Revisiting Katou-Indel in Seventeenth-century botanical treatise Hortus Malabaricus yields new finds for researchers
The brand new palm species Phoenix roxburghii
| Photograph Credit score: Particular association
A palm initially described within the monumental Seventeenth-century botanical treatise Hortus Malabaricus continues to fascinate botanists greater than three centuries later, resulting in the invention of a brand new species and the reclassification of current ones.
Latest research on the palm, named Katou-Indel within the Hortus Malabaricus, Hendrik van Rheede’s work on the flora of the Malabar coast, have led researchers to conclude that the timber present in Kerala and Sri Lanka and elsewhere in India and neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan are two distinct species of the genus Phoenix.
A workforce from the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Backyard and Analysis Institute (JNTBGRI) at Palode in Thiruvananthapuram and the Botanical Survey of India (BSI), Kolkata, has confirmed that van Rheede’s Katou-Indelis certainly Phoenix sylvestris, native to Kerala and Sri Lanka. In doing so, they’ve additionally reclassified three different Phoenix species as Phoenix sylvestris.
A serious growth is the identification of the palm discovered on India’s japanese coast and Bangladesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Pakistan as a brand new species. The researchers have named it Phoenix roxburghii after William Roxburgh, thought-about the daddy of Indian Botany.
Rising 12 to 16 metres tall, Phoenix roxburghii shares morphological similarities with Phoenix sylvestris, however differs by its taller solitary trunk, bigger leaves and leaflets, musty-scented staminate flowers and bigger, obovoid orange-yellow fruits, in keeping with a paper on the findings titled ‘Revisiting Rheede’s ‘Katou-Indel’ and the invention of a brand new species of Phoenix (household Arecaceae) from India,’ revealed within the scientific journal Phytotaxa.
What prompted the JNTBGRI and BSI researchers to take a better take a look at Katou-Indel was an remark made by the Nineteenth-century Botanist William Griffith that, “the fruits figured in Hortus Malabaricus (3: t 22–25) could be very a lot smaller and of a unique form than it’s in Bengal, at the least in unhurt timber,” E.S. Santhosh Kumar of the JNTBGRI, one of many authors of the paper, instructed The Hindu.
A collage of pictures displaying elements of Phoenix sylvestris:
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular association
Hendrik van Rheede, the Governor of Dutch Malabar, compiled the medicinal properties of the flora of Malabar coast in Hortus Malabaricus with the help of the doctor Itty Achudan. The work in 12 volumes was translated into English by Ok.S. Manilal, who devoted 35 years to researching the work, greater than three centuries later.
Over time, Katou-Indel – a reputation which has its origins in Malayalam – has been subjected to many classifications. It was Roxburgh who coined ‘Phoenix sylvestris’ within the Nineteenth century. Of their paper, the JNTBGRI-BSI analysis workforce have confirmed it as such. They’ve additionally reclassified three totally different Phoenix species – P. pusilla, P.farinifera, and P. zeylanica – as the identical as Phoenix sylvestris, a brief palm that grows 3.5 metres to five.5 metres tall.
The opposite authors embody Joemon Jacob, N. Mohanan, Ok.C. Kariyappa and S. Suresh from the JNTBGRI and S.S. Hameed from the BSI.
Printed – August 16, 2025 03:47 pm IST
