Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

DESCRIPTION OF CACAO TREE 5 and frail, and, like most tropical flowers, have no scent. The eye has to seek for cacao-flowers, but when found, one admires them for their pale-pink and yellow colour and delicate form. They grow in tufts or clusters and have five yellow petals on a rose-coloured calyx. To the astonishment of the visitor from England, these flowers do not grow on the ends of the twigs, but spring only from the trunk and main branches of the tree.1 The flowers usually grow from a cushion or boss in the bark, and may sometimes be found on the trunk not a foot from the ground. One’s ignorance might be excused if one mistook them for a novel kind of club moss. A full-grown tree will bear in one year over 6,000 flowers, but of these only 10 to 60 will become mature fruit. According to the Bulletin of the Imperial Institute, p. 44, 1919, “ the flowers are invariably fertilised by insects.” According to Dr. von Faber’s research, self-pollination is the rule. Judging from these figures, whatever the method, fertilisation does not take place very completely, nor do wind or other agents in cross-fertilisation appear to be very effective. The writer once ventured to suggest that the planter might pollinate the flowers with a brush and thereby materially increase the yield. One authority pointed out that this might be difficult to apply on a large scale, and further, one cannot force nature, and the apparently needless waste was to prevent over-taxing the energy of the tree. Another authority has written that “ many cases have been observed where numerous and very large clusters of young cacao fruits have begun to set, but where the local food supplies appear to have been 1 The writers of modern scientific text-books are not always aware of this faet. There is an amusing drawing of a branch of a^eacao tree in Confectioners’ Raw Materials, by James Grant 2— (I463e)