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Raphia
Also called Raphia Palms
Raphia is a genus of about twenty palm species from tropical Africa, especially Madagascar, plus one species (R. taedigera) in Central and South America. They are large palms with the longest leaves of any plant, and each plant flowers once and then dies.
Raffia palms are members of the genus Raphia. The Malagasy name rafia is derived from fia "to squeeze juice". The genus contains about twenty species of palms native to tropical regions of Africa, and especially Madagascar, with one species (R. taedigera) also occurring in Central and South America. R. taedigera is the source of raffia fibers, which are the veins of the leaves, and this species produces a fruit called "brazilia pods", "uxi nuts" or "uxi pods".
They grow up to 16 metres (52 ft) tall and are remarkable for their compound pinnate leaves, the longest in the plant kingdom; leaves of R. regalis up to 25 metres (82 ft) long and 3 metres (9.8 ft) wide are known. The plants are monocarpic, meaning that they flower once and then die after the seeds are mature.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Raffia palm 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.
