ABOVE: A Talipot Palm Corypha umbraculifera flowering in the Singapore Botanic Gardens in November 2013. The Talipot is a suicide (monocarpic) palm which flowers once in a lifetime and then dies. The Talipot is reputed to have the biggest compound flower in the world.
There were 2 Talipot Palms in the SBG flowering at the same time. The one above was flowering about one month later than the Talipot below which was already producing ripe fruit.Note that the flower stalks are covered in thousands of ripe fruit.The fallen fruit covered the ground below.Growing up the trunk of the second palm was a fruiting Ficus apiocarpa which is a locally common fig of peatswamps in Borneo.
Fallen fruit and seeds of Ficus umbraculifera. When giant Flying Fox bats were common in Singapore they would visit at night to eat the ripe fruit.The fruit are roughly 3 x 3 cm whilst the seeds are c. 2.25 x 2.25 cm. The Talipot Palm is replaced in Borneo by the Gebang Palm Corypha utan which is locally common north of Kota Belud in the seasonally dry Kudat Peninsula. C. umbraculifera and C. utan are very closely related but the seeds and fruit of the Gebang palm are only 2/3 the size of the Talipot Palm.,The Talipot palm is native to Sri Lanka and South India whilst the Gebang Palm grows wild from the Malay Peninsula east to Borneo and south to N. Australia.
