Madagascar, the land of weird lemurs, can now add strange palm trees to their list of ecological wonders. An as-yet-unnamed palm tree discovered by scientists from London's Kew Gardens flowers only once every 100 years and promptly dies. This habit probably doesn't help its cause much, since only about 100 are left.
Media sites are making a big fuss about how you can see the palm from space via Google Earth, but I can see the shoe I left on my old apartment doorstep with Google Earth, so I don't get the big deal. But the massive palm grows to 66 feet tall, and possesses 16-foot wide leaves, some of the biggest in the plant world, so I guess it's pretty cool.
Other than the huge fronds, the palm doesn't look that different from other palms until it flowers (y'know, once every hundred years), at which point a gigantic shoot resembling an asparagus (or a Christmas tree, depending on who you talk to) sprouts from the top of the palm and bursts with white flowers oozing nectar. It reproduces in that moment but expends so much energy and effort it promptly dies after. Not a bad way to go, I guess, if you're a palm.
"It's spectacular. It does not flower for maybe 100 years and when it's like this it can be mistaken for other types of palm," said Mijoro Rakotoarinivo, who works for the London botanical gardens in Madagascar. "But then a large shoot, a bit like an asparagus, grows out of the top of the tree and starts to spread. You get something that looks a bit like a Christmas tree growing out of the top of the palm."
Asparagus or a Christmas tree? Pick one, Mijoro— that's just freaking confusing.
Self-destructing palm tree discovered in Madagascar (AP via CNN)
Image Credit: AP
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