Madagascar Palm - Pachypodium lamerei

I first encountered the Madagascar palm (which is not really a palm) at the Tirso de Molino botanical garden in Torremolinos, Spain. It is a very striking plant (I´m not sure you can call it a tree??) that looks like the cross between a cactus and a palm. As you can see from the image above it has some down right wicked thorns! One website that sells seeds for this pseudo palm is rarepalmseeds.com . They also have a lot of information about palm trees in general.

The images with the flowers are from a park in Benalmadena (the next town over from Torremolinos). This one was about 6 feet tall while the ones in Torremolinos were about 7-8 feet tall.
The picture below reminds me of an upside down octopus that is grasping a clump of seaweed in each tentacle.

You can kind of see why this plant got named a palm although if you look at it up close it really has very little resemblance to a palm.


3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the comment! We had fun with it. Interesting blog topic :)

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  2. Wow, that's a wonderful pachypodium you got there. I have some too and it's recently bloomed, great plant. Good Growing!

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  3. My pachypodium is ten years old, about one metre tall, in a pot and spends the summer outside here in London and the winters in a heated dining room - beside south facing french windows.

    I was careless about bringing it inside at the end of last autumn, and it caught an early but quite severe frost. The leaves died immediately and now I'm worried that the whole plant will have been damaged.

    Any thoughts or advive?

    Cheers

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