1998 a mature palm was blown down during Hurricane George. The outlook for these palms was bleak.
There Is Always Hope
Yet when he returned from the expedition, Mike wrote that this “stately, rare and endemic” palm, of great botanical interest, would be “brought back from certain extinction.” Conservation efforts that began in the 1980s concentrated on planting palms and collecting seeds from adult trees to provide a source of seedlings. A small grove of twenty-five palms was planted at the Fairchild Tropical Garden, and in 1998 one of these trees fruited for the first time—probably the only time this has happened outside Haiti. That same year, twenty-one more palms were planted at various locations throughout Haiti. Meanwhile, three of the palms that had been planted in Haiti in the 1980s produced some six and a half pounds of nuts in 1998, and these were all set aside for propagation. The seedlings were planted on secure public and private property in Haiti.
A team of US botanists returned to Haiti in 1999 and found six fruiting trees; from these, more than five hundred viable seeds were carefully collected. These precious seeds were distributed to two nurseries in Haiti and to various botanical gardens around the world.
Thanks to all these efforts, the carossier palm, while it may indeed become extinct in the wild, will not disappear from Planet Earth. It is a dream and a hope that one day the Haitian landscape can be healed and the magnificent palm returned to its homeland.
