Skip to main content

Greater galangal (Alpinia galanga)

Lengkuas or galangal or greater galangal (Alpinia galanga) is a plant species in the Zingiberaceae, growing to a height of 3 meters or more, underground rhizomes and small adventitious roots, young stems emerge as shoots from the base of old stems, the entire stem is covered with leaf sheaths or stems pseudo.

A. galanga has leaves with short stalks, elongated lanceolate in shape, pointed tip, blunt base, flat edge, 25-50 cm long, 7-15 cm wide, 15-30 cm leaf midrib, grooved and green in color.

Dlium Greater galangal (Alpinia galanga)


Compound inflorescence in bunches, long stalks, erect and gathered at the end of the stalk. There are more flowers at the bottom than at the top of the stalk so that they are in the shape of an elongated pyramid. Petals are bell-shaped and greenish-white.

The crown that is still a bud at the tip is white and the bottom is green. Flower lip has a length of 2.5 cm, white with a bright red oblique line on each side. The crown that is still in bud has a white color, while the base is green.



Buni fruit, round, hard, green when young and brown when old. The seeds are small, oval in shape, green when young and turn red, then black when old.

Tubers are white or red. Rhizome creeping, large, thick, fleshy, cylindrical, 2-4 cm in diameter and branching. The outer part is brown, slightly reddish or greenish yellow, the scales are white or reddish, hard and shiny. The inside is white.

The rhizome has a distinctive aroma, rough and spicy when it is old. The rhizome turns green, the fiber becomes hard and tough when dried. The taste is sharp, spicy, biting and smells good because of the essential oil content.

Galangal is a type of spice that is widely grown. Generally for a mixture of spices and traditional medicine. Utilization for cooking by beating the rhizome, then just dipping it into the cooking mixture, while for traditional medicine that is widely used is the red cultivar.

This species grows in open areas, in full sun or partial shade. Grows well in moist, loose soil. Grows poorly in flooded soils. It thrives in the lowlands to an elevation of 1200 meters. This plant grows wild in teak forests, pine forests or in shrubs.

The history of the cultivation and trading of spices originally took place on the island of Java. Galangal is still widely cultivated in Southeast Asia, especially in the Greater Sunda Islands and the Philippines. Cultivation has also spread to Southeast Asia, including Thailand.

Kingdom: Plantae
Phylum: Tracheophyta
Subphylum: Angiospermae
Class: Liliopsida
Order: Zingiberales
Family: Zingiberaceae
Subfamily: Alpinioideae
Tribe: Alpinieae
Genus: Alpinia
Species: Alpinia galanga

Popular Posts

Cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica)

Alang-alang or cogon grass ( Imperata cylindrica ) is a plant species in Poaceae, annual grass, sharp leaf, long buds and scaly, creeping under the ground, very adaptive and grows in all climates which often become weeds on agricultural land. I. cylindrica has a sharp pointed tip of the bud and emerges from the ground, height of 0.2-1.5 m but in other places it may be more, short stems, rising up to the ground and flowering white or purplish, often with wreath of hair under the segment. Leaf strands in the form of long ribbons, lancet-tipped with a narrow base and gutter-shaped, 12-80 cm long, very coarse edge and jagged sharply, long hair at the base with broad, pale leaf bones in the middle. The flowers are panicles, 6-28 cm long with long-haired and white-colored ears for 1 cm which are used as a tool to blow off the fruit when ripe. Cogon grass breeds quickly with seeds that spread quickly with the wind or through rhizomes that quickly penetrate the soil. Alang-alang does...

Ralph Holzenthal caddisfly (Rhyacophila lignumvallis) from Corsica in Rhyacophila tristis (Schmid 1970) group

NEWS - Ralph Holzenthal caddisfly ( Rhyacophila lignumvallis Graf & Rázuri-Gonzales, sp. nov.) from the island of Corsica (France) was established as a new species in the Rhyacophila tristis (Schmid 1970) group based on morphological analysis and the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (mtCOI), including sequences from 16 of the 28 species in the group. Rhyacophila Pictet 1834 with 814 living and 30 fossil species is the largest genus of caddisflies in the world, distributed mainly in the northern hemisphere, but also in temperate and tropical India and Southeast Asia. One of the groups is the R. tristis group in the branch Rhyacophila invaria . R. lignumvallis is most similar to Rhyacophila pubescens Pictet 1834, Rhyacophila tsurakiana Malicky 1984, Rhyacophila ligurica Oláh & Vinçon 2021, Rhyacophila harmasa Oláh & Vinçon 2021 and Rhyacophila abruzzica Oláh & Vinçon 2021. However, R. lignumvallis differs in the shape of the X tergum, the dorsal arm ...

Thomas Sutikna lives with Homo floresiensis

BLOG - On October 28, 2004, a paper was published in Nature describing the dwarf hominin we know today as Homo floresiensis that has shocked the world. The report changed the geographical landscape of early humans that previously stated that the Pleistocene Asia was only represented by two species, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens . The report titled "A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia" written by Peter Brown and Mike J. Morwood from the University of New England with Thomas Sutikna, Raden Pandji Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wahyu Saptomo and Rokus Awe Due from the National Archaeology Research Institute (ARKENAS), Indonesia, presents more diversity in the genus Homo. “Immediately, my fever vanished. I couldn’t sleep well that night. I couldn’t wait for sunrise. In the early morning we went to the site, and when we arrived in the cave, I didn’t say a thing because both my mind and heart couldn’t handle this incredible moment. I just went down...