Once in a lifetime bloom at Botanic Gardens

Grace Chua Straits Times 29 Dec 12;

A TALIPOT palm takes 30 to 80 years before it bears its first flowers - which turn into fruits - and then dies.

This quiet drama involving an 80-year-old palm is taking place at a small lawn behind the Botany Centre, near the Singapore Botanic Gardens' Tanglin entrance.

In October, a member of the Gardens' horticultural staff noticed a stump emerging at the very top of the 10m-tall palm, one of several in the Gardens.

Then, side branches developed from this stump and flowers began to bloom.

It is not known how long this palm has been at the Gardens, said a National Parks Board spokesman.

There are no particular environmental triggers for it to bloom - it is part of the palm's natural lifespan, she added.

The slow-growing talipot palm is native to India and Sri Lanka where its leaves are used for thatching and its sap for palm sugar and wine.

It can grow up to 25m tall before it flowers, and its leaves stretch up to 5m across on a stalk 4m long.

Its main flowering shoot, one of the world's largest, can be more than 6m tall and bears millions of tiny, cream-coloured flowers.

This plume of flowers, visible now, will last for several months before fruits begin to develop.

The green golfball-size fruits will take about a year to mature, then fall.

The Gardens team will collect viable seeds from the ripe fruits.

Some will be planted while others will be sent to botanical gardens overseas for conservation and research.

Other talipot palms last flowered at the Botanic Gardens in 2004, 1996 and 1985.

In fact, fruits from the 1985 flowering were collected and about 20 were planted at the Botanic Gardens.

Other rare and unusual plants have bloomed at the Botanic Gardens before.

In December 2010, a titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), more colourfully nicknamed "the corpse flower" for its odour, produced a single, spectacular blossom.

It was the first time the giant plant - the height of a grown man - had bloomed in Singapore.

The Gardens is also home to a tiger orchid, the world's largest orchid plant, and the unusual double coconut (Lodoicea maldivica), which flowered and is now bearing fruit after being hand-pollinated two years ago.