A palm initially described in the monumental 17th-century botanical treatise Hortus Malabaricus continues to fascinate botanists greater than three centuries later, resulting in the invention of a new species and the reclassification of present ones.
Recent research on the palm, named Katou-Indel in the Hortus Malabaricus, Hendrik van Rheede’s work on the flora of the Malabar coast, have led researchers to conclude that the bushes discovered in Kerala and Sri Lanka and elsewhere in India and neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan are two distinct species of the genus Phoenix.
A workforce from the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (JNTBGRI) at Palode in Thiruvananthapuram and the Botanical Survey of India (BSI), Kolkata, has confirmed that van Rheede’s Katou-Indelis certainly Phoenix sylvestris, native to Kerala and Sri Lanka. In doing so, they’ve additionally reclassified three different Phoenix species as Phoenix sylvestris.
A serious improvement is the identification of the palm discovered on India’s jap coast and Bangladesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Pakistan as a new species. The researchers have named it Phoenix roxburghii after William Roxburgh, thought-about the daddy of Indian Botany.
Growing 12 to 16 metres tall, Phoenix roxburghii shares morphological similarities with Phoenix sylvestris, however differs by its taller solitary trunk, bigger leaves and leaflets, musty-scented staminate flowers and bigger, obovoid orange-yellow fruits, in keeping with a paper on the findings titled ‘Revisiting Rheede’s ‘Katou-Indel’ and the invention of a new species of Phoenix (household Arecaceae) from India,’ printed in the scientific journal Phytotaxa.
What prompted the JNTBGRI and BSI researchers to take a more in-depth have a look at Katou-Indel was an remark made by the Nineteenth-century Botanist William Griffith that, “the fruits figured in Hortus Malabaricus (3: t 22–25) is very much smaller and of a different shape than it is in Bengal, at least in uninjured trees,” E.S. Santhosh Kumar of the JNTBGRI, one of many authors of the paper, informed The Hindu.
A collage of images exhibiting elements of Phoenix sylvestris:
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Hendrik van Rheede, the Governor of Dutch Malabar, compiled the medicinal properties of the flora of Malabar coast in Hortus Malabaricus with the help of the doctor Itty Achudan. The work in 12 volumes was translated into English by Okay.S. Manilal, who devoted 35 years to researching the work, greater than three centuries later.
Over the years, Katou-Indel – a reputation which has its origins in Malayalam – has been subjected to many classifications. It was Roxburgh who coined ‘Phoenix sylvestris’ in the Nineteenth century. In their paper, the JNTBGRI-BSI analysis workforce have confirmed it as such. They have additionally reclassified three completely different Phoenix species – P. pusilla, P.farinifera, and P. zeylanica – as the identical as Phoenix sylvestris, a brief palm that grows 3.5 metres to five.5 metres tall.
The different authors embrace Joemon Jacob, N. Mohanan, Okay.C. Kariyappa and S. Suresh from the JNTBGRI and S.S. Hameed from the BSI.
