468 WEST AFRICAN FORESTS AND FORESTRY 



of the one from which the original seed was obtained. A similar 

 process takes place on a bigger scale in the more distantly situated 

 forests, where the natives do not collect the fruit at all. Here, all 

 the nuts gradually fall off the tree, more or less forming a circle 10 to 

 15 feet away from the trunk. If any clearings take place in these 

 localities, they rapidly appear to become filled up with Oil Palms, 

 which in reality were already there as little tiny seedlings amongst 

 the herbs and undergrowth, ready to make use of any additional 

 light or growing space to develop fully. 



4. Frttit-bearing Age of Oil Palm. — Under these conditions, 

 where the seedling Oil Palms stand only a few inches, or at the most 

 4 or 5 feet apart, the growth is very constricted, with the result that no 

 flowers or fruit appear before the fifteenth or twentieth year. Each 

 stem is excessively thin, and tends to grow upwards like an ordinary 

 forest tree, rather than forming a very short, almost negligible length 

 of stem, but nearly 1 foot in diameter, as is typical of the palm family 

 in the earlier years of its growth. Contrary to the above, where 

 the Oil Palm comes up in a more open place the leaves do not tend 

 upwards, but outwards, arching over with the leaf stalk at an 

 angle of about 45° to the ground. The leaves themselves, instead of 

 being long and thin and with a long length of green stalk, soon spread 

 out fully 20 inches on either side of the main stalk, thus giving the 

 plant more food material and making it grow more quickly. Then, 

 in the fourth or fifth year, bunches of fruit, each containing from 

 twenty-five to thirty nuts, are formed out of the female flower. Each 

 bunch, which is the size of a man's fist at this age, increases to nearly 

 2 feet in length and 1 foot in diameter at maturity. However, each 

 bunch of fruit, having been formed against the stem of the palm and 

 in the axil of the leaf stalk, is very much compressed, especially at 

 the base. As an experiment, when the fruit is beginning to ripen, 

 the leaf stalk just immediately below the base of the fruit stalk is 

 removed ; gradually then the bunch of fruit droops a little and 

 develops more fully at the base, owing to having more space. More 

 light thus reaches the fruit sideways, and the period of ripening 

 is accelerated by three weeks. 



5. Oil Palm Plantations and Crops. — As a result of the greater 

 spreading out of the leaves of the young palm and the more sessile 

 habit of the stem in the earlier stages of growth, light penetrates more 

 intensely into the fruit-bearing axils of the tree, thus increasing the 

 size of each bunch. 



In the Calabar Arboretum, some Oil Palms were cleaned and the 

 ground thoroughly cultivated in two successive years. In the first 

 year one tree bore fourteen bunches of fruit, and in the second year it 

 bore twenty-two bunches. No manure was placed on the ground, 

 and the soil was distinctly poor and sandy — in fact, the natives in 



