Fun with Tagua nuts
William R. Duffield on the Cohansey
>I like your vase. Except for being volumetrically challenged, tagua nuts can provide results that are even superior to dogwood or holly.
There are other ways to have some more fun with tagua nuts. Some, including collecting the nuts and trying to grow your own, might be unimaginable to the typical wood turner who just picks them up off the shelf at his local Woodcraft.
The tagua nut is the seed of an otherwise very obscure palm tree, Palandra aequatorialis, that grows nowhere on Earth except on and above the Guayaquil Plain on the Pacific coast of Ecuador. The definitive book on palm trees leaves its description of this one to the last chapter.
Guayaquil is not a really popular tourist destination (imagine Newark, Camden, Gary, Oakland, etc.), but you might pass through it on your way to visit Lonesome George. In the good old days, before I got seriously into woodworking, I lived in the Gaspar Republic, and my avocation was raising various tropical monocots. During that period, my son took a trip to Ecuador. On his way out of Guayaquil, on a road up into the Andean rain forests, they spotted a Palandra in fruit, on a cliff above the road. The fruit is nearly the size of a skull, and contains a dozen or so well-protected seeds. You would have no trouble using one of them for cracking coconuts open all day long. Several fruit are found growing together, in one larger, spiked ball at the top of the trunk of the palm. This resembles nothing more than the head of a mace, but made of very hard wood and fiber, instead of iron.
They stopped to see if they could collect some seeds to bring back, so I could try to grow them. They clawed their way up the cliff, carrying machetes, hammers, and even a tire iron, to try to separate some seeds from their formidible armament. This was "one tough nut to crack", and their tools were no match for them. They had just about given up, when my son got a bright idea. He picked up the bunch of fruits they had managed to separate from the tree, and heaved it over the precipice, 30 meters down to the paved road below, where it shattered. A couple of the hunks were of manageable size to stow into his luggage.
APHIS in Miami didn't recognize the tagua nuts and fruit in the x-rays, but it piqued their curiousity enough that they ignored the orchids that were in the same bag.
The orchids grew, but the tagua nuts I planted were all stolen by the raccoons who lived in my cypress hammock. My son kept one of the fruits, which still contains several nuts, dried and rattling around inside.
