13 



A tree of the travellers' jjalni, Ravcnala madagascariensis , is 

 at least thirty feet in height to the last leaves and makes a most 

 conspicuous appearance against the background of trees of 

 ordinary foliage. 



There is an interesting avenue of the royal palm and another 

 of the related cabbage palm. The trunks of the latter species 

 are so smooth and symmetrical that they appear artificial. 

 The avenue of Palmyra palms, Borassus flabelliformis, is very 

 picturesque. As the leaves fall off with old age, the persistent 

 leaf bases make a very rough trunk. They point alternately in 

 opposite directions. Each leaf base extends over one half the 

 diameter of the trunk, but the expansion of the trunk splits it 

 at the base into two halves, each half attached to the opposite 

 side of the tree and with the wood fibers ravelled out on the split 

 edge. As the palm tree grows still older, the leaf bases also fall 

 off, leaving the trunk smooth and ringed. These leaves occur 

 in definite spirals, giving a conspicuous screw-like appearance to 

 the trunk. Both left-handed and right-handed spirals occur in 

 approximately equal numbers. The avenue of the trees exhibited 

 31 left-handed and 39 right-handed. 



The best display of palms which we saw in the tropics was the 

 avenue of Talipot palm, Corypha iimhraculiformis. These trees 

 were planted in 1885 and already had a trunk diameter of three 

 or four feet, including the persistent leaf-bases. A single speci- 

 men of this tree in a different part of the Garden was about 

 seventy-five feet high, with a crown twenty feet in diameter at 

 the top, a straight ringed trunk, and hanging dead leaves at 

 the top fifteen feet long. The young leaves were just appearing 

 at the time of our visit. Terminating this huge tree was the 

 inflorescence, a huge pyramidal cluster of flowers fifteen feet 

 high and of equal diameter, forming a most magnificent display. 

 As is well known, these trees bloom only when forty to sixty 

 years old and they die after flowering. Therefore, the avenue of 

 Talipot plams has only twenty or thirty years more to live. 



There is one large specimen of a strangling Clusia on a palm 

 tree. It has the general habit of a strangling fig but differs in 

 the detail of its roots. These fuse with each other more freely 



