The palms and their kin
Not trees at all but giant woody grasses — the family that feeds and clothes the tropics with dates, coconuts, oil, cane and sago.
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Trees№ 3394 minPalms: The Giant Grasses That Feed the Tropics
Not trees at all but tree-sized monocots with no wood, no branches, and no rings — the plant family that gives the world dates, coconuts, oil, sugar, wax, rattan, and sago.
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Trees№ 0925 minCoconut: The Tree of a Thousand Uses
A palm that disperses itself across oceans, yields for most of a century, and supplies food, water, oil, fibre and timber from one crop.
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Trees№ 1195 minDate Palm: The Tree That Made the Oasis Possible
A desert palm that tolerates heat, drought and salt, offsets its own shade for the crops beneath it, and is propagated only from offshoots.
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Trees№ 3275 minOil Palm: The Highest-Yielding Oil Crop and the Deforestation It Drives
A palm that produces more oil per hectare than any alternative — which is exactly why it has cleared so much rainforest, and why the alternatives are worse.
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Trees№ 3873 minRattan: The Climbing Palm That Furnished the World
Spiny climbing palms whose flexible, immensely strong stems are the basis of the global cane-furniture industry — the most valuable non-timber forest product of the tropics, hauling themselves through the canopy on whips of hooks.
- 06
Trees№ 4043 minSago Palm: The Tree You Eat by Cutting It Down
A swamp palm that stores a lifetime's worth of starch in its trunk to fuel one giant final flowering — starch that feeds much of lowland New Guinea and the Moluccas, harvested by felling the tree at the one right moment.
- 07
Trees№ 0023 minAçaí: The Amazon Palm Berry That Became a Superfood
A slender floodplain palm of the Amazon whose deep-purple berries are a staple food of the river people — and, blended and frozen, a global 'superfood' whose boom has reshaped an economy and a forest.
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Trees№ 3453 minPeach Palm: The Spiny Staple and the Guilt-Free Heart of Palm
A fiercely spiny Amazon palm domesticated for its rich, cooked, chestnut-like fruit — and now grown as the sustainable, clumping source of heart of palm, so the delicacy no longer means killing a wild tree.
- 09
Trees№ 1344 minDoum and Palmyra: The Fan Palms of the Dry Tropics
Two tough fan palms of hot dry country — the doum, the rare palm that forks its trunk, with gingerbread-flavoured fruit, and the palmyra, the 'tree of a thousand uses' tapped for sugar and revered in Tamil culture.
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Trees№ 3134 minNipa Palm: The Mangrove Palm With No Trunk
A palm of the tidal mangrove that hides its stem in the mud, throwing up only fronds and a spiky ball of fruit — the oldest palm known from fossils, a source of thatch, sugar, and one of the most productive biofuels imaginable.
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Trees№ 3814 minRaffia Palm: The Longest Leaves on Earth
African swamp palms that grow the largest leaves of any plant in the world — up to 25 metres long — and yield raffia, the soft, strong garden-and-craft fibre, along with palm wine and a scaly 'snake-skin' fruit.