Maya palm

The Essence

"Chamaedorea hooperiana is a clustering understorey palm endemic to Mexico and known in the wild only from the state of Veracruz. It forms fairly dense clumps 3-4 m across and 4-5 m tall, the slender green stems arching away from a central point rather than erupting straight up, which Palms For California notes gives a less compact, more delicate clump than most clustering Chamaedorea. Two features set it apart from its relatives: new lateral shoots emerge from the tops of the old, dried, nearly woody basal leaf sheaths, and the leaflets are notably thick and durable - Hodel called them nearly plastic-like. In flower it resembles C. graminifolia, vegetatively C. pochutlensis. That toughness has horticultural consequences. Hodel judged it much superior as an indoor plant to its relatives and said it holds great promise for interior situations, thanks to its tolerance of low light and low humidity and its resistance to pests; he found it markedly more mite-resistant than C. costaricana and C. pochutlensis, and Rare Palm Seeds adds that the same thick leaves help it shrug off light freezes. Palms For California nonetheless rates its availability as rare. Anyone planting one should allow for its eventual bulk, since Hodel warns that mature clumps spread several metres across, with the perimeter stems leaning outward and taking up still more space."

The species has an unusual discovery story that runs backwards, from garden to wild. Mature plants had been growing for years in a handful of southern Californian collections - Pauleen Sullivan's in Ventura, Lou Hooper's in La Habra, Jack Ingwersen's in Oceanside, and the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino - as unidentified palms of uncertain origin, commonly assumed to descend from a single Central American introduction; the Huntington's plant, Hodel notes, may stem from a separate introduction. Hodel at first took them for C. karwinskyana, and material may have been distributed under that name; he later re-examined the type of C. karwinskyana and referred it to C. pochutlensis. Only in December 1989, during fieldwork in the Catemaco region of Veracruz, was the palm found growing wild, finally supplying a known locality. The type, however, is a cultivated specimen: D. R. Hodel 772, gathered in Louis Hooper's garden in Orange County, California on 16 April 1988, with the holotype at the Bailey Hortorium (BH) and isotypes at CR, HNT, K, MEXU, MO and NY. The species was published as Chamaedorea hooperiana Hodel in Principes 35: 188, figs. 6-8 (1991). Californian collectors have since produced hybrids between C. hooperiana and C. pochutlensis.