Bark
Trunk stout, columnar, grey, ringed with scars of fallen leaf bases.
Corypha umbraculifera
Syn. Bessia sanguinolenta
IUCN Red List
Data Deficient
(DD)
Local name
- Talipot Palm (English)
- Bajarbattu (Hindi)
- Kudappana (Malayalam)
- Tali (Marathi)
Tree type
Evergreen
Deciduous
Family: Arecaceae
25m
Indicated uses
Medicinal
Edible
Ornamental
Avenue
Other
Flowering & fruiting
Flowering
Fruiting
Key characters
Leaves
Leaves are huge, fan-shaped (costapalmate), up to 5 m across, with up to about 130 segments; leaf stalks up to 4 m long and armed with black teeth along the margins.
Flower
A single gigantic terminal inflorescence, 6–8 m long, rises above the crown and bears several million tiny creamy-white to yellowish-white flowers.
Fruit / Seeds
Fruits are round, about 3–4 cm across, yellowish-green ripening to brown, produced in thousands; each contains a single seed. Fruits take about a year to mature.
Did you know?
It produces the largest branched inflorescence of any plant. Its leaves were traditionally used for writing palm-leaf manuscripts, and in South India also for umbrellas and thatching.
Distribution
India, Sri Lanka, Andaman Is., Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand