This palm was very nearly harvested out of existence for its sap, which was boiled down into a honey.
Chilean Wine Palm
Jubaea chilensis
The Chilean wine palm carries one of the thickest trunks in the palm family, a grey column that can run past three and a half metres round, and that trunk is why the species barely survives in the wild. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
Jubaea chilensis stores its sugar as sap, and for two centuries Chilean producers got at it by felling a mature palm and draining the stump for palm honey, a tapped tree never growing back. Central Chile's valleys once filled with these palms; a handful of protected stands are what is left. The tree found a second life in nineteenth-century Europe instead, where its rare cold-hardiness for a palm made it a prize for villa gardens built to look exotic in a climate that kills most others. The old ones still stand in exactly that ground, in Italian villa parks from Genoa to Florence.
Florence
Naples
This palm was very nearly drunk out of existence.
Genoa
In its own country this palm is worth more felled than standing, which is most of the reason there are so few of them left.
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