Coontie

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Zamia integrifolia

Zamiaceae

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Thank you to Pat Bowman for suggesting today’s topic and for providing resources to boot.  One of South Florida’s most curious plants is the Cycad known as Coontie.   The curiosity begins with being a Cycad, the only one in the U.S.  Cycads are living fossils dating to the time of dinosaurs associated mostly with the Southern Hemisphere.  Most look like big ferns or small palms, although they are unrelated to both.  Cycads have no flowers, but rather seeds in cones, on separate male and female individuals.   

Coontie female cone

The Coontie cones are pollinated by beetles who live their entire lives in the male cones, except when they visit the female cones.  And speaking of insects, Coonties are essentially the exclusive hosts to the beautiful Atala Butterfly and its hungry orange caterpillars.   Dependent on Coonties, the butterflies became rare as Coonties became scarce in the wild, so scarce that in the 1950s Atalas were presumed extinct.  Happily, however, the butterflies survived on one island off of Miami, and widespread Coontie cultivation has allowed the Atalas to rebound since the 1970s.  It is possible that all the Atalas now descend from that single island population, unless there were other undetected hideaways.   Why did Coonties become scarce?  In addition to standard habitat destruction, they once were a commercial source of starch.  They got dug up, ground up, and ate up.

Coontie lives naturally in Florida and Georgia into the Caribbean, with its classification and original range both are a little bit murky, probably by being moved around by pre-European peoples who harvested starch from the big chunky subterranean stems (“roots”) long before Europeans arrived.   Isolating the starch is not easy due to dangerous toxins.   

Grinding Coontie

The plant produces some of the poisons directly, and other toxins perhaps come from symbiotic nitrogen-fixing Cyanobacteria (Blue Green Algae) associated with the roots.   Detox required cutting and pulverizing the root followed by extensive washing, at least sometimes in a running stream, sometimes involving boiling, followed by straining to separate the starch from the pulpy residue.  The starch flour was shaped into cakes and sun-dried. The pulp became fertilizer.

All dug up

European settlers got in on Coontie starch, ultimately on a commercial scale with Coontie mills around the Miami area from the 1830s to somewhat beyond 1900.   The starch was shipped far and wide as “Florida Arrowroot” for cookies, biscuits, pasta, army food, and laundry.   The problem is, Coontie was not farmed but rather dug in massive quantities from the wild,  not a sustainable practice.  It became scarce, and also illegal in the 1920s due to fears of accidental poisoning.   The last Florida Arrowroot factory succumbed to the “Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.”

Coontie mill near Miami

Happily, the plant is attractive and grows well in plant nurseries, and has become a popular landscaping choice:   slow-growing, ferny-looking, tough, and not very demanding.  Around Palm Beach County, except where introduced, you don’t often see it growing wild, but there is plenty in front of stores, in median strips, and around homes, including mine.  Some landscape plants are merely pretty, but Coontie is fun to think about on each encounter:  older geologically than the flowering plants,  having the weirdest pollination system in town, and having a foodie history.   When it looks all bug-eaten in the landscape, that’s a good thing…Atala support.