Laos Lady Palm

The Essence

"Rhapis cochinchinensis is a small clustering lady palm of Laos, northeastern Thailand and Vietnam, offered in the trade as the Laos Lady Palm. It forms loose clumps of slender, cane-like stems — reported to 2 m by PACSOA and to 3 m by Hastings (2003) — sheathed in fine fibrous leaf bases whose close outer and inner fibres form a squared mesh, and carries light shining green fan leaves usually split into just three segments. Hastings singled out three marks that identify it: the large thick prophyll and first rachis bract, boat-shaped and overlapping; the glossy upper leaf surface, which usually takes a pinkish tinge when dried; and the distinctly cucullate, or hooded, segment tips. Specimen labels give the male flowers as bright yellow and the female as greenish cream, and Hastings recorded a single hermaphrodite inflorescence — notable in a dioecious genus. Much about the plant remains unrecorded: Hastings saw no mature fruit, and PACSOA reports that all plants in cultivation in the U.S.A. are said to be female, so little is known about the fruits. PACSOA adds that the palm is grown in the U.S. and possibly Japan, and notes the cultivar 'Otohime', grade 4, discovered in 1963."

The name is a taxonomic tangle. POWO/Kew treats Rhapis cochinchinensis (Lour.) Mart. as a synonym of Livistona saribus, the taraw palm, because its basionym — Loureiro's Chamaerops cochinchinensis of 1790 — is itself placed there. The small lady palm that growers, Palmpedia and PACSOA call R. cochinchinensis follows instead the treatment of Hastings (2003), whose description Palmpedia reproduces and who merged R. laosensis and R. macrantha under that name; Palmpedia accordingly lists both as synonyms, and the specialist nursery Rare Palm Seeds equates R. cochinchinensis with R. laosensis outright. POWO accepts Rhapis laosensis Becc. with two subspecies, subsp. laosensis and subsp. macrantha (Gagnep.) A.J.Hend. — the latter combination published in Andrew Henderson's 2016 revision of Rhapis (Phytotaxa 258(2): 137–152, the combination on p. 146), which recognised eleven species.