Vegetable ivory

Tagua nuts

Description

The hard, cream-colored seed of the any of several palm trees. Vegetable ivory resembles true ivory in appearance and hardness, but it has a fibrous microscopic structure. Ivory nuts were used for small carved items, buttons, cane heads, and Japanese netsuke. They accept dyes readily and can be polished to a glossy luster. Some of the vegetable ivory palms are:

- ivory nut - Phytelephas macrocarpa, found in Colombia and Ecuador

- doum palm nuts - Hyphaene thebaica, found in Africa

- tagua palm nuts - Phytelephas euqatorialis, found in South America

- apple nuts - Metroxylon amicarum, found in the South Pacific

Tagua nut piece

Synonyms and Related Terms

ivory nut; doom palm nut; gingerbread palm nut; apple nut; tagua nut; dom nut

Additional Information

J.Thornton,"The Structure of Ivory and Ivory Substitutes", AIC Preprints, Philadelphia, 1981, p.173-181.

Authority

• G.S.Brady, Materials Handbook, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1971 Comment: p. 424

• Hermann Kuhn, Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art and Antiquities, Butterworths, London, 1986

• Random House, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Grammercy Book, New York, 1997

• The American Heritage Dictionary or Encarta, via Microsoft Bookshelf 98, Microsoft Corp., 1998