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Nature: Voluptuous in Flower & Fruit!
By Jim Henrich, Curator and Scot Medbury, Former Director
In May the Conservatory of Flowers acquired a seed of the rare coco-de-mer, a Seychellese palm which produces the world's largest and arguably most salacious fruit. The fascinating natural and cultural history of this extraordinary plant will add richness to the Conservatory experience for decades to come.
The coco-de-mer grows naturally only in deep valleys on Praslin and Curieuse in the Seychelle Islands, which are located north of Madagascar and east of Africa along the equator in the Indian Ocean. Before the discovery of the Seychelles in 1743, seeds of this palm would occasionally wash up on the shores of India and elsewhere, but no one knew where the plant that produced them grew. The legend developed that the seeds came from a giant underwater palm which was dubbed the coco-de-mer, coconut of the sea. Later the palm was guessed to be native to the Maldive Islands, off the western coast of India, hence its scientific name, Lodoicea maldivica. Though not closely related to the more familiar coconut, another common name for the coc-de-mer is the double coconut because of its twin lobes.
This fan palm is slow growing from the very beginning. Fruits take five to seven years to mature and contain two, sometimes three, seeds. A fruit can weigh up to 100 pounds! Seeds can take up to one year to germinate, a process that requires total darkness and temperatures between 80o and 90o F. It is another year before the first leaf appears. A cotyledon stalk is formed first. This is an odd, root-like structure that penetrates the soil and may "wander" several feet before the tip differentiates into a root and a shoot. One leaf is typically produced every year thereafter, each ultimately growing as much as 40 feet long and 18 feet wide. Trees begin flowering at 20 to 30 years of age and may ultimately attain a height of 80 to 100 feet. Another oddity of this unusual palm is the formation of a dense, woody socket at the base, upon which the trunk sits and through which the roots penetrate into the surrounding soil. This adaptation purportedly allows the tree to rock in the strong winds that are typical in the Seychelles.
Because of its suggestive shape, the seed was long thought to possess aphrodisiacal properties, and served as a sort of medieval Viagra. Food or drink drank from vessels fashioned from a coco-de-mer seed were also thought to be cleansed of any poison, adding to their desirability, as poisoning was a principal source of worry for people in positions of power in medieval times.
The Conservatory's seed was collected under permit by Forestry Department officials of the Government of Seychelles. It has been packed into moist peat and placed in a dark place in one of the support greenhouses. After it germinates it will be planted directly in the soil in the Lowland Tropics exhibit under the Conservatory's central dome. Stay tuned for updates on the progress of this amazing plant.
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