Old man palm

The Essence

"Coccothrinax crinita, the old man palm, is a solitary fan palm endemic to Cuba, growing in low-lying, seasonally flooded savannas and thorny scrub on serpentine soils. Two subspecies are accepted: subsp. crinita and subsp. brevicrinis, the latter with shorter and less dense leaf-sheath fibres and occurring in central Cuba. Its name comes from the trunk, which persistent leaf sheaths wrap in a thick layer of wool-like fibre that makes a stem only 8-20 cm thick look bulky and shaggy. Young trees carry the heaviest growth of stringy tan fibre, which sheds on mature specimens to reveal a narrow brown trunk. That beard has made it a sought-after collector's palm, grown in botanical collections: Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden holds six accessioned specimens across five plots. In the wild it is close to disappearing. Subsp. crinita is strictly endemic to Bahía Honda municipality in western Cuba, near Las Pozas in Artemisa province, and is treated as Critically Endangered on the Cuban red list. A 2018 conservation review in Oryx found it is conserved in no protected area, reported recruitment in the wild population but no population-size estimate, and identified unsustainable ethnobotanical harvest for broom manufacture, uncontrolled fires, invasive alien species and interspecific hybridization among the threats facing the group; one widely repeated figure, given by Wikipedia, puts the remaining wild trees at 60-130. A field study of one locality sampled 10 palms within a 500 m² area. The same fibres are the pressure: leaves are cut for thatch and bowls, the fibre used for rope, brooms, mattress stuffing, hats, purses and fence poles. Growth is famously slow, and propagation research - a 2017 seed-dormancy study and separate work on the palm's arbuscular mycorrhizal associations - has been framed around supporting propagation and conservation of the species."

The combination was published by Beccari in Webbia 2: 334, dated by IPNI to 31 December 1907, although Palmweb and World Flora Online cite 1908. IPNI and GBIF give the basionym as Thrinax crinita R.D.Hoyt, published in Gardening (Chicago) 2(46): 369 in 1894, while Wikipedia, Palmweb and World Flora Online cite the authorship as (Griseb. & H.Wendl. ex C.H.Wright) Becc. Kew's current treatment in POWO, and a recent Kew Bulletin paper on the palm's nomenclatural history, both use (R.D.Hoyt) Becc. Antia crinita and Thrinax crinita are listed as synonyms. Ethnobotanical use of the palm is extensive - leaves for thatch and bowls, fibre for pillows, rope, brooms, mattress stuffing, hats and purses, and the trunk for shelter and fence poles - and that harvesting is now itself a driver of the species' decline.