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For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the Western world, on the other hand, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare. The Italian merchant traveller Marco Polo saw coconuts in South Asia in the late 13th century. Among the mid-14th-century travel writings of Sir John Mandeville, there is mention of ‘Great Notes of Ynde’ (great Nuts of India). Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are clichés in the West to sell holidays, chocolate bars, fizzy drinks, and romance.

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The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk, up to 30 metres tall. This is an important source of timber for building houses and is increasingly being used as a replacement for endangered hardwoods in the furniture construction industry. The trunk is surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six metres long.

The leaves have hard veins in their centres, which, in many parts of the world, are used as brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away. Immature coconut flowers are tightly clustered among the leaves at the top of the trunk. The flower stems may be tapped for their sap to produce a drink, and the sap can also be reduced by boiling to produce a type of sugar used for cooking.

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Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer and a hard inner layer. The thick fibrous middle layer produces coconut fibre, ‘coir’, which has numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing ropes.

The woody innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds the seed. An important product obtained from the shell is charcoal, which is widely used in various industries and at home as a cooking fuel. The shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia when broken in half.

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The nutrients (endosperm) that the developing seed needs are inside the shell. Initially, endosperm was a sweetish liquid, coconut water, enjoyed as a drink, but it also provided the hormones that encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce higher yields.

As the fruit matures, the coconut water solidifies to form the brilliant white, fat-rich, edible flesh or meat. Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made into coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in different parts of the world and in cosmetics. A derivative of coconut fat, glycerine, acquired strategic importance in a quite different sphere, as Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his nitroglycerine-based invention: dynamite.

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Their biology would appear to make coconuts the great maritime voyagers and coastal colonisers of the plant world. The large, energy-rich fruits can float in water and tolerate salt but cannot remain viable indefinitely; studies suggest they can no longer germinate after about 110 days at sea. Cast onto desert island shores, with little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun, coconut seeds can germinate and root.

The air pocket in the seed, created as the endosperm solidifies, protects the embryo. In addition, the fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float during the voyage stores moisture that the roots of the coconut seedling can take up as it starts to grow.

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There have been centuries of academic debate over the origins of the coconut. There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean or the east coast of the Americans before the voyages of the European explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. 16th-century trade and human migration patterns reveal that Arab traders and European sailors will likely have moved coconuts from South and Southeast Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic to America’s east coast.

However, the origin of coconuts discovered along the west coast of America by 16th-century sailors has been the subject of centuries of discussion. Two opposing origins have been proposed: they came from Asia or were native to America. Both suggestions have problems. In Asia, there is much coconut diversity and evidence of millennia of human use – but no relatives are growing in the wild. There are close coconut relatives in America, but no evidence that coconuts are indigenous. These problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on coral islands in the Pacific and were dispersed from there.