Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time | Hacker News Reader

Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time

apnews.com

212 points165944709146 comments

The URL originally submitted is longer and more detailed than the AP article, but some HN readers question the quality of the writing and the origin of the photos. We've made the AP article the main URL, but I'm posting this comment with the original URL so readers can read it if interested to learn more.

https://en.jardineriaon.com/The-talipot-palm-trees-of-Rio-de...

I lived in flamengo for a number of years and would pass by these trees often although admittedly never knew this about them.

One thing that always struck me in park were the sheer diversity of palms. There are really beautiful shapes and sizes. That whole stretch along the beach and highway is just incredible with the forethought of designing and planting such wonderful species of plants, beyond the trees mentioned in the article.

Also as an anecdote my favorite thing in the Flamengo beach park is an abandoned marionette theater filled with stray cats. The cats were very friendly and the community would come and take care of them. I would go as often as I could and often thought of one as my own.

Copacabana is way more famous, but Flamengo in my opinion is probably the top beach in Rio.

This perspective suggests limited direct experience with Grumari beach [1]

[1] - https://www.mountainproject.com/area/202035833/grumari

For me the central location of Flamengo adds a lot of value. You can live in an apartment with ocean views, have a great beach without crowds, excellent restaurants, and easy public transportation and access to highway that lets you visit either further south down Botafogo way or north towards downtown. Perfectly situated. Little to no crowds and mostly locals.

For me personally, I generally dislike those neighborhoods around the south zone. I feel very unsafe (more so at nighttime) and I never get used to that smell.

Also I find it a huge plus when beaches have no electricity nearby nor buildings as a backdrop. (Florianópolis gets a massive thumbs up for these)

It’s quite nice, unfortunately the bay gets more polluted as you go north. So full swimming at Flamengo beach is not recommended.

Some comments saying there was not even a single picture but for me there was a picture almost immediately near the top of the article so not sure why others are not seeing it.

This is a neat story I can only imagine those who have lived there their entire lives and had no idea that this would one day happen. What a amazing treat for them.

I have recently became interested in palm trees. I know a person who immigrated from Slovakia to here in Western Canada many years ago. In her front yard stands a beautiful palm tree probably around 18 or so feet tall. Seeing how we get snow here every year and always associated palm trees with warmer climates I didn’t think they could actually do so well. The couple I came across in the past were very small and the owner stated that he needs to cover them every winter to keep them safe. According to this lady with the big palm she never did that. She said her family member brought seeds from Slovakia years ago and they just started them inside and planted it outside when small and it survived the cold months no protection.

Now I eagerly want to try grow a palm tree myself. Her tree has a few big bunches of seeds hanging on but I have no clue when they are due to fall. And due to this ladies age she forgets exactly when the seeds drop also but that they turn a kind of orangish color first. So I keep watch hoping I will catch some once they fall. It is just a neat looking tree and hers seems to be very hardy I hope I can continue the life of this tree and the memory of this lady by planting my own.

The first image for me was some spam about palm reading

"very interesting palm....I see a pool in your future"

uBlock Origin! Years and years of not seeing spam like that.

I remember when a Century tree appeared in my balcony a few years ago [0]. It grew something like 8 meters in a single month. It was fascinating.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27375835

Ah! I remember that! If I ever see one in that phase I'd love to set up a time lapse...

After my initial thoughts of curiosity and admiration, I couldn't help but ponder how they now have to deal with a bunch of dead 30-meter tall trees in an urban area. Almost makes the landscape architect from the 60's seem a bit like a passive-aggressive practical joker. "Oh, how pretty! And this is the only time they will bloom because now they're going to... oh sh*t."

my first initial thoughts when i visit very big cities with dozens of skyscrapers is how the proletariat still deals with a bunch of millionaires and billionaires seeing the clouds under their hard work /s

you gotta go to Brasilia and check Niemeyer's huuuuge empty concrete/grass spaces on a city that almost reaches 40°C on summer and it's basically warm all year. trimming and taking care of these trees must be a joy

Well we're good enough at killing living trees, I can't imagine disposing of dead ones poses much of a burden

They just cut them down in segments using a bucket truck to bring down the segments one at a time or use rope rigging and pulleys to lower them by friction hitch device.

“Tree rigging” is the term to search for. It’s generally less annoying to remove a century plant than a tree because there isn’t a huge stump or root system to deal with, and once they die they start to dehydrate and lose weight rapidly. The trick is to do it before they start falling over.

All trees die at some point. Poplar trees are super popular as urban ornamental trees and they only last for 50 years. Upkeep is just the reality of landscaping.

https://archive.is/nB3IU

Wow, the matter which deserves one sentence is expanded to hundreds, with dozens of ads. Also they had to add emotional flavor, calling the tree as mother tree that dies off after flowering. Slop of some kind.

I saw about a dozen ads, and not a single photo of the trees and the bloom. Bravo.

was also confused why the site had exactly 0 images of anything. (i use dns ad blocking)

anyhoos: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tguSVmcMux8

It seems to be blogspam from the Spain-based Actualidad Blog network.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/actualidad-blog

IA has a capture of the site[0]; the first and only photo in the archived version of TFA appears to be a cropped version of one sourced to AP ([1] photo 2 in the carousel), and it is entirely uncredited in TFA.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20251214073005/https://en.jardin...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/brazil-rio-talipot-palm-flamengo-...

Other reporting I dug up reference the AP and also Reuters as sources for the story.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/once-in-a-lifet...

Ironically the UX on Reuters and AP wasn’t hugely worse than the blogspam: * the text of the blogspam is pretty faithful to the AP article * Reuters had a fullscreen paywall * the AP had a floating video ad and an interstitial you have to click to get below the fold

I don't know if "blogspam" is fair. This article seems to contain a significant amount of original content that is not lifted/rewritten from elsewhere. The photos do seem to be taken from the AP article without acknowledgement, which is not ideal, but I guess that's for them to worry about.

Overall I think it's an interesting enough topic to warrant HN front page placement, and this is the most extensive article about it. We'd be happy to switch to a different source if someone can recommend a better one.

IMO the article reads like it was written by a high schooler trying to reach a page count. It has original content, but it rehashes the same points many times, is short on actual substance, and doesn't have a clear point.

I think it may be language thing but sure, we've switched it to the AP story.

While poking around on other pages from the same .en subdomain of TFA on archive.org, I found error pages from GTranslate (Google Translate?) which could explain the weird formatting and language issues.

I don't mean to disparage the site by calling it blogspam, but I do take your point. Thanks for your efforts and for your gentle nudging; I will seek to be more expressive and less judgemental.

Odd. I run noscript, so no javascript was running. I use ublock as well. I saw a number of photos. What's your setup?

On the other hand, the random bold lines makes it seem AI generated. Dunno.

Invest in an ad blocker.

Do these ad sites make money?

It adds up when you run several dozens, they run a whole ring of spam

- http://www.abinternet.es

- https://www.actualidadblog.com/

Better link https://apnews.com/article/brazil-rio-talipot-palm-flamengo-...

OK, after much debate, we've re-pointed the URL to this from https://en.jardineriaon.com/The-talipot-palm-trees-of-Rio-de...

Odd the other comment(tree) is collapsed? I liked the article and the pictures of the palm trees(plants) are cool.

I still need to go see them! Here's hoping I don't procrastinate it too much.

It is so hot in Rio de Janeiro right now. We've had nothing but hazy, humid, UV-infested mornings. Can't wait to spend summer somewhere else. I miss the especially mild winter season we have.

An annual, except for every x years where x is greater than 1. Or am I missing something? Why is this interesting? Many plants only bloom once before dying.

Edit: for those of you unfamiliar with the term, an annual only blooms once a year before dying. This is opposed to a perennial.

Not annual, only once

In agriculture, annual crops are crops that you have to plant annually. For example corn - the plant dies after producing its fruit, and you have to plant new corn seeds.

In contrast, perrenial crops are those you can harvest every year without having to plant new ones. For example, strawberries don't die after bearing fruit, you can collect fruit over and over from the same plant.

> Its most striking, and at the same time most dramatic, feature is that it is a monocarpic species: It only blooms once, at the end of its life, and then it dies.This moment can occur between 40 and 80 years of age, depending on climatic conditions, soil type, and the amount of sunlight the plant has received over the decades. All of the plant's energy is then concentrated into a single reproductive burst.

It is of interest because these palms only bloom once in their entire lifetime and then they perish. This has relevance to us all, because it’s literally a once in a lifetime event, and a beautiful one at that. Imagine spending your entire life storing energy for your one and only act of reproduction, and then dying.

Plants are beautiful systems, and for those of us who pay attention there are is lots of beauty in the way they work.

Very common crops do this, like wheat, corn, barley, and all other cereal crops. The special thing here is much more the huge timespan, and the human connection to those that planted these and never had a hope of seeing their most spectacular moment.

The biggest thing is the spectacle of the flowers themselves, and the reflection on time passing for humans given by such a long time span between when the palm is planted and when this spectacle can be observed.

There's also the spectacle of seeing so many once in 40-80 years blooms happen at once - which the article doesn't touch on, but is an awe-inspiring look into how regular biology can be, despite us thinking of it as messy and random. You'd tend to think that over such a long timespan, the trees would get "de-synchronized". Of course, that wouldn't make sense evolutionarily - they almost certainly need to all bloom at once to have a good chance of reproduction. But getting a biological process to happen 80 years from now on the same day/week for dozens(?) of trees across a park is a marvel in itself.

And that's across a park. Let me tell you about gregarious flowering of certain bamboo species, which are synchronised all over the world. They bloom at the same time. Nature is a deeply commited eccentric :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom

There was some math joke that zero, one and infinity were OK, but the rest of the natural numbers were weird and hard to justify ...

The general term for plants that set seed once is monocarp. Most famously agave and bamboo, among plants with cycles longer than two years.

For plants like bamboos, they're interesting because the periods can be quite long, over a hundred years in some cases, so it's simply rare to see them in flower, and due to how they're propagated and how they keep time, you sometimes see a mass worldwide flowering and die off followed by a shortage of that plant.

It's a much rarer reproductive strategy than annual, biennial, or perennial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com