Caryota maxima Seeds | Giant Fishtail Palm

Giant Fishtail Palm (Caryota maxima) seed — Giant Fishtail Palm (*Caryota maxima*): Arecaceae, tribe Caryoteae — the fishtail palms, the only palm genus with twice-divided leaves, native to South and Southeast Asia: Northeast India and the eastern Himalaya through Myanmar, Thailand and Indochina to southern China in Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan, and onward into Malesia.

LATIN NAME: Caryota maxima

COMMON NAME: Giant Fishtail Palm

Plant Profile

The trunk is single, stout and ringed with the scars of fallen leaves, reaching twenty metres or more on good ground. Leaves are twice-divided, which is rare among palms, and each secondary leaflet is wedge-shaped with a jagged apex, the midrib ending between the lobes. Leaf bases form a dense sheath that holds water and debris, and the petioles are long enough to hold the blade clear of the crown so light reaches the lower foliage.

The genus flowers once and dies, a life history called hapaxanthy. Inflorescences emerge in sequence from the top of the trunk downward, each a long pendent branch system carrying hundreds of small flowers with male and female flowers close together. Male flowers on a branch open just ahead of the female ones, and because the trunk flowers over an extended period, pollen from a lower branch can reach flowers opening higher up, or be carried between neighbouring trunks. Clumping species in the genus spread the risk across several stems; a single-stemmed species such as this one has one chance, and after the fruit ripens the trunk dies and stands for a while as a bare pole.

The species grows in humid tropical and warm subtropical forest, often on slopes and in valleys where rainfall is high and the dry season short, sometimes over limestone. It tolerates light shade when young and reaches into the canopy as it grows. Populations in southern China were recorded under the name Caryota ochlandra for well over a century, and the boundary between that name and this one has been debated repeatedly; the current tendency is to include the Chinese plants within a broadly understood giant fishtail palm.

Science & Biotechnology

Clonal propagation of a hapaxanthic palm is difficult by conventional means, because a trunk cannot be divided and suckering does not occur. Tissue culture work in the genus has concentrated on the family’s standard routes: somatic embryogenesis from zygotic embryos, and regeneration from immature inflorescence tissue taken before the flowering sequence begins. Both have been used across palms to multiply selected genotypes, and for fishtail palms they offer a way to preserve material from plants of known sap yield. Molecular work on the tribe Caryoteae has meanwhile clarified how many flowerings the group’s clades perform and how the twice-divided leaf evolved.

Uses & Benefits

Two products come from the trunk. Before flowering, the pith is rich in starch, and where palms are felled at that stage the pith is rasped, washed and settled to give a sago-like flour that is cooked as a staple or made into cakes. Alternatively the trunk is left standing and an inflorescence is cut at its base, so that the sap which would have fed the flowers drains into a collecting vessel; in the fishtail palms generally that sap is boiled down to a dark sugar or fermented into a palm toddy, and the same trade supports the related species in India and Sri Lanka.

Growing from Seed

In tropical gardens the plant is used as a bold specimen, set singly where the crown can be seen against the sky or in groups of three to hide the gap that appears when a trunk dies. Because the flowering sequence can be followed in the crown, a replacement can be planned before the fruit ripens, and the spent trunk should be removed once it is bare, since standing dead tissue is heavy. In cooler collections it is a conservatory palm and needs enough height for the leaves to expand properly. The young growing point is edible and is occasionally harvested as a palm heart, which of course ends the plant.

Sow palm seed as fresh as it can be obtained, in a mix of three parts loam, two parts coir or peat and two parts coarse bark or perlite, with the seed pressed two to three centimetres below the surface and the pot stood in a shaded frame with bottom warmth. Keep the mix damp but never sour, and be patient with the shape of the seedling: a stout root is produced first, and only later does the first leaf appear above the surface. Pot on when the first fully divided leaf has opened, using a deep pot so the root has room, and move the plant to its permanent position once the trunk is about the height of a person; allow six to eight metres between specimens.

Dry air under glass brings spider mite and mealybug, both of which build up in the leaf axils where sprays rarely reach; raising humidity and wiping the crowns helps more than repeated spraying. Cold is the other enemy: growth stops and roots rot when temperatures fall much below about ten degrees Celsius, so a heated conservatory is safer than an unheated porch for a young plant.

Our Take

Plant a group rather than a single trunk, and you will never be left looking at a hole in the planting. Where there is room for a clump, the clustering fishtail palm keeps the display going while individual stems flower and die, and the sap trade of warmer Asia is built largely on Caryota urens, which is tapped far more than this species. In a smaller conservatory, the pygmy date palm gives a similar tropical line without demanding space above head height.

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