Letting the Takipan Take Off!

The takipan with an eight month inflorescence  

I have a takipan (Caryota sp. aff. rumphiana), a solitary fishtail palm native to the Philippines.  I have had it since 2011, when I bought it from a weekend market, on a trip to Baler in Aurora. Then, it was only about two feet tall with one opened leaf and another about to emerge. From 2011 to 2016, it was grown in the confines of a twelve inch diameter plastic pot, growing from two feet to about my shoulder height, and adding about a handful of leaf rotations to its developing crown.  When I transferred houses in 2016, I took the potted takipan with me to the new house and out-planted it in soil in the farthest corner of the lot.  

The property I transferred to has a small garden that is about 25 to 30 square meters. It is not much, but when I started to develop it it had an existing kamansi (Artocarpus probably camansi) tree growing at one side. Since 2016 I have already plant a few bantulinao specimens (Diospyros ferrea), a salingbobog tree (Crataeva religiosa), a baraibai (Cerbera manghas), a samuyao (Citrus westeri) and a few other palms alongside the takipan.  

The takipan seemed to have liked its new home. A year after it was out-planted it was already taller than I was in 2017. At about the time of the pandemic, the palm was already competing for canopy space with the kamansi tree casting much shade in my garden.  The heavy arbor has drastically changed the composition of the garden, from the sun loving plants I was collecting - which I transferred from the rooftop garden in the old house - to shade loving plants like aroids, ferns and understory plants. By the time that indoor plants became popular in the pandemic, my garden has lost more of the succulents in favor of the shade tolerant species. 

Towering and nearing the wires

In 2022, the takipan palm has grown taller than my two story apartment structure and towers over the whole of the garden, but its size has presented a new problem - its very huge compound leaves were encroaching over street space and nearly touching the high tension wires adjacent the property wall. I hired a gardener to cut down some of the leaves to temporarily alleviate the problem.  A year after, I came home one day to find the leaves again unceremoniously by the Meralco maintenance crew.  They left the cut leaves still hanging precariously on the tree which I later had removed by hired help. As the palm has become a source of added anxiety, I reflected on cutting down the tree entirely.

In May of 2024 I asked a gardener friend to help me cut down the takipan.  Her crew came to the house one Saturday morning to assess it and how to go about felling the tree.  One gardener climbed up its  crown and discovered that the takipan was starting to bring out flower shoots. I have seen fishtail palms flower in other gardens before.  Their inflorescence is interesting but a long and tedious process. It appears that the palm does not want me to cut it. I could hear it say 'let me be and I will shower you with my flowers'. But seriously I became curious in the prospects of observing a full grown takipan flower in my backyard.  And since the plant is starting to flower, it will concentrate its energy on bringing out the inflorescence and hopefully less on new large leaves. I decided not to cut the takipan and let it display its flowering glory!