Zombie palm

The Essence

"Zombia antillarum is the only species in its genus and grows wild nowhere except the island of Hispaniola. It forms dense clumps of slender stems up to about 3 m tall, but what catches the eye is the armour: leaf sheaths stay attached to the stem after each leaf falls, the soft tissue between them degrades, and the remaining woody vascular strands split apart into rings of downward-pointing spines around the trunk. Orator F. Cook called it the Haitian cactus palm for exactly that reason. Known populations are few and scattered — northern Haiti along tributaries of the Trois Rivières between Gros-Morne and Port-de-Paix, southern Haiti along the eastern edge of the Massif de la Hotte, and the Dominican Republic between Dajabón, Jarabacoa, the Sierra de Yamasá, Puerto Plata and Gaspar Hernández. The IUCN assessment counts about 20 locations and describes the population as severely fragmented and decreasing, and GBIF holds just 70 occurrence records worldwide — a fair measure of how thinly the species is documented. It sits in tribe Cryosophileae, closest to Coccothrinax, Hemithrinax and Leucothrinax; work by Cano and colleagues found Zombia and Coccothrinax to be sister genera and concluded that their ancestors most probably reached the Caribbean from North or Central America rather than from South America. The IUCN Red List assesses it as Vulnerable under criteria B2ab(ii,iii,iv), and Wikipedia reports that the 2016 Dominican Republic red list ranks it Critically Endangered within that country. The IUCN assessment codes housing and urban development, mining and quarrying, logging and wood harvesting, and fire as threats; habitat destruction in Haiti and damage to seedlings by browsing livestock are also reported. In cultivation it is valued for those armoured trunks, its small stature, salt tolerance and low maintenance."

Descourtilz reported in 1821 that the wood was used for snuff boxes and tobacco cases, the seed kernel to treat scurvy, and the sap by indigenous people for its powerful properties. The leaves are woven into hats and made into brooms, and harvested from the wild for thatching; seeds, at 2.8–4.9% protein, are fed to livestock including pigs; and near Sabaneta in the Dominican Republic the petioles are reportedly used to mix manioc flour for making cassava bread. The zombie association has actually been investigated: Taylor and Timyan (2004) found reports that the seed oil was described as a sense-activator able to "awaken" a zombie, and that thatch made from the leaves could stop zombies spying on a dwelling, concluding that the link between the name Zombia and Haitian culture, though real, is weak. In conservation horticulture, a Montgomery Botanical Center expedition to the Dominican Republic collected the first documented wild-origin seed of the species to be grown in South Florida botanic gardens; two mature specimens planted in Col. Montgomery's time flank the front door of Nell's House, and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden's collection database records 12 accessioned plants across plots 102, 113, 142, 143 and 158.