Berlin – The captain had certainly imagined things a little differently. The French adventurer François Pyrard wanted to sail to India in 1602. But because his “Corbin” gave up the ghost on the open sea, he had to rely on the Maldives save. The only problem was that the local king refused to let the castaways go for five years.
When Pyrard and the crew finally managed to escape, they carried the news of a strange fruit to Europe. Again and again it was washed up on the beaches of the islands. It wasn’t just that the things were gigantic. They were also suspiciously reminiscent of a woman’s pelvic region. The king insisted that such tempting finds all be delivered to him – and threatened dishonest subjects with having their hands chopped off or even death.
What Pyrard had seen was the fruit of the Seychelles palm. Its scientific name is Lodoicea maldivica. It is three to four times the size of a normal coconut. The seeds are also heavier than anything biologists know of comparable – up to 20 kilograms. The tree from which the nut comes is one of the rarest palm species on the planet. Such a nut, sometimes referred to as Coco de Mer, is now germinating in the Botanical Garden in Berlin. For the first time in 80 years, one of the rare trees could be growing in the capital.
A party was therefore held at the Great Tropical House on Thursday: The head of the garden, the Honorary Consul of the Seychelles, a lawyer who brought the valuable seeds to the capital, researchers, gardeners and journalists. Drinks and palm-shaped cookies are served. The small fenced plant in the bed next door is quite inconspicuous despite all the fuss.
“This winter in Berlin is particularly gray, wet and unpleasant,” says garden manager Thomas Borsch as a greeting. So it’s nice to be able to celebrate a symbol of the tropics with the palm tree. But wait: the botanical garden has around 22,000 species, half of them under glass. So why make such a fuss about something that looks like any old office plant, at least for the moment? “The Seychelles palm is like a panda bear in the plant kingdom,” explains Borsch, “the symbol of an endangered species.”
Giant trees with a complicated love life
The palm tree is at home in the jungle of the small Seychelles island of Praslin, with some trees also growing on the neighboring island of Curieuse. That’s it. There are probably still around 8200 plants in total. The giant trees have a very complicated love life. And that is probably the reason why they are so rare.
It starts with the fact that the giant seeds are not buoyant. Over the centuries, only hollow nuts drifted across the oceans, the rest simply sank. There are also male and female specimens of the tree. Biologists call this dioeciousness. The female plants, on which the huge seeds hang, grow to a height of around 25 meters. It takes seven years for the nuts to ripen and fall to the ground. Maybe they will germinate there.
The male trees provide the pollen. At 30 meters, they are slightly higher than the ladies next door. “How exactly pollination takes place and when it is successful is largely unknown,” says biologist Albert-Dieter Stevens. Maybe the wind does the job, maybe it’s insects, maybe it’s small rodents.
The Berliners have repeatedly tried their hand at cultivating the Seychelles palm. And they have failed again and again. In the war year 1943, two palm trees froze to death under the destroyed roof of the tropical house. They had been bred from seeds brought back by a German warship in the early 1930s. Then nothing happened for a long time. After the turn of the millennium, there were two new attempts. Once the plant died, once the nut didn’t even germinate.
Now it should finally succeed. In the large tropical house, they have sunk a special bed heater into the ground. “It doesn’t work without technology, the Seychelles nut needs a warm foot,” explains master gardener Henrike Wilke. She and her colleagues will need a lot of patience – and a little bit of good hope. Because it is not yet certain that the little tree will hold out. “Child mortality happens,” says researcher Stevens. It becomes critical when the palm has used up the nutritive tissue in the nut and has to rely on its own roots.
Export on a grand scale
Whether the tree in the Berlin Tropical House is a boy or a girl will not be known for another 25 years, or perhaps not for another 50. In any case, the capital’s biologists are facing a long and complicated battle for their protégé. The palm tree only develops a trunk after 15 years. In return, it produces huge leaves up to fourteen meters long and four meters wide.
The Seychelles palm has always fascinated people. Emperor Rudolf II dug particularly deep into his pockets for this strange natural object. The Habsburg paid 4000 guilders for a nut. He then had an expert from Prague set them in gold in a particularly artistic way. Incidentally, the goldsmith was paid ten guilders a month.
For centuries, the nuts were exported on a large scale, most recently to India and China, where they were processed into medicines and sexual enhancers. This has not been so easy for a few years now. And so it took special permission from the government for Berlin lawyer Robin Maletz to bring the seed to Berlin in spring 2010 – in the hand luggage compartment of an airplane and as an official gift from the Republic of Seychelles.
So now they are hoping in Berlin that the palm tree will hold out. After all, it is something very special. At the end of the 19th century, British General Charles Gordon had the following idea during a visit to the Seychelles: The Seychelles palm, said the former governor-general of the Turkish-Egyptian Sudan, must surely be the biblical tree of knowledge. Since the nut is so strongly reminiscent of the female form, it alone could have triggered all carnal desires, the evangelical Christian concluded: “If curiosity can be incited by a tree, then by this one.”
Source: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/0,1518,810125,00.html