December 2025

It’s early December, and a grey lid of cloud hangs over the Orkney Islands, alternately disgorging rain and sleet. Occasionally the clouds part and the extremely low angle of the sun results in the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen. Waves break across the Churchill Barriers, driven by sixty-mile-an-hour gusts. We only have daylight for six hours a day. What can you expect at 59 degrees north? In my vegetable garden, most plants have died back for the winter. The slugs have gnawed my Christmas potatoes down to the ground, and only my leeks, watercress and parsley are bravely holding out. Perhaps it’s a good time to visit, in imagination at least, the veggie patches of somewhere warmer and lighter. And I thought of babai, the Giant Swamp Taro, growing in the coral atolls of the Pacific.

When I was a little girl, nurtured on Robert Louis Stevenson* and RM Ballantyne**, I used to imagine living on the classic coral island. The sun always shone: on the equator, there is no winter dark and cold. White sandy beaches were lapped by the brilliant blue waves of the lagoon and fringed by waving green coconut palms. Coconuts dropped from the trees and tasty fish swam into your hands. Around the lagoon lay a reef of shimmering white coral, with a string of tiny low-lying islets rising just above the waves. The beaches on the outside of the reef were open to the vast Pacific Ocean. The only sounds were the rustling of the palm fronds and the breakers crashing and foaming against the reef…

I was recently re-reading an old favourite of mine, ‘A Pattern of Islands’, by Arthur Grimble***, describing his experiences as a colonial officer  in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, in the early 20^th century.  A second book in my personal library about these islands is ‘Atoll Holiday’, written by Nancy Phelan****, after she spent a long holiday in the Gilbert Islands in 1956. These islands were a British Protectorate from 1892 until 1916, and then a British colony until 1976, when they became two separate colonies. In 1978 the Gilbert Islands became independent, as the republic of Kiribati, and the Ellice Islands remained British, now called Tuvalu.

Kiribati lies in the central Pacific Ocean, and consists of 32 tiny atolls and one raised coral island, strung out across the equator. ‘Atoll’ is the name for a roughly circular coral reef, with or without islets, surrounding a central lagoon.  Atolls only occur in the warm tropical and subtropical seas where coral can grow. There are various theories about how they develop their characteristic shape, but the most popular seems to be that the coral formed around an extinct volcano which subsequently eroded away.

Daydreams apart, these islands are not the best place for growing vegetables. They are made of coral and have no stone. They also have very little, very poor, soil. Grimble, writing of his arrival in the Gilbert Islands in 1914, describes in heartrending detail how attempts to make compost for growing the sort of vegetables he was used to were foiled by the speed at which it eroded away. He wanted beans and tomatoes. He got coconuts. The islands are short of water too. Water comes from rainfall which forms a convex ‘freshwater lens’ between the ground surface and the lower layers of coral which are permeated with salt water from the surrounding ocean.  The little islets are usually only a few hundred metres across, from ocean to lagoon, so plants also have to be salt-tolerant. Most of Kiribati is only two metres above sea level.

Between them, Grimble and Phelan described a selection of vegetable foods which came mainly from trees.  There were coconuts: green and ripe, both nuts and milk, and the sweet sap known as toddy which was collected from the palm blossom. It can be drunk fresh, or fermented into an alcoholic drink. Toddy was collected every day by men climbing up the coconut palms, and Phelan explained that it contains many nutrients which complement a diet of mainly fish and coconut.  Pandanus fruit, breadfruit, banana and an occasional pawpaw or pumpkin were also mentioned.

The main vegetable grown by the islanders which wasn’t a tree, apart from occasional pumpkins, was a plant known as ‘babai’.  This is the local name for Cyrtosperma merkusii or giant swamp taro, a plant native to the islands and an important part of their culture. Babai has dark green arrow-shaped leaves, huge succulent stalks and flowers a bit like an arum lily. It can grow up to 6m tall, with leaves up to 2m long by over a metre wide. The starchy corm (the swollen base of the stem) can be nearly a metre in diameter and weigh 80-100kg. It can be stored for long periods in the ground, or sun-dried and stored, so it is a useful resource for times of shortage.

Both Grimble and Phelan talk about babai being grown in deep muddy pits with compost added, each plant wrapped round in a straw cage. The pits are muddy because they are dug into the level of the freshwater lens, and their size varies from a few square metres to over a quarter of a hectare.

Babai has to be properly processed to get rid of toxins but it is very nutritious and in the early 20^th century it was an important part of the local diet. Grimble refers to it being mashed with butter, or steamed. He found it indigestible. Phelan also found it very heavy (page 179), except when it was mixed with other ingredients. She was presented with a pudding called ‘buatoro’ which she thought very pleasant. It was made by grating the babai, mixing it with coconut cream and with a syrup called kamaimai which was rather like golden syrup and was made by boiling down toddy. The pudding was cooked in a leaf wrapper.  It does sound rather nice, if a bit heavy, rather like my father’s golden syrup steamed pudding.

Alas, in the 21^st century, although giant swamp taro is still quite widely grown, islanders have apparently largely switched from their traditional diet to buying wheat bread, rice and sugar with the proceeds from the copra trade. It may be more convenient in the short term, but the resulting health problems are causing serious concern.

And the legendary coral island with its shining sands, coconut palms and babai growing in muddy pits may soon be nothing more than a memory. The rising sea levels associated with global warming are threatening babai cultivation as the fresh water lens is being contaminated by sea water, and extreme high tides lead to salt water spilling over into the pits. Many Pacific island groups are preparing to migrate to other countries, as entire islands are in danger of being submerged. They are, after all, only 2m above sea level.

* ‘Treasure Island’, 1883 Robert Louis Stevenson

**‘The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean’, 1857 R. M. Ballantyne.

***‘A Pattern of Islands’, 1952 Arthur Grimble

****‘Atoll Holiday’, 1958 Nancy Phelan