Why the coconut palm is nature’s most useful tree

Many of us who live along the coast take the coconut palm for granted, without appreciating just how amazing it is, though it has been accorded religious and cultural respect — thus you will ritualistically break a coconut before starting a ceremony, say, a wedding, or taking delivery of a new car. Growing tall and slim up to 30 metre (100 feet), it can live up to 100 years, producing around 80 nuts a year. Dwarf varieties have been developed, these reaching 8 metre high as have been in-between hybrids and others with a still greater yield of nuts.

The tree’s major USP has got to be its nut, which actually is a drupe, and not a nut. Protected by a helmet-hard outer shell, its pure white interior (the endosperm) may be full of the most delicious fresh sweet water, so full of electrolytes that it is said, doctors have used it as IV fluid in times of crisis. Its flesh, the ‘meat’, may be soft and silken (‘malai’ or cream), or hard and crunchy — with a healthy helping of fat and delicious as a snack. The dried flesh is called ‘copra’. We’ve put the nut to myriad uses: crushed for oil, to cook with or massage into our skin and hair, as ‘milk’ so useful for tempering a fiery fish curry, to ferment into liquor (Feni here in Goa) and vinegar. Each nut may hold around 500 ml of sweet water and it’s amazing to think of the process by which the tree produces this, living as it does in such a saline environment.

Coconut cultivation and its relative industries have supported people in over 93 countries around the world, especially in coastal and tropical regions.

The giant 4-to-6-metre pinnate leaves or fronds have been used for roofing and the hard outer shell for making charcoal and decorative items. The fibrous husk is used for making coir and may be so flammable that several airlines have banned them from their flights.

The tree itself is a marvel of natural engineering: how it survives gale-force winds and hurricanes have always amazed us for they are often the only trees left standing after a cyclone or hurricane (such as the cyclone ‘Val’ that struck Samoa with windspeeds of 260 kmph in 1991). A sea-loving species, it fixes itself in the soft sandy soil by a cluster of 2,000 to 4,000 strong fibrous rootlets spreading out from its base — it has no tap root — with just a couple of the roots digging deep to provide anchorage. The trunk, tapering slightly as it ascends, is itself elastic, flexible and fibrous and not made of typical hardwood as is that of other trees and so does not snap in high winds. The fronds let the wind whistle through them and at their base, are elastic too. stretching when the wind blows and reverting to their original shape to optimally catch the sunlight, when it drops. They are equipped with unique stretchy sheaths full of strong fibrous lignin (which is a strong natural polymer that acts like a ‘glue’ in plant cell walls, providing rigidity and strength). The tree bends and sways with the wind, and doesn’t fight it head on, reverting to its normal shape when the storm abates; the wind in fact, helping it to shed its nuts, each of which can weigh nearly 1.5 kg. The entire tree (except the very top) leans towards the sea to help deposit its nuts into the waves and send them floating away to some distant shore where they can germinate.

You can best appreciate the tree during a storm. While other trees thrash about wildly, shedding all dignity and huge branches, and sometimes keeling over entirely, the graceful coconut palm simply swings with the rhythm of the wind, bending nearly double at times. And when peace descends, it’s back again, tall and stately as ever.

Of course, the tree has ‘predators’, chiefly bacteria and viruses, apart from the giant coconut crab which can make short work even of that helmet shell. But that ‘nut’ is worth its weight in gold; if you are recovering from an illness, you can be sure your doctor will advise you to have ‘narial paani’(coconut water). And then of course, there are those two great balladeers who endorse that: Harry Belafonte and Edmundo Ros. As Belafonte sings: Get your coconut water (coconut)/Man, it’s good for your daughter (coconut)/Coco got a lot of iron (coconut)/Make you strong like a lion (coconut)/….The thing’s that best when you’re feeling glum/Is coconut water with a little rum…

And Edmundo Ros reiterates: At the medical centre what do you think?/My doctor told me I had to drink/He said take my advice me lad/Why don’t you go back to Trinidad/Where you can get your gin and coconut water/That is the tonic man/Gin and coconut water, gin and coconut water/You cannot buy it in America…

Salute!