Archontophoenix tuckeri
Encyclopedia
Archontophoenix tuckeri, the Rocky River palm or Cape York palm is a palm native to Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

.

Description

Palm to 20 m tall, trunk to 26 cm in diameter and expanded at the base. Leaves about 3 m long with a moderate lateral twist. Crownshaft is green. Pinnae have silver/grey scales below and tend to be semi-pendulous in the apical 1/3. They lack ramenta on the midrib below. The infiorescence, branched to 3 orders, usually holds the branches erect though they become pendulous in fruit; it is usually wider than long and remains green with maturation of the fruit
Fruit
In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

. Flower
Flower
A flower, sometimes known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants . The biological function of a flower is to effect reproduction, usually by providing a mechanism for the union of sperm with eggs...

s are white/cream. Staminate flower has 13-19 stamens. Fruit is red/brick-red at maturity, 17-25 mm long. Fibres in the mesocarp are in two distinct layers, the outer with thin straight fibres, the inner with thick, fiat to 0.3 mm wide, usually held tight in the dried state.

It occurs in rainforest, gallery forest, swampforest, mangrove ecotone and moist vine-thickets of Cape York
Cape York Peninsula
Cape York Peninsula is a large remote peninsula located in Far North Queensland at the tip of the state of Queensland, Australia, the largest unspoilt wilderness in northern Australia and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth...

 Peninsula, Queensland
Queensland
Queensland is a state of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, south-west and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean...

from Mcllwraith Range [14° 00'S] to Cape York [10° 40'S], from sea-level to 500 m altitude.

This is a variable species which tends to become shorter with smaller leaves in the northern parts of its range. The fruit is large and the two distinct layers of fibres in the mesocarp are unique within the genus. New leaves are often in tones of pink, red or bronze, and the juvenile leaves become proportionately larger than in other species before they commence to divide.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK