Here is a link to my friend's website that has pictures an a descriptioin of the plant in question: http://smallislandnotes.blogspot.com/2008/07/pano-on-2.html Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
Just a suggestion.... please would Richard go and look at the whole plant and take more photos of the flowers. Could it possibly be the terminal flower of a wild banana (Musa) with an immature banana inside. Apparently wild bananas have many more black seeds than the cultivated ones that we buy in the shops. See...... http://www2.wabash.edu/blog/images/musa fl.JPG Pic is Musa x paradisiaca Of course this could be a million miles out!!!!!
Actually no, the plant in the last photo of the page is the actual plant itself that produces the bud/fruit and Richard describes the leaves as "Lily-like". The bud itself grows out of the ground at the root/stem juncture. I tried for several hours to search through archives on the net with no luck whatsoever.
Taking a look at the plant again I think it resembles in some ways a few species of ornamental gingers but I have not heard of one that produced an edible bud like this, much less one that is sweet and eaten as "candy" by the local population. Thoughts anyone?
How about Zingiber rubens. See.... http://images.google.com/imgres?img...microsoft:en-gb:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7SUNA&sa=N
I think that is getting very close. It could be Z. Rubens, but the seed bracts are described as spicy and it's home range is Eastern Himalayas and NE India. The plant we are trying to identify is located on Siargao Island which is between Leyte and Mindanao on the Pacific coast of the Southern Philippines and the seed bract is described as sweet. Perhaps it is an as yet unidentified Zinziber....
I found this site with a photo that looks like the fruit in question. Pano-on - a forest epiphyte. http://www.coconutstudio.com/Strange Fruit.htm
Right, I am trying to get some assistance in identifying it for Richard. He actually has a lot of plants he's collected there but has no idea what they are. He enjoys tracking it down but from time to time asks for assistance so I post here. Last one I posted here was a species of Dischidia that was only recently identified so someone beat him to it, but since the Philippines has not been catalogued very well with respect to it's flora and fauna and he has an eye for the unusual, I think he just may find a new species.
Bluewing, Richard Parker has his name on both sites. seattleman1969. Naturally, it may well be a newly found plant, however I would still suggest a pic with the flowers on should be posted.The pics on here show the seed and plant after flowering. One I read about flowered underground, praps this is like that.
In my research I found a species with some very similar properties but again it is not the same species. Aframomum melegueta forms a bud that has seed bracts tightly packed inside, however, the bud is not separated, it forms a a single fleshy pod rather than overlapping pedals and I could not find a picture of the actual leaf/stem structure for comparison. Maybe a clue moving forward in identifying this species. Thanks for all your input thus far!
Richard, you have piqued my interest. Growing up in Borneo, during our forays into the jungle by our house, we learnt to recognise a lot of plants, and fruits. And we ate quite a few of them. One of them is a fruit similar to the one shown on this post. As I recall, the plants resemble ginger, with rhisomes. But the rhizomes did not have the aroma of ginger. The fruits consist of seeds surrounded by a muciginous material. It's the muciginous material that we suck and enjoy, spitting out the seeds. To this day, I have no idea what the botanical ID of that plant is.
