Paul Moss

There's a new site in Rio de Janeiro that's pulling in the crowds, a giant palm tree.

What's so special, you may ask?

Well, this particular species is native to southern India and Sri Lanka and was replanted in the Brazilian city 60 years ago.

And all these decades later, the tree is for the first time producing flowers.

Professor Bill Baker is an expert on palms at Kew Botanic Gardens in London.

had explained why this tree, and indeed its sudden transformation into bloom, is so special.

It's really one of the natural wonders of the world.

It is an absolutely immensely enormous palm tree.

It has a trunk that can be almost a metre wide and it shoots up a stem of about 25 metres with a crown of massive fan-shaped leaves.

Each of those leaves is about five metres in diameter.

And then it has this astonishing flowering strategy whereby after decades of just growing trunk and leaves, it suddenly switches over to reproduction and produces what we would call the largest inflorescence or the largest flower bearing structure in the plant kingdom.

and it does it just once, so it's a fatal effort.

We think it's a strategy probably to deal with the fact that it grows in relatively disturbed environments, so by producing massive amounts of flower and then seeds all in one explosive effort, you have a higher chance of colonising these disturbed environments in which it lives.

The really amazing thing about it is that

Palm tree expert Professor Bill Baker.

In her six-decade-long career, the British actor Dame Helen Mirren has won many top awards, an Oscar, Golden Globes, five Emmys and a Tony Award for roles too numerous to mention.

But you probably haven't seen or heard her like this before, unless you live in Italy.

In that 2021 video, she appeared with an Italian comedian, encouraging people to get vaccinated against Covid.

It was filmed at her farmhouse in Salento, in the southernmost Italian region of Puglia.

She spent a good part of the last 18 years there, becoming part of the local community and campaigning to save the local olive groves, which are suffering from a rare virus.