#tahina palm

[helluvatimes]

Blessed Is This Palm

The Tahina Palm or Blessed Palm raising eyebrows in the botanic gardens. Photo credit: Jonathan Chua.

#photographers on tumblr #blessed palm photos #canon eos-m5 #canon photography #flora fauna #flora photography #tahina palm #Tahina spectabilis #tamron 18-270mm #tree pics

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Thursday 21 September 2017

Thank you to the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, UK, for an amazing tour last weekend. The botanist and specialist in Madagascar flora, Ian Derbyshire, kindly explained how the approximately 7 million pressed, dried and preserved specimens, collected from all around the world, are cared for and their value to science. The specimen in this box is Tahina spectabilis (dimaka, ‘self-destructive’ palm) a monocarpic (dies after flowering and setting seed) palm that remained undetected by science until 2007 even though it is large enough to be visible in satellite imagery. The hope is now to conserve this species through the distribution of seed and cultivation in botanic gardens.

Jill Raggett

#tahina #dimaka #self-destructivepalm #palm #monocarpic #monocarpicperennial #herbarium #kewgardens #Botanic Garden #botanicgarden #kew #conservation #wucplant #writtledesign #mhort #Madagascar

[innosex]

“The palm is particularly unique due its dramatic, ‘hapaxanthic’ flowering sequence; this means the species only flowers once in its lifetime, between the ages of 30 and 50, when it produces a large additional stem that branches into clusters of flowers. This habit has earned the species its other common name of the ‘suicide palm’. Flowering occurs in September during Madagascar’s dry season.”

https://globaltrees.org/threatened-trees/trees/tahina-palm/

https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-gardens/palm-house 

[fafotw]

Part 1 of “The Worlds Rarest Plants”

I am going to be starting a five part series about the top five rarest plants on the planet, according to letitgrow.org. I will be starting off and going from the fifth rarest to the most rare plant there is in the entire world so, without further ado, I give you part one of the series “The Worlds Rarest Plants”.

Tahina spectabilis, also known as the “suicide palm” only has about 100 mature plants to be believed to exist, it is also critically endangered due to this fact. It resides in, and is native to, the northwestern region of Madagascar. In fact, it is the largest palm out of all Madagascar’ 170 different species, having a trunk that can be up to 18 m (or 59 ft) tall and 5 m (or 16 ft) in diameter! So now that you have the basic information, it is time to go onto how and why it has such gained such a morbid name.

This plant is called the suicide palm due to the fact that once it matures and produces it’s fruit and flowers, it immediately dies. It can take this tree up to 50 years to mature! When it does mature, the tip, top of the palm grows branches with hundreds and hundreds of flowers, which is also known as an inflorescence. This is the reason that this plant dies immediately after it blooms, the large surge of the nutrients needed takes a massive strain on the palm, and the drain of nutrients so quickly, immediately kills the palm.

The tahina palm, nick named “suicide palm”, was found by a French cashew plantation manager (his job is very specific and odd so I decided to include it) Xavier Metz and his family, who were strolling through a remote northwestern region of Madagascar in 2007 (why they were there or what they were doing there, I had no idea) which is fairly recent I’m the grand scheme of things, when they came across a mature and flower Tahina Palm and sent photos to the Kew Gardens for identification. Its name is derived from "Tahina", a Malagasy word meaning "to be protected" or "blessed", which is very fitting now due to the fact that this plant is critically endangered, being the given name of Anne-Tahina Metz, the daughter of its discoverer, while "spectabilis" means spectacular in Latin. This plant is truly spectacular, it is so beautiful!

[ajarimages-online]

Blessed Palm leaf. The Blessed Palm or Tahina Palm was only discovered in Madagascar in 2007. Tahina means blessed and spectabilis means spectacular, which it certainly is, with leaves about five metres or yards across! This photo of part of a back lit leaf was taken in the Cairns Botanic gardens in late afternoon sun, with shadows from another leaf..photo of green plant

Blessed Palm leaf. The Blessed Palm or Tahina Palm was only discovered in Madagascar in 2007. Tahina means blessed and spectabilis means spectacular, which it certainly is, with leaves about five metres or yards across! This photo of part of a back lit leaf was taken in the Cairns Botanic gardens in late afternoon sun, with shadows from another leaf..photo of green plant