Anivona palm

The Essence

"Ravenea xerophila is the dry-country outlier of a genus otherwise associated with Madagascar's rainforests, and one of the rarest species in it. It is a solitary, dioecious palm of 1.5-8 m, carrying 11-22 glaucous, arching pinnate leaves above a trunk 13-30 cm thick that is widened at the base and densely covered with persistent leaf-sheath remnants. Its strangest feature is underground: alongside normal roots it forms tuberous, laterally swollen roots that serve as a water and food reserve — a characteristic Monaco Nature Encyclopedia describes as "not met in other palms", and which Rare Palm Seeds calls the first such roots ever recorded for a palm. Seedlings begin with an unusually large, carrot-like root more like a cycad's. Dransfield and Beentje, in The Palms of Madagascar, judged it "an extraordinarily beautiful palm" and probably an excellent species for cultivation given the very dry sites it occupies. In practice it is barely in cultivation at all: growth is very slow, and Jungle Music has reported having only two plants available, with no seed coming out of Madagascar. In its homeland the leaves are woven into winnowing baskets and hats. The picture from the field is sobering — Palmweb, following Dransfield and Beentje, reports roughly 65 trunked trees and some 80 seedlings across the two known populations, with the Tranoroa site degraded by overgrazing, and rates the species Endangered in house, stricter than its formal IUCN listing of Vulnerable."

Described by Henri Jumelle in 1933 (Ann. Mus. Colon. Marseille, sér. 5, 1(1): 28).