The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Caryota urens
Also called Fishtail Palm, Toddy Palm, Wine Palm, Solitary Fishtail Palm, Kitul Tree, Sago Palm, Fish Tail Palm
Caryota urens is a solitary-trunked feather-leaved palm, native to India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and grown as an ornamental tree in warm climates or as a young houseplant. It is monocarpic, flowering once and dying after fruiting.
Caryota urens is a species of flowering plant in the palm family, native to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia (perhaps elsewhere in Indo-Malayan region) and India, where they grow in fields and rainforest clearings, it is regarded as introduced in Cambodia. The epithet urens is Latin for "stinging" alluding to the chemicals in the fruit. Common names in English include solitary fishtail palm, kithul palm, toddy palm, wine palm, sago palm and jaggery palm. Its leaf is used as fishing rod after trimming the branches of the leaf and drying. According to Monier-Williams, it is called moha-karin ("delusion maker") in Sanskrit. It is one of the sugar palms.
Caryota urens is cultivated as an ornamental tree, and planted in gardens and parks in tropical and sub-tropical climates. It is also used as an interior and houseplant when smaller.
The trunk contains a high quantity of starch and a juice can be extracted from the shoots of the flowers. The latter can be boiled into a sugary syrup. The cabbage can be eaten raw or cooked.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Caryota urens 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.
