Wine palm a very ugly 'tree'

Palmas de Ocoa, La Campana National Park is about a one hour drive out of Santiago, Chile, and famous mostly for its stands of Chilean Wine Palm, Jubaea chilensis. This species, the only one in its genus alive today, is restricted to only a few populations in central Chile. It grows further south than any other palm in South America.

Mostly it occurs on steep slopes of high mountains but in the La Campana National Park is grows in an accessible valley which Lynda and I visited under the guidance of Estela Davis and Catherine Kenrick from the Chagual Botanic Garden in Santiago.

The park also supports lots of other species restricted to this region. Our visit in autumn meant we were not destracted by many flowers but the local cactus Quisco (Echinoposis chiloensis) supports a leafless mistletoe, Tristerix aphyllus, which was in vivid red flower.

And there were the two species of large-flowering bromeliad, Puya beteroniana (with blue-green flowers) and Puya chilensis (with yellow flowers). Both had dry brown floral remnants when we visited in April.

But most importantly this is where the Chilean Wine Palm grows most abundantly today after its range has been severely reduced due to land clearing and fire, its seed traded as currency and many of the plants harvested (cut, then placed on their side to drain) for fermenting of the sap. Here, reaching up to 30 m, it towers impressively above nearby vegetation. Like the Monkey Puzzle Tree further south, it is an ‘architectural’ plant, described by Estela as like a column from a Greek or Roman temple.

Not the most elegant of columns perhaps. Charles Darwin dismissed it as 'a very ugly tree', despite it not technically being a tree but more accurately a giant grass or lily. The trunk starts out nice enough but narrows, unattractively to some, after 60 to 70 years. Noone is quite sure why this happens but one of the popular theories is that the change occurs after it first flowers, which takes about this long. It's a slow grower, and this is what an avenue of Chilean Wine Palms (in Jardín Mapulemu, in Santiago) looks like after a decade or two.

When young it can be easily mistaken for the more commonly planted, and somewhat weedy, palm from the Canary Islands - Phoenix canariensis. The difference lies with the crease in the leaflets. They fold downwards in the Chilean Wine Palm and upwards in the Canary Island Palm.

There is plenty of seed produced in the wild, and a nursery nearby within the private park 'Cocalan' was propagating large numbers for horticulture. Until recently, when it had to be removed to allow for a £35 million restoration of the Temperate House, London's Kew Gardens was home to a specimen planted as a seed in 1846 and arguably the tallest plant in a glasshouse. Here it is on its last day, just over a year ago, with only a few other palms for company.

In RBG Melbourne we have a number of specimens perhaps a 100 or more years old, growing outside. A particularly statuesque specimen (hardly narrowed at its top, interesting given its age) was planted on the lawn behind the Herbarium in 1904 by the Government Astronomer, Robert Ellery.