Cocoanut palm

“ More useful is the native cocoanut palm, that grows everywhere, both in and out of cultivation. Several million cocoanuts are exported from the Isthmus every year. The brown, fuzzy shell of the cocoanut, as we know it in the grocery store at home, is only the innermost husk. As it grows on the tree, the cocoanut is as big as a football, and as smooth and green as an olive. Cut through the thick husk of a green cocoanut with a machete, and you have a pint or more of a thin, milky liquid that is one of the best thirst-quenchers in the world. ”

“ The natives have a saying that the cocoanut palm loves the sound of the human voice, and, [514] like the magpie and robin, will not flourish away from the habitations of men. Like the palmyra palm in the north of Ceylon, the cocoanut in the south yields most of the necessaries of life. Its fruit furnishes food, its shell drinking vessels, its juice palm wine and sugar, its stem materials for building, its leaves roofs, matting, baskets and paper. ”

“ The world-encircling cocoanut-palm is found about the shore of tropical North America, and there, as elsewhere, serves a great variety of uses, being a greater blessing, especially to the natives and the poorer descendants of European and African immigrants, than even the royal palm. The economic importance of its wood-fibres, leaves, and fruit are too well known to require re-enumeration. ”

“ In the Philippines, the poorest soil seems to give nourishment to the cocoanut-palm; indeed, it thrives best on, or near, the sea-shore, as close to the sea as where the beach is fringed by the surf at high tide. The common cocoanut-palm attains a height of about sixty feet, but there is also a dwarf palm with the stem sometimes no taller than four feet at full growth, which also bears fruit, although less plentifully. ”

“ It has been said that nature seldom produces a tree so variously useful to man as the cocoanut palm. In tropical countries, where it grows abundantly, its leaves are employed for thatching, its fibers for manufacturing many useful articles, while its ashes produce potash in abundance. The fruit is eaten raw, and in many ways is prepared for food; it also yields an oil which forms an important article of commerce. The milk of the fruit is a cooling beverage, and the woody shell of the nut answers very well for a cup from which to drink it. ”

“ Indeed, to take away from Southern India and Ceylon its cocoanut-trees, would inflict upon multitudes a most severe calamity; hence, their owners guard them most carefully, and on no account destroy them until they grow old and of little value except for timber. They are rented out at so much a tree, and sometimes a single tree will be the property of two or more persons. Commonly, the cocoanut-palm is planted in topes or groves, covering a large surface of ground, and arranged in parallel lines, so as to form lanes completely shaded by their uniting leaves. ”

“ But 'the cocoanut-palm is the most valuable of Nature's gifts to the inhabitants of those parts of the tropics where it grows, and its hundred uses, as they are not inaptly called, extend beyond the tropics over the civilized world. ”

“ Feet vie with fingers in marvellous capacity, and to see a native cocoanut gatherer run up the polished stem of a swaying palm, with greater ease and swiftness than anyone shows in mounting a ladder, transports thought to the distant past, when the ancestral stock, disembarking from the rude canoes at nightfall, sought an evening meal on the edge of the palm-forest, bowed beneath the weight of green and yellow nuts a hundred feet overhead. ”

“ A number of these different members of the palm-family are found in India, but among them two stand pre-eminent for frequency and utility; these are the palmyra and the cocoanut. To take these away would greatly diminish both the beauty and wealth of Southern India; for whole castes are entirely dependent upon them for their support. The cocoanut-palm is one of the most beautiful as well as one of the most useful of this beautiful and useful tribe of plants. Its shaft-like trunk towers forty, sixty, or eighty feet into the air; sometimes quite straight, at others bending and curved ”

“ TO dwellers in Ceylon, the cocoanut palm calls up a wide range of ideas. It associates itself with nearly every want and convenience of native life. It might tempt a Singalese villager to assert that if he were placed upon the earth with nothing else whatever to minister to his necessities than the cocoa-nut tree, he could pass his existence in happiness and contentment. ”

“ By way of vegetables, we had cocoanuts, and bread made of cocoanut flour, which the Kanakas taught us to prepare, and hearts of palms. This latter is one of the rarest of delicacies, and outside the tropics only multimillionaires can afford it. The price, when you get palm hearts in Europe, is higher than that of Russian caviar. For the most part, it is reserved for castaway sailors and buccaneers like ourselves. It is the core taken from the very tip of the cocoanut palm, right where the new leaves form. For each heart, weighing about ten pounds, a noble palm has to be sacrificed. ”

“ Belligam was a famous resort of devout pilgrims in olden times, and there is still an ancient Buddhist temple here which is much visited by people from afar. In no other part of the world does the cocoanut palm flourish more luxuriantly than it does in this district. One intelligent writer estimates that the province lying between Dondra Head and Calpentyn contains between ten and twelve million fruitful palms. The productiveness of the cocoanut is most extraordinary. As long as the tree lives, it continues to bear; blossoms and ripe nuts are frequently seen on it at the same time. ”

“ In the interval of sowing, the natives often sow the land with pulse or sesame, the stubble of which is used as manure for the next rice-crop.
At intervals scattered over the plain, there are groves of cocoanut and palmyra-palms, like islands in the vast sea of rice-fields, with small villages built under their shade. As the betel-nut palm is the most graceful in India, so the palmyra (Borassus flabelliformis) is undoubtedly the ugliest, with its black stem the same size all the way up, and coarse fan-shaped leaves. It is chiefly from this tree that the Shanars draw the toddy. ”

“ Many varieties of the palm flourish here,—the cocoanut palm producing fruit in greater abundance than in any other country of the West Indies.
THE COCOA PALM. The most abundant cocoanut groves in the world are said to be found on Puerto Rico and the other islands of the Antilles. This tree usually grows near the coast, for it loves the salt water; but it is sometimes found on the hill slopes a short distance inland.
"The tree grows to a height of from sixty to eighty feet, lives a hundred years, bears a hundred nuts each year, and is said to have a hundred uses for man." ”

“ As a consequence, the palm languishes and it has long been deemed, on this account, one of the most rebellious subjects introduced into palm-house cultivation.
[Contents] The Soil. The soils for cocoanut growing are best selected by the process of exclusion. The study of the root development of the palm will prove to be an unerring guide to proper soil selection. ”

“ The cocoa-nut tree requires a sandy and well-drained soil; and although it flourishes where no other tree will grow, it welcomes a soil of a richer quality and produces fruit in proportion. Eighty nuts per annum are about the average income from a healthy tree in full bearing, but this, of course, depends much upon the locality. This palm delights in the sea-breeze, and never attains the same perfection inland that it does in the vicinity of the coast. There are several varieties, and that which is considered superior is the yellow species, called the "king cocoanut." ”

“ Finally one mature specimen was found, with both trunk and leaves strongly suggesting the cocoanut, but much smaller. The leaves are light green, the leaflets in one plane, and the fibers separating from the narrow base of the leaf. The fibers are few and flimsy, but like those of the cocoanut and other South American species of Cocos. The palm stood within a few feet of a small permanent brook, down which the seeds had evidently been carried and there were several young palms along the bank. ”

“ A thoughtful person cannot fail to be impressed with the remarkable adaptation of the palm family to the requirements of the natives of this region. Take, for instance, the cocoanut-tree, and realize for a moment its bountiful, beneficent products. It affords never-failing water in an always thirsty clime. Nutritious and palatable cream is obtained from its luscious nut; toddy to refresh the weary traveler, or arrack when fermented, comes from the same source, besides a rich oil for various domestic uses. ”

“ Palms and the popular foliage plants can be grown satisfactorily with little or no sunlight. The kentia palm before mentioned is one of the very hardiest, and will thrive where few others will grow. Both the cocoanut and date varieties can be easily grown from seed,—an interesting experiment. ”

“ It is the cocoanut palms that put the touch of picturesque adventure on the place. Here are the bold beach-combers of the tropic world come to add storm-tossed beauty to The Garden. The cocoanut is the adventurer of all seas, born of salt and sand on the wave-worn shore it matures, clad in a brown, elastic, water-defying husk that will bear its live germ whithersoever the waters will take it. The storms that tear it from the yielding stem and toss it in the brine send it on through scud and spin drift, to currents that drift lazily to all shores. ”

“ The infant is swung to sleep in a rude net of coir-string made from the husk of the fruit; its meal of rice and scraped cocoanut is boiled over a fire of cocoanut shells and husks, and is eaten off a dish formed of the plaited green leaves of the trees, with a spoon cut out of the nut-shell. When he goes a-fishing by torchlight his net is of cocoanut fibre; the torch, or chule is a bundle of dried cocoanut leaves and flower-stalks; the little canoe is the trunk of the cocoa-palm tree, [Pg 132] hollowed by his own hands. ”

“ A [Pg 176] peculiarity of this tree is, that it has no substance in the interior of the trunk, [50] yet the outside, to the thickness of an inch and more, makes the finest of boards, and, when seasoned, will turn a board nail with one stroke of the hammer. The top of the palm yields a vegetable which is much used upon the table, and, when boiled, resembles in flavor our cauliflower. The cocoanut tree very much resembles the palm, the branches diverging, like the ribs of an umbrella, from one common centre, among which the fruit hangs in tempting clusters far out of reach from the ground. ”

“ Family COCACEAE The cocoid palms are a distinctly American group, the African oil-palm, Elaeis Guineensis and the cocoanut being the only outliers of the family which have been supposed to be indigenous in the Old World. South America is the center of distribution and is the home of a large proportion of the two hundred or more species. Only five genera reach Puerto Rico, and one of these, Cocos, was probably not a native of the island. ”

“ Cocoanuts grow near the tops of tall cocoanut palms, and these palms are fond of standing on the seashore. When the nuts get ripe they often fall in the sea and are carried long distances by the ocean currents. ”

“ The progressive German colonist of Kamerun, German East Africa, and the South Pacific Islands, as well as the French in Congo and Madagascar, are vigorously practicing conventional, modern orchard methods in the treatment of their cocoanut groves, and it is amazing to read of discussions between Ceylon and Indian nut growers as to the best method of tethering cattle upon cocoanut palms in pasture, so as to obtain the most benefit from their excreta. ”

“ Flowers of every hue and fragrance blossomed along the way.
The cocoa-nut palm abounded, of all heights and ages. The older ones had a smooth bark, made of its own dead leaves, crowned with long, bending branches, made up of spines like ribs going out of a backbone. It begins in these spines, and they seem to grow together as new ones shoot out, so that the trunk is itself a leaf. These leaves hang dead and loose in their upper edges, ragged and gray, but bind the trunk at their juncture. Every new burst of leaves gives a new cincture and a new raggedness. ”

“ Then the nuts gradually swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst thing about the cocoa-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit uninterruptedly for forty years. ”

“ Nature has given the cocoa-nut the power of preserving its vitality almost indefinitely. The fallen nuts float on the sea and drift hither and thither. Once washed up on a beach and dried by the sun, the nut thrusts out little green suckers from those "eyes" which every one must have noticed on cocoa-nuts, anchors itself firmly into the soil, and in seven years will be bearing fruit. The fallen fronds decay and make soil, and so another island becomes gradually clothed with vegetation. In Bermuda the cedar replaces the cocoa-nut palm. ”

“ The fruit consists of a thick external husk or rind of a fibrous structure, within which is the ordinary cocoa-nut of commerce. The nut has a very hard, woody shell, inclosing the kernel, within which again is a milky substance of a rather agreeable taste.
The cocoa-nut palm is so widely disseminated throughout tropical countries that it is impossible to distinguish its original habitat. It flourishes with equal vigor on the coast of the East Indies, throughout the tropical islands of the Pacific, and in the West Indies and tropical America. ”