09 Apr Northern Ilala Palm
Ilala palms are popular trees: elephants love their fruit, as do baboons. Palm swifts nest in them, and people use their fruit for food, their leaves for weaving, and even brew a strong alcoholic drink from the plant’s sap!
These tall stately trees are common along the banks of the Zambezi River, including on islands upstream of Victoria Falls, as well as in the Hwange National Park. A close relative of this tree (the Southern Ilala palm) is found in the southern eastern lowveld and along the Limpopo River, which forms Zimbabwe’s border with South Africa.
Mature trees produce large quantities of round fruits, each a little smaller than a tennis ball, which grow in large clusters near the crown of the tree, which can reach over 15m (49ft) in height.
The Ilala palm is of considerable economic importance to people who also use many parts of the tree for traditional medicine and fiber used in weaving.
The fruit, which has a nutritious fibrous outer pulp, also has a very hard kernel known as “vegetable ivory” which can be carved into trinkets. Fibers from the leaves are used to weave baskets, hats, or mats, which, although widely used in everyday life by rural communities, are also an important source of income in tourist areas.
Some lodges employ local weavers to create items for use in their décor, while others buy directly from local markets.
Elephants relish the fruit, which, if it is out of reach, they knock to the ground by vigorously shaking the palm. Although the pulp of the fruit is digested, the hard vegetable ivory kernel remains and can often be seen in piles of elephant dung.
The northern Ilala palm is also found in Angola, northern Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, and Mozambique.
