Brazilian landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx (the long-forgotten 5th Marx brother after Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo) designed a park in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. And look out! Palm trees he planted there all that time ago are just now flowering!
The life of a palm tree can run between 40 and 80 years, but it's not until almost the end of its days that a palm shoots out a central plume all full of millions of tiny white blossoms high above its leaves.
People passing by Flamengo Park in Rio are simply entranced, and they're making a point of going to see the blossoms and take lots of photos.
This particular type of tree is the talipot palm. They originally came from India and Sri Lanka and can grow as tall as 98 feet high. All that reproductive energy over all those decades allows the tree to produce like 25 million flowers when it finally gets around to it.
Aline Saavedra, a biologist at Rio de Janeiro State University, says these trees are happy to live in that "Brazilian rhythm of daylight" so popular in movies such as "Blame It On Rio."
And in case you were getting ideas about corralling a couple of talipots for your back yard, environmental laws say you can't, so just run on down to the local nursery and be happy to get a Loblolly pine, a tree that allows you to walk around your yard saying "Loblolly" a lot.
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