PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

96

Trachycarpustakil – Lostand Found,for Now

MARTIN GIBBONS

The Palm Centre, Ham Central Nursery, Ham Street, Ham, Richmond,Surrey, TW10 7HA, UK

AND

TOBIAS W. SPANNER

Tizianstr. 44, 80638 München, Germany

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, most people have long assumed that

Trachycarpus takil is very similar in appearance to T. fortunei, with only subtle

differences separating them. Having now – finally – tracked down the living

trees in northern India, we discover that they are in fact very different, and

easily distinguishable. We reveal how a 120 year old mistake has muddied the

water and why confusion has reigned ever since.

PALMS 53(2): 96–102

1. Some ofthe tallerTrachycarpustakilremaining atKalamuni.Note theopen crownon the largermature plant.

In 1990 when Wilko Karmelk of Holland andone of us (M.G.) set off on the first of manytrips investigating Trachycarpus, we did notknow that the mystery we were about touncover would not be finally solved until 15years later. That first trip to check outTrachycarpus takil was to an area in northernIndia on the borders of Nepal and Tibet onceknown as the Kumaon District (now part of thenewly created province Uttarakhand). In thosedays we were rather naïve and hardly knewwhat we were looking for, nor how we wouldrecognize it if we found it. All we had to go onwas the line from Beccari (1931) about theplant’s occurrence on “Mt. Takil,” at 2400meters, where it “grows in damp oak forests ina region where snow covers the ground fromNovember to March.” The full story of thistrip can be read in Principes (Gibbons 1993),but in summary, all we found on themountain, correctly Mt. Thalkedar, were acouple of hundred young plants. All the adultshad apparently been cut down for their trunkfibers, which were made into ropes. We didfind one mature tree in a nearby village, butbecause of our hazy knowledge of the genus,wrongly assumed it to be T. martianus.

Not far from Mt. Thalkedar is the hill stationof Naini Tal, used by the British early lastcentury as a resort town away from the heatof the plains. In its streets and outside severalprominent buildings such as the boat club wefound many Trachycarpus — which at the timewe assumed to be T. fortunei — but no moreexamples of any other Trachycarpus species.We were more confused than ever. In terms ofshedding light on the subject, we found we,like Omar Khayyam’s young philosopher,“came out by the same door wherein wewent.”

Since then we have been back to the area a fewtimes, each time adding a little more to ourstore of knowledge about this elusive andmysterious species. Despite the gains, however,we felt there was some fundamental issue withwhich we could not get to grips; differentplants with features that didn’t quite matchup. At one time we felt we had made a mistakein assuming the street trees in Naini Tal to beT. fortunei. Why should they be T. fortunei wereasoned, when T. takil grows (or at least grew)in the wild just a few miles distant? And yetwe couldn’t really claim to be able to identifyany major differences between them and thefamiliar T. fortunei.

In another garden founded by the British andwhere many Trachycarpus are cultivated, the

evidence appeared to point even more clearlytowards T. takil. This garden is located inChaubattia, near Ranikhet, somewhat northof Naini Tal, and is today a Government AppleGarden and Fruit Research Centre. Beccari(1931) wrote that Mr. G.B Osmaston,Conservator of Forests in Naini Tal, and Mr.E.A. Smythies, Assistant Conservator,“…supplied me with samples from plantscultivated in the Chaubattia Garden andbrought there in 1877 from Badkot, 20 milesnorth of Chaubattia, where this palm wasgrowing in a cool, moist valley….” At least oneof the plentiful Trachycarpus found in thegarden today could be old enough to be thatvery plant dug up in Badkot. It is a femaleplant, and, so we reasoned, the smallerspecimens found everywhere in the garden,would most likely be its offspring and hencemust all be T. takil (see also Singh et al. 1995,Kulkarni & Pawar 1996, Rana et al. 1996).

In truth, no author seemed particularly clearabout the differences between T. fortunei andT. takil. Even Beccari, who described T. takil asa new species (Beccari 1905, 1920), wasequivocal, admitting that many of thedifferences were, at best, slight. We were laterto realize why. As evangelists for the genus,we were under pressure to come up with

PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

97

2. Trachycarpus fortunei cultivated in Naini Tal,exhibiting the characteristic dense crown.

something definitive but were less confidentthan we probably sounded. Some of thefeatures we came up with to tell T. takil apartwere the asymmetrical base of the lamina (the“twisted hastula”), the brittle leaf sheath fibersand the creeping habit of the young trunk thatBeccari (1931) mentioned. We even feared thatthe two species might have to be “lumped”into one before we could clear up the mystery.

It was obvious that the species in the wild wasunder threat. The “great numbers, formingclumps and rows, the trees rising from 30 to50 feet high, each with its superb crown oflarge flabelliform leaves rattling loudly in thebreeze” described by the discoverer of thespecies, Major Edward Madden, during his visitthere in March 1847 (Madden 1853), had longsince been cut down for the trunk fibers forrope-making. The locals did not understandthat the fibers could be harvested for rope-making year after year, without the necessityof killing the trees. Would the palm becomeextinct before being properly classified?

On that first trip, in 1990, we had met a youngscientist, Dr. Kholia, who was studying Indianferns. Unbeknown to us, in the interveningyears (and, he later explained, as a result of ourvisit) he had “converted” to palms and fromtime to time had done further research on T.takil. He emailed us in January 2005 to ask ouropinion about it and over the course of thenext few months he visited some known andsome rumored locations of this species in thewild. His tantalizing, sometimes weeklybulletins persuaded us to plan a trip back toIndia to see if we could finally solve themystery surrounding this palm, and we met upwith him, after 15 years, in October 2005.

Over the course of the busy week that we spentwith Dr. Kholia, the highlight was certainlyvisiting a small population of adults andseedlings. Kalamuni (or Kalimundi) is a steeplimestone ridge above Gini Village inPithoragarh District, over which a small passroad winds between the towns of Girigaon andMunsyari. While adjacent slopes have longbeen cleared of any forest, the Kalamuni ridgeis still mostly covered by majestic Cupressustorulosa, large evergreen oaks and massiveRhododendron trees. Scattered among them onSW, W and N facing slopes around 2200 ma.s.l. were mostly juvenile Trachycarpus andsome mature, reproducing trees (Fig. 1). Theclimate here is “warm temperate” withpleasant temperatures throughout the year,excepting the occasional cold spells duringwinter that may be accompanied by frost andeven snow, although the latter would unlikelyremain for more than a few days at a time atthis altitude.

It was on seeing these trees (the first mature,wild T. takil that we had ever seen) that thedifferences between it and T. fortunei becameapparent to us. Later we went back to the townof Naini Tal and realized that we had beencorrect the first time in identifying the streettrees there as T. fortunei (Fig. 2). Alas, welearned the Indian authorities had apparentlyalso assumed them to be T. takil and hadcollected seeds to plant back in the wild tobuttress the flagging wild populations (Dr.Kholia, pers. comm.).

So what exactly are the differences? Beccari(1905) in his original description highlightedthe difference between the ligules of the twospecies. The ligule is the exposed tip of theleaf sheath. It is the leaf sheaths that produce

PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

98

3. Straplike ligules ofcultivated Trachycarpus inthe Chaubattia Garden.

the distinctive fibers that clothe the trunk ofTrachycarpus palms. In T. fortunei, the ligule islong and splits readily into narrow straps thatform a rather untidy mass at the apex of thetrunk (Fig. 3). In T. takil, the ligule is very shortand shallowly triangular (Fig. 4), which resultsin a much tidier trunk apex and leaf sheathfibers that are tightly clasping. This is clearlydifferent from T. fortunei, and actually morelike T. martianus. Secondly, the crown of T.takil is much more “open” than that of T.fortunei due to the fact that there are far fewerleaves. One can see through the crown of theformer while in the latter the leaves growmuch more densely and the crown normallycannot be seen through. Once these two mostapparent differences are clearly explained thespecies can be easily distinguished.

Beccari mentions the stem of young plantsgrowing obliquely, a feature that has beenmuch elaborated on subsequently. However,while young plants do indeed initially producea creeping, often saxophone-shaped stem, thisfeature can also be observed in many T. fortuneiand other Trachycarpus and may to someextent be caused by environmental factors. Itis this same feature that we, and others, had

observed on young plants grown from seedobtained in Naini Tal (T. fortunei as we nowknow) that had also contributed to ourmisidentification.

Despite usually being compared with T.fortunei, it seems that T. takil is most closelyrelated to T. oreophilus (Stührk 2006), which wedescribed from northern Thailand (Gibbons &Spanner 1997) (and of which we consider T.ukhrulensis [Lorek & Pradhan 2006] ofnortheast India synonymous). For this reasonwe include it here for comparison. Table 1shows the main vegetative distinguishingfeatures between T. fortunei, T. takil and T.oreophilus.

Beccari based his 1905 description on a maleplant, which grew from seed sent to him in1887 by Mr. J. F. Duthie, the superintendentof the Botanical Garden of Saharanpur, India.Beccari was a well-known botanist of his timewho willingly gave palm seedlings to bothbotanical and private gardens (S. Quercellini,pers. comm.). There is no record of whathappened to the other seeds, although we doknow that there were at one time several T.

PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

99

4. Short, triangular ligules on Trachycarpus takil at Kalamuni.

takil growing in both Rome and Florence, afew of which remain to this day.

There is an old specimen at the Botanic Gardenin Rome, recorded as being there in 1897 in adirectory by P. R. Pirotta, the first Director, andthere are a few in the grounds of La SapienzaUniversity. Though their provenance isunknown, it is not impossible that they arethe same as Beccari’s palm. We are indebted toDr. Sergio Quercellini and his research of T.takil for this valuable information.

Major Madden also distributed seeds to severalof the leading nurseries of his day in Irelandand the U.K. (Morley 1972) so it is possiblethat some of these still survive, though thereare no records.

Beccari’s description of the femaleinflorescence and flowers was drawn fromsamples sent to him by Messrs. Smythies andOsmaston, Conservator and AssistantConservator of Forests in Naini Tal, whichcame from plants cultivated in the ChaubattiaGarden, not far from Naini Tal. As pointed outearlier, all the palms there have turned out tobe T. fortunei; there are no T. takil present.Beccari’s description of the femaleinflorescence is equivocal: “spadices very

similar in every respect to T. excelsa (fortunei),”“flowers a trifle large,” etc. Having seen thetrees (or their descendents) from which thoseflowers may have come, we propose theexplanation that Beccari may have been sentsamples not of T. takil but of T. fortunei andunwittingly based his description on them.We feel it is no coincidence that the trees inboth Naini Tal town and Chaubattia Gardenare T. fortunei especially when one takes intoaccount Messrs. Osmaston and Smythies’connections with both.

We are aware of a few cultivated examples ofT. takil in India, at Munsyari, Kausani, andBarabe (on Mt. Thalkedar). Further, we saw atree in the Lakeside Gardens in Shillong(Meghalaya), which could well be the samespecies.

In cultivated plants, it seems that once thegrowth of a trunk sets in, yearly growth ratesare around 25 cm or more. In older, tall trees,growth apparently slows considerably andinternodes become very short. It is worthnoting that tall, old plants usually attain alarger crown with wider leaves that holdconsiderably more and wider segments. Theestablishing phase of young plants appears tobe quite slow. Some cultivated plants in Italy

PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

100

Table 1. Trachycarps fortunei. T. takil and T. oreophilus compared.

T. fortunei T. takil T. oreophilus

Diameter of woody trunk 10–25 cm (15–)20–25 cm 10–16 cm

Number of live leaves to 100 ca. 20 ca. 20

Leaf sheath appendage (ligule) long, ribbon-like short, triangular individual fibersnot forming a ligule

Hastula ca. 1.5 cm 1–2.5 cm 1–3 cm

Leaf blade width 95–110 cm 100–120 cm ca. 100 cm

Abaxial leaf blade colour pale, pale bluish, pale, slightly to slightly waxy strongly waxy strongly waxy

Leaf blade segmentation irregular for irregular to regular regular for moreca. 3/4 for more than than 1/2

1/2–3/4

Segment number 40–51 45–62 55–70

Segment width 3–4 cm 3–5.5 cm 2.5–4 cm

Central segment length 55–80(–90) cm 67–78 cm 58–70

Embryo back of seed side of seed back of seed

Eophyll ca. 10 cm long, ca. 10 cm long ca. 15 cm long, 4-plicate 2-plicate 2-plicate

retain a massive skirt of dead leaves, a featurenot observed on mature trees in the wild or incultivation in India. Climatic conditions couldplay a role here as well as brush fires. Ingeneral, plants in cultivation present a slightlymore robust habit.

It would be an interesting project to recordand identify the several trees in Rome andFlorence. Lorek (2006, 2007) attempted aninventory of the plants in Beccari’s garden inFlorence, but we feel with misleading results.Morici (2008) claimed that all T. takil in thegarden have perished but, like Lorek,overlooked a mistake in an unpublished paperby Cellai Ciuffi et al. (1999) that misidentifieda palm that perished in the harsh winter of1985 (clearly a Washingtonia) as T. takil.

We strongly suspect that most if not all otherplants labeled “T. takil” in cultivation aroundthe world are, in fact, T. fortunei or, in somecases, T.wagnerianus (Stähler & Spanner 2007).

There has been considerable discussion on thestatus of this species (Singh et al. 1995,Kulkarni & Pawar 1996, Rana et al. 1995, 1996,Husain & Garg 2004, Gibbons et al. 2008). Inthe wild, we are aware of just three populationsof T. takil, two of which contain only juveniles,the third with several adults and manyjuveniles. Recently there have been reportsand photographs of a larger population of wildtrees in the general area of the smallpopulation we saw at Kalamuni (Riphagen,pers. comm.). This is exciting indeed andperhaps worthy of a trip to check it out. It isnot unlikely that there are other, unknown,populations in more remote areas, perhapseven over the close-by border in Nepal, butthis is purely speculative.

Nevertheless, T. takil must be consideredthreatened (IUCN 2001) and its future seemsin serious doubt, it having gone from “greatnumbers” to extreme rarity in a little over ahundred years. Serious efforts should be madeby the authorities in India to conserve thosetrees that are left. This should begin with anunderstanding of the clear differences betweenit and T. fortunei, followed by the removal ofall T. fortunei seedlings that have apparentlybeen transplanted into the wild. These effortsshould also include the controlled collectionof seeds from wild populations for cultivationand perhaps an eventual re-introduction intothe wild. Finally, it is crucial to gain thesupport of villagers local to where T. takil clingson in the wild in an effort to prevent any more

trees from being cut down. Dr. Kholia has firsthand experience of this destruction; he hasmonitored the young plants on Mt. Thalkedar,watched them grow over a period of severalyears to around 50 cm of trunk, and then seenthem cut down for their few pitiful fibers.Harvest not destroy! If provision of free ropewould take the pressure off, we are confidentthat there are a number of individuals andpalm societies who would be delighted tocontribute funds.

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to Dr. B.S. Kholia forhis many contributions to our research of T.takil. We would also like to thank SergioQuercellini for sharing his findings oncultivated plants in Italy, and HerbertRiphagen, who provided valuable informationon the status of wild populations.

LITERATURE CITED

BECCARI, O. 1905. Le palme del genere“Trachycarpus.” Webbia 1: 41–68 .

BECCARI, O. 1920 Recensione delle palme delvecchio mondo appartenenti alla tribù delleCorypheae con descrizione delle specie evarietà nuove che vi appartegnono. Webbia5: 5–70.

BECCARI, O. 1931. Asiatic Palms – Corypheae(ed. U. Martelli). Ann. Roy. Bot. Gard.(Calcutta) 13: 1–356.

CELLAI CIUFFI, G., A. GRIGIONI AND P. LUZZI. 1999.Il complesso die Giardini di Villa Beccari,storia, evoluzione, ipotesi di sistemazione.Unpublished work available at the BotanicGarden, Florence.

GIBBONS, M. 1993. Trekking on the Trachycarpustrail. Principes 37: 19–25.

GIBBONS, M. AND T. SPANNER. 1997. Trachycarpusoreophilus – The Thailand Trachycarpus.Principes 41: 201–207.

GIBBONS, M., T. SPANNER AND B.S. KHOLIA. 2008.Trachycarpus takil Becc. in Kumaon. CurrentScience 94: 444–446.

HUSAIN, T. AND A. GARG. 2004. Trachycarpus takilBecc. is not a ‘rare’ palm. Current Science 86:633–634.

IUCN. 2001. Red List Categories and Criteriaversion 3.1.

KULKARNI, A.R. AND B.S. PAWAR. 1996. Commentson ‘A critical appraisal of the type locality ofa rare palm from Kumaon Himalaya, India’.Current Science 70: 19–20.

PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

101

LOREK, M. 2006. Aktueller Bestand derArecaceae im Garten der Villa Beccari(Florenz, Italien). Hortus Exoticus 2: 10–22.

LOREK, M. AND K.C. PRADHAN. 2006. A newspecies of Trachycarpus (Arecaceae), withremarks on its unusual habitat. Bot. Jahrb.Syst. 126: 419–426.

LOREK, M. 2007. The Indian speciesTrachycarpus takil in the garden of VillaBeccari, Florence, Italy. Current Science 93:295–297.

MADDEN, E. 1853. On the occurrence of palmsand bambus, with pines and other formsconsidered northern, at considerableelevations in the Himalaya. Trans. Bot. Soc.Vol. 1V. 183–195.

MORICI, C. 2008. Villa Beccari – one centurylater. Palms 52: 175–179.

MORLEY, B. 1972. Edward Madden. RHS Journal97: 203–206.

RANA, T.S., T. HUSAIN AND R.R. RAO. 1995. Acritical appraisal of the type locality of a rarepalm from Kumaon Himalaya, India.Current Science 68: 590–592.

RANA, T.S., T. HUSAIN AND R.R. RAO. 1996.Comments on ‘A critical appraisal of thetype locality of a rare palm from KumaonHimalaya, India.’ Current Science 70: 20.

SINGH, D. K., SURENDA SINGH AND S. K. MURTI.1995. Trachycarpus takil Becc. (Arecaceae) –a rare, endemic palm of Kumaon Himalaya,India. Indian Journal of Botany 18: 332–336.

STÄHLER, M. AND T. SPANNER. 2007. WinterhartePalmen. Medemia Verlag, Berlin.

STÜHRK, C. 2006. MolekularsystematischeStudien in der Subtribus Thrinacinae, mitbesonderer Berücksichtigung der GattungTrachycarpus H. Wendl. (Arecaceae).Diplomarbeit im Studienfach Biologie.Biozentrum Klein Flottbek und BotanischerGarten, Hamburg.

PALMS Gibbons & Spanner: Trachycarpus takil Vol. 53(2) 2009

102

Genera Palmarum 2 Wins Award

In early May, the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries announced that GeneraPalmarum: the Evolution and Classification of Palms, published by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kewin association with the IPS and the LH Bailey Hortorium had been given the 2009 AnnualLiterature Award. The award recognizes both the authors and the publisher of a work thatmakes a significant contribution to the literature of botany and horticulture. GP2 has won theTechnical Category. Larry Currie, Librarian of the California Academy of Sciences Library notedthat “the high production quality of this book, coupled with the comprehensive coverage ofthe subject, will certainly make this the standard reference on palms for many years to come.”

Copies of this award-winning reference book are available from the IPS website, www.palms.org.