The Royal Palm

If you were looking forward to a blog today about shamrocks, sorry to disappoint you! If I do plants associated with important dates all in the first year of my blog, I'll have nothing left to blog about in future years! So you'll have to be satisfied with a different green object for today :)

Species name: Roystonea sp.

Common name: Royal palm

Location: Dominican Republic

The royal palm is one of the most instantly recognizable, and arguably one of the most beautiful, palms around the world. It is native to Central and South America, as well has having a "hyper-diversity" of species in the Caribbean Islands. In countries where it is native, there is usually only one species native to each country with the exception of Jamaica which has two native species of Roystonea, and Cuba which has five native species. The tree is recognized by its green leaf sheathes which encircle the tree at the top and its concrete-like stem (much more pronounced as the tree matures and loses the leaf sheath scars). As the leaves mature, they are easily sheared off by the wind. They are also easily cut off from the tree and used as roofing material for thatched roof houses or huts. There are approximately 20 species in the genus, and other than extreme examples like R. violacea with its purple stem, they are almost impossible to distinguish unless you pay close attention to flower morphology.

The royal palm has many uses throughout the Caribbean and Central/South America, not the least of which is as a coffee substitute. The seeds to not contain the caffeine that is naturally present in coffee beans, but it does have a very similar flavour when roasted. It makes me wonder why it is not used more often as decaf coffee! The men that pick the ripened fruit of the royal palm have special training starting from when they are very young (and much more fearless than the average adult male) to teach them how to properly climb the trees. By the time they are in early adulthood, they are able to climb a 20 meter tall royal palm very quickly with bare feet and only a rope for assistance. A machete is used to cut the stalk that all of the fruit is attached to (very similar to a bunch of grapes), and the fruit bundle is carefully lowered to the ground with the assistance of a second rope. The wood-like material of the stem of the royal palm is used as a building material, and the "heart" of the palm (when the plant has only started producing its first few leaves, the plant is cut at the soil surface and carefully peeled apart to reveal the young, tender area responsible for the upward growth and the production of new leaves. This is called the palm "heart") is used as a source of food. The hearts of palm we buy in North America in cans in the grocery store is highly unlikely to be from the royal palm; it is more likely to be from the coconut palm or the jucara (also called the palmito, Euterpe edulis). The tree also serves a huge cultural significance in Cuba; it is their national tree. It is said that for every citizen of Cuba there are at least three royal palm trees!

The royal palm is also very important as an ornamental species in the Caribbean, and not just because of its beauty. The tree also has a hidden secret that you wouldn't know until it was pointed out to you: it is a natural lightning rod. The new leaves are produced from the middle of the bundle of leaves and sticks straight up towards the sky until it starts unfurling. This single palm frond can make the tree significantly taller than a lot of hotel buildings, and almost twice the height of the average beach hut. When you walk around hotel grounds in tropical countries, look for trees that are very tall but have no leaves on top. Those have almost certainly been struck by lightning and lost all of its leaves, but leaving the very tough stem still standing.

False Birds of Paradise

Species name: Heliconia latispatha

Common name: expanded lobster claw, false bird of paradise

Location: Dominican Republic

The false bird of paradise is not native to southwestern Ontario, but it is native to where I photographed it; it is native to Central and South America, extending from northern Argentina up to the southern tip of Mexico. It is still quite common in some areas, but since it prefers moist, temperate forests in which to grow since intense heat can damage the flowers and the leaves. These forests, the same ones in which coffee thrives (which you can read all about HERE), are at serious risk of deforestation due to their rich soil that is ideal for use in agriculture, and also due to climate change. As the earth warms, these forests are turning into dry temperate forests since rainfall in these areas is decreasing. The false bird of paradise has been transported to many other areas of the world where it thrives in the wild and in cultivation, the most popular of the two being the South Pacific islands (Fiji, Cook Islands, Vanuatu, etc.) and Hawaii. There is actually no above-ground stem that exists in this plant. What looks like a stem is called a pseudostem; it is merely a bundle of petioles all packed in together. The true stem of the plant is a rhizome which can be found underground.

These plants are actually quite closely related to the traveller's palm (which you can read all about HERE), and there's one way that you can tell: the colour of the seeds. If these flowers were producing fruit and seeds, you would see that the seeds were bright blue (but don't have the same surface hairs like the traveller's palm seeds do). These seeds were sometimes used to create a type of "war face paint" when crushed. The colour doesn't last long, so it has limited use as a natural plant dye. It could just be that it requires a very specific type of mordant (a substance that adheres a dye to a fabric) that hasn't been tried yet.

I read on a website about the plants of Hawaii that this plant is similar to day lilies in North America; the variation in flower colour due to hybridization and selective breeding is enormous (within the species, let alone in the entire genus of Heliconia; there are about 60 species in the genus and all of their flowers are wildly different). There are some gardens in Central and South America and in Hawaii that only have Heliconia flowers planted; you would never guess that they were all closely related unless someone told you! These flowers aren't just grown ornamentally outdoors; there is also a huge market for greenhouse-grown disease-free flowers since they are so remarkable looking and are popular in flower arrangements. The flowers themselves are extremely long-lived, and can last up to a month in a flower bouquet!

For all you caffeine addicts...

Species name: Coffea arabica

Common name: coffee

Location: UWO Greenhouse

I was contemplating skipping this plant and blogging about it later when I finally found my pictures of wild coffee plants growing in Cuba, Dominican and Jamaica, but then decided that no, I'll just make it two blogs! Ah, the joy of being my own boss...

Despite coffee being grown in multiple locations around the world (with Colombian coffee gaining the most press recently as being the most prolific source of the world's coffee), it is actually incredibly rare in its native habitat in Ethiopia. There are some protected natural populations, and some equally protected populations in neighbouring South Sudan (no one is quite sure if that is a native population or a population that was introduced there very early on in the domestication process). There is also one very old population in Kenya, but it is believed to have started there as a result of trade with Ethiopia hundreds of years ago and not an independently domesticated population. Due to climate change, the "growable range" of coffee is shrinking. It requires cool, humid climates usually on mountain sides. There have been many attempts to grow coffee in North America in the great outdoors, but every single one of these ventures has failed. Coffee is very sensitive to rainfall, and if it is in an area with too much or too little rainfall it will not survive. To say it's a finicky plant would be an understatement! It is possible that with further climate change the Rocky Mountains or the Alps might one day be hospitable for coffee growth, but by then we will have significantly more problems than just not having coffee!

Believe it or not, the British used to be avid coffee drinkers, not tea drinkers. So what happened? Well, one of the areas of the world during the British Empire that was the most productive for coffee was Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon. Unfortunately, there's a fungal pathogen of coffee called the coffee rust that was spread from Ethiopia into Yemen and then to Sri Lanka that completely destroyed their coffee crop since it had no resistance (native populations do have some resistance to this pathogen; we have also now developed fungicides and genetically modified crops that show much higher resistance). The British noticed that the Chinese and Japanese made a beverage very similar to their coffee drink, and decided to "borrow" some of their crop to replant Sri Lanka. The British had discovered tea, and have been tea drinkers ever since (and tea is still the leading export of Sri Lanka, even 400 years later!). Tea and coffee, the main sources of the drug caffeine, are the most consumed beverage around the world. One could argue that caffeine is also the most abused drug in the world!