The Chilean Wine Palm of the Botanical Garden

This palm was very nearly drunk out of existence. Jubaea chilensis carries one of the thickest trunks of any palm on earth, and that trunk is full of sweet sap. Chilean producers spent the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felling mature wild palms in order to tap them, boiling the sap down into a syrup sold as palm honey and taking the crop of small coconuts as a bonus. A tapped palm never recovers, because a palm has exactly one growing point and it sits at the top. Groves that once ran to millions of trees were cut back to a few thousand hectares, and the species is now protected at home and listed as threatened. It is also one of the slowest palms there is. A seedling can spend a decade doing nothing visible before it starts building a trunk at all, which is how this one is only four metres tall after more than a century, while measuring 250 centimetres around. The garden calls it a splendid specimen and grows younger ones near it. Stand close and look at the trunk rather than up at the crown. It is smooth, grey and straight-sided, marked all over with the diamond scars of fronds that dropped a very long time ago.