Tree of the Week: The Chilean Wine Palm’s unfortunate past

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The Chilean Wine Palm – Jubaea chilensis

When mature, a condition that takes this slow grower decades to achieve, the Chilean Wine Palm produces a copious amount of sweet sap for internal use. But once beheaded, over 100 gallons of the sap may seep from the trunk of the now dying and topless tree and can be boiled down to syrup or fermented into wine. This thoughtless practice, described by Charles Darwin in ‘Voyage of the Beagle,’ resulted in the sacrifice of so many of these impressive, massively pillared trees. This, together with overgrazing, endangered the palm. It is now protected in its own country.

Native to Chile’s matoral, that country’s vegetation equivalent to our chaparral, where it grows from sea level to 2,000-plus feet high, it was named in honor of the Berber king and botanist Juba of Numidia, who reigned from 25 to 19 BC. This palm is also called honey or coquito palm, after the seeds that look and taste like tiny coconuts and were part of the indigenous population’s diet. It is being replanted for seed production.

The Chilean Wine Palm eventually reaches a commanding presence of 80 feet high and 30 feet wide. The straight and stately gray trunk with the faint flattened diamond-shape leaf scar markings reaches a diameter of 3 feet or more. Reputedly this palm can last over 1,500 years. The head consists of densely packed, pinnate (feather-shaped) 12-to-16-feet-long, leathery leaves without spines on the stalks, that stand stiffly bent on short stems. They are dull green on top and grayish green below. Purple flowers are carried on 4-foot-long inflorescences (flower stalks) hidden among the leaves. These produce numerous 1.5-inch diameter hard-shelled orange-yellow coquitos fruits that hide the hollow seeds inside. This palm tree loves full sun, low humidity, well drained but most any soil. It is completely drought-resistant but appreciates subsurface moisture. It likes neither coastal nor hot desert or tropical conditions.

Once established, the Chilean Wine Palm can take enough freezing cold (10 degrees Fahrenheit) that experimental planting is underway in Britain, France, Switzerland and the northern Pacific Coast states. It will grow indoors but is then even slower to mature than outside.

-- Pieter Serverynen

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