Jumagua Palm

The Essence

"Hemithrinax ekmaniana is among the rarest palms on Earth, confined to a single hill system in central Cuba: the Mogotes de Jumagua, a line of eight connected Upper Cretaceous karst limestone hills near Sagua La Grande, Villa Clara Province, about 16 km from the northern coast. It survives on only three of those eight mogotes, growing mostly on north-facing cliffs at and near the hilltops from 20 to 80 m above sea level, and the entire population occupies about 2.3 hectares within a 10-hectare site. A 2014 census counted 504 plants — 311 adults, 115 juveniles and 78 seedlings — barely changed from 493 in 2004. The IUCN, which listed the palm as Critically Endangered in 1998, reassessed it in 2022 as Vulnerable under criterion D1, with the population judged stable. The palm is unmistakable. A pencil-thin trunk, 6.4–7.6 cm across at the base, carries some 40–60 living leaves plus 50–70 persistent dead ones on petioles no longer than 10 cm, so the crown packs into an obovoid, almost spherical, spiky ball; it is sold in the seed trade as the Lollipop Palm. Plants reach maturity and fruit while still under a metre tall, though the 2017 monograph in Palms describes trees to 7 m. Growth is very slow — about 1.27 cm of trunk per year, and roughly six years before a trunk begins to form. The monograph's authors rate its ornamental potential as great, and judge it especially suitable for subtropical and tropical gardens in areas with a pronounced, lengthy dry season and poor, rocky or limestone soils."

Burret described the palm in 1929 from Ekman's 1924 collection; León collected it again at the Mogotes de Jumagua in April 1940 and published his treatment of the Cuban Hemithrinax in 1941, giving the precise locality. In 1976 a quarry was established on one of the hills for the mining of limestone aggregates, and the destruction it caused drew the speleological and archaeological group Sabaneque to the site in early 1977; Sabaneque successfully made the case for protecting the mogotes from mining and other destructive activity. Popular sources also describe a rediscovery of the palm itself around this time, but differ on the year — Palmpedia and Wikipedia give 1978, crediting the Sabaneque group, while Monaco Nature Encyclopedia gives 1976. Formal conservation activity began in 1984, and in 2008 Cuba's Council of State legally established Mogotes de Jumagua, designating 453 hectares as an area of national significance; the site holds 442 vascular plant species in 302 genera and 106 families. In cultivation, a seed collection made in 1996 by specialists of the Palmetum of Santa Cruz de Tenerife placed plants in a handful of botanical gardens, but wild-collected seed reached the commercial trade only in 2007.