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Calamus vitiensis
Also called Solitary Lawyer Vine
A slender climbing palm with a solitary (non-clumping) stem and long barbed whip-like leaf tips that hook onto neighbouring plants. It is a rainforest liana, so it suits warm, humid, sheltered sites rather than ordinary garden beds.
Calamus vitiensis, commonly known as the Dunk Island lawyer vine, solitary lawyer vine or Mission Beach wait-a-while, is a climbing palm in the family Arecaceae. It is found from the Maluku Islands east through New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to Fiji and Vanuatu, and south to Queensland, Australia. It is a solitary (i.e. not clumping) palm with a stem diameter up to 3 cm (1.2 in). The leaves have 25–40 leaflets and the midrib extends into a barbed cirrus up to 150 cm (59 in) long. It grows in lowland rainforest up to about 150 m (490 ft). It was first described in 1908.
Calamus acanthospathus · Wait-a-while · Calamus bousigonii · Calamus brandisii · Calamus calospathus · Fishtail Lawyer Cane · Calamus compsostachys · Calamus · Dragon's Blood · Calamus dumetosus · Calamus egregius · Calamus elegans
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Calamus vitiensis by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
