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.
Oraniopsis is a genus of flowering plant in the palm family Arecaceae that is endemic to Queensland, Australia. It contains only one species, Oraniopsis appendiculata, commonly known as grey palm or Orania palm. It is a very slow-growing tree restricted to mountain rainforest in the Wet Tropics bioregion. It was first described in 1891 and its closest relatives occur in Madagascar and South America.
Seed germination is a lengthy process, to a year or more, with some seeds resisting germination to four years. Cracking the shell might assist the process, but it has been shown that bottom heat is ineffective. The grey palm is exceptionally slow-growing – after germination it remains as a stemless rosette of fronds for up to 30 years before a trunk develops. It is thought that tall specimens may be hundreds of years old.
O. apendiculata grows as an understory tree in well-developed rainforest, from the Walter Hill Range near Tully, northwards to Mount Spurgeon in the Mount Lewis National Park, and on the Atherton Tableland. It is found in creek beds and close to creeks, in very wet forests with annual rainfall totals of over 1,800 mm (70 in), usually on soils based on granite or metamorphics. The altitudinal range is from 80 to 1,600 m (260 to 5,250 ft), but it is rare beneath about 400 m (1,300 ft).
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Oraniopsis by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
