Ruffled fan palm

The Essence

"Licuala grandis is a small, solitary, slow-growing fan palm of the rainforest understory. Plants of the World Online gives its native range as the Santa Cruz Islands and Vanuatu, and NTBG describes it as native to lowland rainforests of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Its reputation rests on one feature: an almost perfectly circular, undivided, regularly pleated leaf about 90 cm across, notched around the rim and carried on a long petiole armed with curved spines. An older account quoted by PIER likens the leaves to knife-pleated skirts or corrugated roofs. Despite that narrow native range it is widely grown as an ornamental. PIER records it as introduced or cultivated in the Cook Islands, Kosrae, Fiji, the Marquesas and Society Islands, Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Singapore and the Seychelles, and POWO records it as introduced in Malaya, the Society Islands and Trinidad-Tobago. That popularity has a cost: PIER gives it a weed risk assessment score of 6 (Evaluate), records it as widely naturalised on Taha'a, locally naturalised in a botanical garden on Tahiti, a potential invader on Raiatea, and a potential invasive on Majuro Atoll where it grows well even under other trees; NTBG likewise flags it as potentially invasive in French Polynesia. Growth is famously slow. One Palmpedia contributor reports that a curator at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden estimated the age of the 10 to 15 foot trunked specimens there at close to fifty years. NTBG lists its IUCN status as Not Evaluated while also noting that the palm has been declared rare; no IUCN Red List assessment could be confirmed for this species."

Published as Licuala grandis (T.Moore) H.Wendl. in Illustration Horticole 27: t. 412 (1880). POWO lists its homotypic synonym, the basionym, as Pritchardia grandis T.Moore in Gardeners' Chronicle, n.s., 1: 92 (1874). Some sources, including Wikipedia and PIER, cite the authority instead as (hort. ex W. Bull) H.Wendl. The GBIF backbone lists the name as accepted under usageKey 8008690.