Sanibel palms

[Yunder Wækraus]

I'll post more pix, but here's one of the coconut-filled hotel where we're staying :-)

[ck_in_fla]

Sannibel and Captiva is one of my favorite places to vacation.  Both are islands that are accessible by car only via a bridge from Ft. Myers.  Since they are surrounded by water on all 4 sides, I'm guessing both are a solid 10B.  Especially Captiva.

There is a third island, North Captiva which is only accessible by boat.  It is largely undeveloped (or at least it was the last time I was down there).

[Yunder Wækraus]

Here are some more photos of our hotel and its palms and shell bounty :-)

 

[Yunder Wækraus]

We also visited Blind Pass between Sanibel and Captiva. Only native plants grow there, but someone has planted some buccaneer palms. I hope more of these are planted around the island. Oh, and my son caught a massive horse conch, which we released, of course. I feel like shells and palms go together :-)

[RedRabbit]

Great pics, thanks for sharing! 

I wonder if Sanibel might be the warmest place on Florida's west coast. Marco Island is further south, but it has a lot less water seperating it from the mainland.

[Eric in Orlando]

When I was younger our family used to go to Sanibel a lot. But I haven't been there since about 1994. Last time I was there I saw some borderline zone 11 plants; Pritchardia pacifica and younger Breadfruit trees. I wonder if you could grow Cyrtostachys, Pigafetta or Verschaffeltia there.

[Yunder Wækraus]

17 minutes ago, Eric in Orlando said:

When I was younger our family used to go to Sanibel a lot. But I haven't been there since about 1994. Last time I was there I saw some borderline zone 11 plants; Pritchardia pacifica and younger Breadfruit trees. I wonder if you could grow Cyrtostachys, Pigafetta or Verschaffeltia there.

It's definitely a beautiful place. I wasn't looking too closely during our trip because I had 3 sick kids who pretty much restricted us to the hotel's beach and a very short visit to Blind Pass and the shell museum. I had hoped to go around Sanibel and Captiva to look for interesting plants. Captiva is probably the most lush-looking Florida Island outside of those near the Gulf Stream in the SE (i.e. Jupiter on down to Key West). Again, I didn't look too closely, but in general, I would say that nothing was growing prominently in Sanibel or Captiva that I don't see growing somewhere on my barrier island far to the northeast. I would say, however, that the lack of consistent wind and salt spray makes the plants look much more robust than they look near the beach near my home.

A good example is the coconuts you can see in my first picture of the hotel. They are all vigorous, graceful, and growing right out of crushed-shell up the dune line near the beach. Sure, we have coconuts all over the place up here, and there are quite a few of the same height as the ones in my picture above, but our coconuts just don't seem quite as relaxed. Does that make sense? I can find some coconuts near me that look about as good as the ones at the Sanibel hotel, but they aren't growing as effortlessly or in such numbers, and they sure don't look like that next the beach! The same is true of everything else: both islands have native gumbo limbo, but the gumbo limbo on Sanibel seems more vigorous; both islands have introduced royal palms, but on Sanibel they're naturalized, but here they don't seem to reproduce without human intervention, and, again, they look beaten down near the coast.

I'm not sure that Sanibel and Captiva are better than 10b over the long haul, but I sure wouldn't mind living on one of them :-) Anyway, here's a pretty representative pic of one of the nicely landscaped tropical residences on Captiva: https://www.google.com/maps/@26.4960662,-82.1860641,3a,75y,265.48h,106.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sr8-E1ncVnP60DqpVXVeXeQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1?hl=en