Plant Story--Double Coconut, World's Largest Seed

In April 2018, I visited Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, Hawaii, and saw this:

Double coconut (Lodoicea maldivica) seed, April 2018

A cage around a very large seed.

It was the double coconut, also called coco de mer (sea coconut), and Seychelles coconut, the largest seed in the world. Largest seed in the world!--of course I was interested. It is the seed of the palm Lodoicea maldivica (palm family, Arecaceae), a very rare plant endemic to the Secheylles. (Lodoicea is Latin for Louis, honoring King Louis XV of France, maldivica is because it was thought, incorrectly, to come from the Maldives.)

This post, Plant Story--The Double Coconut, is about the plant. The next post, Playing Cupid for the Double Coconut, gives the story behind the seed in the cage in 2018 and what I saw on my return  in 2019.

Looking at 2020

Happy New Year! 2020.

I decided to make 2020 "the Year of 2020 Vision," reviewing my activities and all my stuff, asking if each is an active interest or something I think I might, maybe, do or use, sometime in the future. My possessions and surroundings should reflect my current self. The trick will be honest answers.

When I dial up 2020 Vision beyond the junk drawer, looking at my yard I find lots of ideas that I have carried over for years, to dust off and reconsider.

Plant Story--the Iconic Fireweed

fireweed, Epilobium angustifolium

Fireweed  is one of the most recognizable flowers of the Rocky Mountains. They are tall spikes of magenta flowers, easy to spot and to recognize.

But also forming glorious stands

Walking Beaches

"Life is a beach."That might have been my father's motto. A metalurgist, he became a serious amateur seashell collector, retired to Florida, and walked a lot of beaches.

I think about him whenever I walk beaches. And, looking back over the last decade, I've been on a bunch of beaches. For example, a beach in the Lesser Antilles:

A lovely beach, Iles des Saintes, Lesser Antilles

Plant Story--Black Pepper, Everyone's Spice

Black pepper, Piper nigrum (pepper family Piperaceae) has been an important commodity for millennia. We get it as a dark powder, or if you have a pepper grinder, little round pepper corns.

Growing on Sandy Tropical Beaches

beach in Hawaii

Our world has more ocean than land, so there are vast coastlines. I live in the center of the second-largest continent, which puts me nearly as far from a coastline as is possible. So of course I'm enchanted by beaches.

Plants in Winter

When considering winter in Colorado, I often want to write that plants rest, but in fact, I don't think that is true. A rest is defined as a time to relax and recover strength. Plants drop their leaves and go dormant in winter because they cannot move ice in their tissues, let alone use it to grow. Furthermore, water expands as it freezes, so freezing rips up most cells. There is no recovery of strength in winter, only waiting out an impossible season.

That said, the plants that survive through the winter are an elite minority.