Coco-de-Mer or Double Coconut
or Coco Fesse or Seychelles nut
The Coco de mer tree
"Frontside"
"Backside"
The Coco-de-Mer palm produces the largest seed in the world and is endemic to only two of the 115 Seychelle Islands. The plants have separate sexes and thus there are male trees and female trees. These large seeds may weigh up to 50 pounds and have historically been found floating in the Indian Ocean, being known to explorers long before the parent plants were discovered. They were originally named only from floating seeds; erroneously thought to have originated in the Maldive Islands, they were assigned the scientific name "maldivica".
In days of old it was rarely found washed ashore on the coast of India and viewed as the female counterpart to the shankara stones on Hindu alters. It was also used as a medicine and as an aphrodisiac.
Today, the seed is so valuable and coveted by so many that it's chances of being allowed to fall into water and drift away have to be extremely small!
Lodoicea maldivica
Coco D'Amour $ 30
The following information regarding the Coco-de-mer is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Coco de mer (Lodoicea maldivica (J. F. Gmelin) Persoon, Arecaceae) is a palm tree that grows on the islands of Praslin and Curieuse in the Seychelles. It is the sole member of the genus Lodoicea.
Its fruit, weighing up to 22 kg and measuring up to 50 cm across, contains the double coconut, which is the largest seed in the world, and is so called because it has two lobes each resembling a coconut. It is an example of a sea-bean or drift seed, which is a seed that is designed to be dispersed by the sea. It is also called the coco fesse, sea coconut and Seychelles nut.
The sailors who first saw the double coconut floating in the sea imagined that it resembled a woman's disembodied buttocks. This fanciful association is reflected in one of the plant's archaic botanical names, Lodoicea callypige Comm. ex J. St.-Hil., in which callipyge is from Greek words meaning 'beautiful rump'. Other botanical names used in the past include Lodoicea sechellarum Labill. and Lodoicea sonneratii (Giseke) Baill. Until the true source of nut was discovered in 1768, it was believed by many to grow on a mythical tree at the bottom of the sea. The coco de mer is now a rare protected species.
The genus name is from Lodoicus, the Latinised form of Louis, in honour of King Louis XV of France.
Natural Coco de Mer $ 1000
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