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Inocarpus fagifer
Also called Tahitian Chestnut, Tahiti Chestnut, Ironwood
1 NParks heritage tree in Singapore: Found in Singapore Botanic Gardens, behind Jacob Ballas Children's Garden Carpark
Inocarpus fagifer is a medium-sized evergreen tropical tree from the Pacific and Southeast Asia, grown for its edible seed kernels. It needs a hot, humid lowland climate with plenty of rain and tolerates a wide range of soils, including wet and saline ones.
Inocarpus fagifer, commonly known as the Tahitian chestnut or Polynesian chestnut, is a species of flowering plant in the subfamily Faboideae of the legume family, Fabaceae. The tree has a wide range in the tropics of the south-west Pacific and south-east Asian regions, and a history of traditional use by the peoples of Polynesia and Melanesia. It is the only edible and culturally important member of the genus Inocarpus.
The Tahitian chestnut grows in the humid lowland tropics with a moderate to high, uniformly distributed or mainly summer rainfall of 1,500–4,300 mm (59–169 in) annually, at altitudes ranging from 0–500 m (0–1,640 ft). It grows in a wide range of soils, including those that are highly calcareous and saline, poorly drained to waterlogged, or those with medium to very low fertility, as well as in mildly acidic to very alkaline coastal soils.
The tree has a wide variety of traditional uses, exploiting almost every part of the plant. The leaves and bark have found uses in herbal medicine, in Fiji the ivi leaves also are one of the traditional materials for thatching the bure, fallen branches serve as firewood, green wood is burned to dry copra, and the timber is used for crafts such as carvings and tool handles, as well as for building canoes and for general light construction. Young ivi leaves are used to cover food in the traditional lovo oven.
[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 Inocarpus fagifer 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.
