PALM FESTIVAL
A Palm and Cycad Festival is on the docket at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden Saturday and April 6, featuring lectures, palm products and palms for sale. There will be cooking demonstrations using palm and palm-related products, kids' programs, live music and food. The event is presented in cooperation with the South Florida Palm Society.The Palm and Cycad Festival runs from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. both days at the garden, 10901 Old Cutler Rd., Coral Gables. For more information, call Ann Schmidt, 305-667-1651, ext. 3344.Fairchild's palms and cycads have been designated National Palm and Cycad collections by the American Public Gardens Association.Xavier and Nathalie Metz went on a family picnic in their native western Madagascar in August 2005, and saw a huge palm nearby. They took a photograph, thinking it was a well-known Borassus. The next year, they went back to the area that abuts a tsingy, a harsh limestone landscape where rocks are exposed and sharp. This time the palm had a huge flower stalk emerging from its top, and so they photographed it again.
A friend put the pictures on the bulletin board of the International Palm Society's website and speculation began. What was it?
Some time later, Malagasy botanist Mijoro Rakotoarinivo collected leaves and parts of the flower stalk and fruit, sending them to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, outside London. Leaf tissue was sent to Jack Fisher at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden for an analysis of its anatomy.
The answer finally arrived from Fairchild and Kew. It's a new genus, now bearing the name Tahina spectabilis. Tahina is Malagasy for ''blessed,'' and the name of the Metzes' daughter, Anne-Tahina.
Like the talipot palm, the fishtail palm and a few others, this discovery has a peculiar lifestyle. It grows for about four decades, reaching a massive size, and then it flowers, making a great to-do of its once-in-a-lifetime effort by producing a branched flower stalk the size of a Christmas tree. Once the fruit have matured, the parent dies.
It's a phenomenon akin to ''all the wildebeests dropping all their calves on the Serengeti in a three-week period,'' said Mike Maunder, Fairchild's executive director. ``You flood the immediate environment with so many [seeds] that the chances are good of one germinating and surviving.''
Maunder said the discovery is one of many being made by scientists at Fairchild and around the world.
''The significance of the discovery is that it shows quite clearly that we need to continue to document the plant kingdom. There still are species we haven't found,'' he said. ``And it's evident that Madagascar is still a frontier for biology.''
Only about 90 Tahina palms have been counted, but the tsingy territory is rugged and not easy to access, so there's hope that more may be found on the western coast.
Seeds of the giant have arrived at Fairchild and will be grown under controlled conditions so that the endangered Madagascar native can join endangered palms in the garden's world famous collection. Fairchild's palm collection includes 456 species, 20 percent of which are threatened with extinction. Several of the palms, such as the Tahina, the bottle palm of Mauritius and the Carossier palm of Haiti, are down to fewer than 100 in the wild.
In Tanzania, meanwhile, Fairchild staff member Quentin Luke discovered a species of cycad, Encephalartos kanga, named for Mount Kanga on which it grows. Kanga means guinea fowl in East African dialects, probably because of the shape of the mountaintop. The mountain is part of the Eastern Arc Mountains, which, like the tsingy regions of Madagascar, are forbidding and not well explored.
Maunder said there are three additional cycads waiting in the pipeline to be described and named. Luke, whom Maunder calls ''one of the best field botanists in East Africa,'' also has found a genus of monkey and seven new trees.
The East African cycads occur in tiny numbers in the Eastern Arc Mountains, he said.
One particular cycad, Encephalartos whitelockii, known from one site in Uganda, is threatened by a hydroelectric dam.
''We're working with the Ugandan National Park Service trying to work out what to do about it,'' Maunder said.
However, discoveries now being documented by Fairchild scientists (a tribe of asters from Cuba, a genus related to croton from the Dominican Republic, and an anthurium from Jamaica) are cause for celebration, he said.
``All of us in this business hear so much bad news that when anything new comes along, it's a cause for jubilation.''
