Varieties and Forms of the Coconut

Abstract

The Country of Origin:The coconut belongs to the family of palms viz.,Palmaceae.It is a very useful tree cultivated by man from very ancient times.De Candolle and and others consider the Indian Archipelago to be the original home of the coconut.It is a unique species in respect of the characters of the stem and the nut and is very much unlike any - other known species of Cocos.The coconut stads in a class by itsel.There are some thirty species of Cocos and all these are wild in native America,though some of them have been brought under cultivation for ornamental purposes If all - the known species of Cocos have an American origin,it is difficult to explain how the coconut alone originated in the Indian Archipelago:and some (Bailey 1927)belive that America is the home of the coconut.By some others.the millions of years old fossil coconut of New-Zealand which is of the size of an arecanut is considered to be the progenitor of the present -day coconut.The consensus of opinion.however,regarding the origin is that the Indian Archiplago should be the origit al home of the coconut.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.194970

Pages

349 - 366

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords