COCONUT PLANTER'S MANUAL. 17 



opens, the female flowers are seen as more or less spherical bodies, 

 somewhat resembling ruts, and hence the idea has arisen that the flower 

 has been fertilised and the nut formed, before the inflorescence opens. 

 As will be evident later, that conception is quite erroneous. 



The female flower, like the male, has six floral leaves, but they are 

 much larger and thicker. When the inflorescence opens, these floral 

 leaves are tightly folded over the inner part of the flower and com- 

 pletely hide it. They are so tightly wrapped over that the outside, at 

 first glance, appears to be continuous, and that is the reason why the 

 female flower has been thought to be the fruit. Inside the floral leaves 

 is an oval body composed chiefly of the tissue which will develop into 

 the husk of the fruit, while the embryo coconut is a minute structure 

 at the very base of this. After the inflorescence opens, but before 

 fertilisation has taken place, this mass of tissue continually increases 

 in size and ultimately forces apart the floral leaves, disclosing only its 

 rounded upper surface which is surmounted by a white nipple. This 

 nipple is marked by three equidistant grooves which meet at its apex 

 and thus divide it into three triangular sections. When the female 

 flower is ripe, these three segments separate and stand erect as three 

 teeth, exposing the stigmatic surface on which the pollen must fall in 

 order that the flower may be fertilised. These three teeth constitute the 

 stigma. It is impossible for fertilisation to occur before the stigma is 

 ripe, and that does not happen until long after the opening of the in- 

 florescence. The stigma ultimately turns brown and the tissues round 

 it collapse, forming a small, black, more or less circular area containing 

 three shrivelled teeth, at the apex of the young fruit. The six floral 

 leaves do not increase much in size, but form the whorl of small 

 leaves" at the base of tbe fruit. 



Pollination" is the application of the pollen to the stigma. As 

 the pollen and the stigma are in separate flowers, male and female res- 

 pectively, in the case of the coconut palm, there must be a transfer of 

 pollen by some means or other from the male flower to the female. 

 Now, when the coconut inflorescene expands, the male flowers open 

 first. (This, by the way, is not peculiar to the cocount, but is quite 

 a common phenomenon in palms, ) The inflorescence is then, if we 

 consider the ripe flowers only, entirely male, and it continues entirely 

 male until all the male flowers have opened and fallen off. This male 

 phase may last for from three and a half to five weeks, 



