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Elaeis guineensis
Also called Oil Palm, Macaw Fat
In Singapore: Oil Palm, Macaw Fat, African Oil Palm, Kelapa Sawit, Kelapa Bali, Obe Palm, Wild Oil Palm (Grown in Singapore)
Elaeis guineensis is the African oil palm, a tall single-stemmed palm grown mainly as a plantation crop for palm oil in hot, wet tropical climates. It needs warmth, high rainfall or regular moisture, and full sun to do well.
Elaeis guineensis is a species of palm commonly called oil palm but also sometimes African oil palm or macaw-fat. The first Western person to describe it and bring back seeds was the French naturalist Michel Adanson.
It is native to west and southwest Africa, specifically the area between Angola and The Gambia; the species name, guineensis, refers to the name for the area called Guinea, and not the modern country Guinea now bearing that name. The species is also now naturalised in Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Central America, Cambodia, the West Indies, and several islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The closely related American oil palm E. oleifera and a more distantly related palm, Attalea maripa, are also used to produce palm oil.
[Contains information from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Heritage Trees from data.gov.sg (National Parks Board), made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0]
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Elaeis guineensis 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.
