We were inside the Brookfield Ecoworld complex on the Outer Ring Road in Sarjapur, Bangalore; the palm fringed roads looked spectacular ! The tall stately looking palms were standing in perfect attention, their green canopy swaying in the wind, greeting the commuters.

The trunk of this particular palm variety looked perfectly smooth and grey like it’s smothered with concrete; palm tree trunks were supposed to have the rings around made of stumps from the old leaves. This palm has smooth perfect rings with no remaining bases of the old leaves. Another feature noticeable was a slight bulge of the trunk. Are they supposed to be like this !? Apparently yes !

They are called the Cuban Royal Palms 🌴 or Bottle Palm (because of the bulge of the trunk !). Another noticeable feature is that further up the stem, after the grey, there is also green forming a crownshaft just underneath the crown of leaves; it is the collection of the leaf bases of the tree, all tightly wrapped around one another. It’s these leaf bases that result only in a ring around the stem when they fall off and not stumps. When a leaf dries up, it unwraps itself from the crownshaft and peels away, ready to fall off.

The Royal Palms lend an exotic feel to the roads inside the Ecoworld; they are not the trees you normally see lining the roads in Bangalore. They look majestic !

I thought of these Royal Palms as exotic and needing high maintenance; I was wrong. On a recent trip to Kerala, these palm trees were seen everywhere and in many home gardens. My aunt and uncle have four of these stately Royal Palms in their front garden 👇

The sizes of the Royal Palm vary, in some places, they are tall and thin and elsewhere they are tall and stout; but their grey ringed and bulging trunk and the green crownshaft stand out.

Tree-spotting opens your eyes and once you learn a name, you tend to notice the tree everywhere you go. I thought the Australian Almond tree was exotic 👉Almond canopy🍃🍂, but in Kerala, it’s seen everywhere esp. along the roadsides and junctions. Their horizontal branches with the broad leaves providing shade. I even noticed a small Australian Almond tree outside while standing in queue indoors at the RT PCR testing center (mandatory for the journey back from Kerala to Bangalore).

Till next post, take care !!