I’d always thought of the palm tree simply as a tree, and never once stopped to wonder how it actually grows — not until I saw it happen with my own eyes. But first, let’s clear something up about what a palm actually is.
And no, a palm is not a tree.
A palm is grass.
Not the kind of grass you’re used to seeing on your lawn, admittedly, but botanically speaking, it genuinely is grass — it belongs to the class of monocotyledonous plants, the very same class your lawn belongs to, along with cereal crops, orchids, and a great many similar plants besides. In fact, a palm has considerably more in common with your lawn than it does with an oak tree.
Let’s talk about coconut palms specifically, since this is the palm of all palms, and it ranks among the world’s top ten most useful trees… or grasses, rather.
Picture an ordinary palm: a long trunk, topped with a wild, sprawling mop of leaves. Somewhere tucked away inside that mop sit the coconuts. While still unripe, a coconut yields coconut water — delicious, and genuinely good for you. As it ripens, that liquid gradually thickens into coconut milk. And once fully mature, the flesh inside hardens completely, and the coconut is finally ready to leave the palm behind and become a palm in its own right.
At that particular moment, it’s best not to be standing, or sleeping, directly beneath one — because a two-kilogram fruit with a rock-hard shell will win, decisively, in any confrontation with a human skull. Roughly 150 people die from falling coconuts every year, incidentally — some 15 times the number killed by sharks. Some grass, this.
Once it breaks free of the palm, a coconut simply falls, onto land or into water — it genuinely doesn’t care where it ends up putting down roots. It can drift across the ocean for hundreds of days, wash ashore somewhere entirely different, and still grow into a perfectly healthy palm.
A palm sprouts from one of three seeds tucked inside the coconut — those same three marks that give it its faint resemblance to a bowling ball. At first, the young sprout clings only to the nut itself, sending down roots only sometime later. And because a palm’s root system closely resembles that of grass, it can withstand not just strong winds but the full force of tropical hurricanes — despite looking, from the outside, as though the whole thing is held together with little more than string.
I managed to photograph this particular palm, at exactly this early stage of growth, while walking through a beautiful palm grove on Koh Phangan — the first time I’d ever seen a palm quite this young.
