The saying is that when you see lots of sugarpalm trees you know you are in Petchaburi Province. They are found more-or-less throughout Thailand but not quite in the same concentrations. Here they swarm over the floodplains with most paddyfields having one or two along their boundaries giving the landscape a very distinctive, spiky look.
The circular crown of a sugarpalm is less feathery than a coconut palm
Similar in height to the more elegant coconut palms, the sugarpalms look a bit like toilet brushes but are far more than just decoration. The saucer-sized fruit are collected and made into various desserts, whilst during the flowering season the nectar is collected daily and used to make both palm sugar and palm wine. They are also known as toddy palms and the alcoholic drink produced known as toddy wine.
A braver man than I climbing a sugarpalm to harvest the fruit
The collection of both fruit and nectar is still largely done the traditional way by brave men climbing high up bamboo poles tied to the trunks. I have considered trying it but watching them do it makes me nervous enough.
There is one place where these trees have almost become a tourist attraction. But it's so understated that only passersby are likely to visit and it's so tucked out of the way that nobody passes-by. For about one hundred metres along a small, winding backroad there is an avenue of sugarpalms tight up against the roadside. They are close together and give you a feeling of being somewhere special but in the Petchaburi-style of not being in any way loud or brash about it. It just is what it is, with no parking, no information boards and no indication of the best place to take selfies. As tourist attractions go it is very modest, almost shy, but then these are still more importantly working trees as you can see by the bamboo poles running up their trunks.
The sugarpalm avenue between the towns of Petchaburi and Thayang
From our house it is a pleasant thirty-minute cycle ride where all the other sugarpalms dotted around the ricefields are a continuous prelude to this avenue. It took me longer than that to find it on GoogleEarth! It would be nice to be able to call it a tunnel but their crowns don't really reach far enough to form a canopy. It's almost like something you would expect to find planted along the access drive to a mansion but in a more working-agricultural style.
Our local crows have chosen sugarpalms as their communal roost
Being so tall and rigid with lots of crevices, sugarpalms are popular places for birds to both roost and make their nests in. They are fairly safe from predators up there and the sugarpalms on the edge of our garden are always used by nesting myna birds. Plus there is a roost of thousands of crows not far away.
They are also very popular as a roosting place for insectivorous yellow house bats, which can form colonies of thousands in a single tree. In Cambodia some farmers encourage these bats by protecting them from disturbance and providing extra roosting spaces up in the crowns. They then collect the bat guano from the ground below and sell it as highly valued fertiliser. It can be enough on its own for them to earn a living.
Sugarpalm couple - female with fruit on the left, male with flowers on the right
The sugarpalms of Petchaburi are so highly valued and cared for that I don't expect the landscape to change much in the foreseeable future. Elsewhere there may be a rush for larger, more efficient fields but here nobody wants to lose the sugarpalms and the avenue is going to remain, waiting for the occasional visitor.
