The Beginning of the End...the blooming of a lifetime.

Common name:Talipot Palm, Bajarbattu बजरबट्टू (Hindi), Sritalam (Telugu), Tali (Bengali), Talipot (Marathi), Kudappana (Malayalam), Kudaippanai (Tamil)

Botanical name: Corypha umbraculifera Family: Arecaceae (palm family)

Native to South India and Srilanka, Talipot Palm is one of the largest palms in the world; individual specimens have reached heights of up to 25 m, with stems up to 1.3 m in diameter. It is a fan palm with large palmate leaves up to 5 m in diameter, with a petiole up to 4 m, and up to 130 leaflets. The Talipot palm bears the largest inflorescence of any plant, 6-8 m long, consisting of one to several million small flowers borne on a branched stalk that forms at the top of the trunk. The Talipot palm is monocarpic, flowering only once, when it is 30 to 80 years old. It takes about a year for the fruit to mature, producing thousands of round yellow-green fruit 3-4 cm diameter, containing a single seed. The plant dies after fruiting. The Talipot palm is cultivated throughout southeast Asia, north to southern China. Historically, the leaves were written upon in various Southeast Asian cultures using an iron stylus to create palm leaf manuscripts. The leaves are also used for thatching, and the sap is tapped to make palm wine.

Palm leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. They were used to record actual and mythical narratives in South Asia and in South East Asia. It was the paper of the ancient world. Initially knowledge was passed down orally, after the invention of alphabets in South Asia, people eventually began to write them down in dried palm leaves of Palmyra palm or talipot palm. Once written down, each document had limited time frame before which the document had to be rewritten or copied onto new sets of dried palm leaves. With the spreading of Indian culture to South-East Asia countries such as Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia are also are home to a collection of documents in Palm leaves. With the addition of printing presses in the early 19th century this cycle of copying from palm leaves has come to an end. Many governments are making efforts to preserve what is left of the palm leaves documents.

Thatching is the craft of covering a roof with dry vegetation such as palm leaves,straw, water reed, sedge, rushes and heather, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away from the inner roof. It is probably the oldest roofing material and has been used in both tropical and temperate climates. Thatch is still employed by builders in developing countries, usually with low-cost, local vegetation. By contrast in some developed countries it is now the choice of well-to-do people who want their home to have a rustic look.

Palm Wine also called Palm Toddy or simply Toddy is an alcoholic beverage created from the sap of various species of palm tree such as Talipot Palm, Palmyra Palm, Coconut tree etc,. [1]. This drink is particularly common in various parts of Asia and Africa with different names such as Legmi in Africa[2], as Kallu in South India (particularly Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa, Kerala and Tamil Nadu (కల్లు in Telugu, கள்ளு in Tamil, കള്ള് in Malayalam), as Bahar (Dusunic languages) and 'Goribon' (Rungus language) in Sabah(a state in Borneo), as Tuba in Philippines. Toddy is also consumed in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and in Colima(a state in western Mexico).
in Colima(a state in western Mexico).

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