Double coconut or coco-de-mer
Family Palmae (or Arecaceae)
Lodoicea maldivica (= Lodoicea seychellarum), the double coconut or coco-de-mer (L. maldivica 1), is a dioecious palm, over 30 m tall, with a crown of about 12 enormous palmate leaves (L. maldivica 3): petioles 3-5 m long, lamina 3-5 m. Male and female spikes up to 2 m long, male flowers with numerous stamens, female flowers up to 5 cm wide. The fruit (L. maldivica 4) is the largest in the plant kingdom, weighing up to 20 kg. The seed (L. maldivica 5) resembles a female pelvis in shape. The palm only occurs on the islands of Praslin (L. maldivica 2) and Curieuse in the Seychelles.
Distribution
The fruits of the double coconut were known long before the home of the plant was discovered. Washed-up nuts on the Maldives, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia were worth a fortune, as a result of their rarity, their mysterious origin and curious shape. In Magelhaen’s time it was believed that they came from a big tree growing in the middle of the ocean, hence the name coco-de-mer. In 1744 the French discovered the real place of origin on the islands in the Seychelles. But only in 1881, when General Charles Gordon, known as Chinese Gordon and the hero of Khartoum, had visited the place, a famous theory was developed in his work ‘Eden and his two sacral trees’: the coco-de-mer being the Forbidden Fruit and the Vallee de Mai, where some 4000 palms still survive, being the Garden of Eden.