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Sorry Dave, been traveling a lot and not been here in a bit, but here you go. Probably 5' of trunk and sadly the crown getting tall enough my house no longer blocks the southern exposure.. thus some small burning. Pic taken today.

An update on the three C. radicalis. There was latent cold damage and all three completely defoliated, but all three survived and are growing.

About 8 feet to tallest frond. having to cut it back at times. Partial canopy. Been below 20 F a few times now.

Time to revive this topic! 😆 In my backyard, I have some really really tall saw palmettos under live oak canopy next to a small drainage stream. I always thought they were really tall and I admire them often. But then I pulled out some measuring tools and tried to measure them, and realized they're even taller than I thought. My measurements aren't 100% accurate, but I measured the tallest of the bunch to be around 25 feet tall! The dense part of the stand is probably around 8' tall, and there's several large trunks poking out with individuals that are 15' and up. There used to be more of the taller palmettos but they seemed to have died and had their heads knocked off in storms last year. Just thought I'd share it here, pretty cool!

@kinzyjr I'm pretty convinced the Sylvestris is dying from LB. It's gone downhill a lot in the last week: I color enhanced the picture a bit so it's obvious. The set of fronds that was mostly dead are now dessicated, and the ones that were 99% green are now about 50% yellow and 25% brown tipped. And the new spears had pretty much closed up. So at lunch I chopped off all the fronds: And I didn't see any signs of fungal discoloration: I'll dig out the stump this weekend when it's not 90+ degrees!

The shade jungle is taking off, including another chambeyronia leaf opening pretty fast. They are all speeding up now that days are longer and in the 80s and nights are in the 60s. It seems that a lot of the chrysalidocarpus are happiest there, they were MUCH slower until these past two weeks, and now spears are lengthening noticably every day. Im hoping that trend continues even in summer with nights of 77 or so, but a slowdown in the hottest time of the year is ok by me (as long as there is no damage). New seedlings are greening up and starting to show spears, but there are some casualties (as expected) too. Im starting to think some of these palms that fail in south florida from the heat are super narrow in their prefered metabolic ranges for temps and rainfall, which makes sense considering their homes of origin and the past geology of those areas. There is geologic evidence of some of their ancestors living near the south pole in warmer times but winter would still be a chilly time of year and heat would not be as intense and extensive as the equator even in summer. Even if that is a load of hot garbage they are mostly higher elevation too so no 70s at night there either. Now time to plant more out somewhere lol.

Northern California Palm Society San Francisco Gardens - Saturday April 20, 2024 Last Chance to Sign Up: San Francisco Open Garden Saturday, April 20, 2024 from 12:30 – 4:00 p.m. Hello Palm Friends! We’re excited to announce our first meeting for 2024. There will be two gardens in San Francisco open to visit and we’ll conclude the day with a member meeting, pot luck and auction at the Flora Grubb nursery. 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm: The San Francisco gardens of Darold Petty and Thom Berninzoni will be open from 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm for self-guided tours and walk-throughs. The gardens are small city plots and cannot accommodate everyone at once, so please choose your own schedule for the 2 hour open window. The Outer Sunset garden of Darold Petty: The legendary garden of Nor. Cali. Palm Society President emeritus Darold Petty is located in one of the chilliest corners of the City. Darold has been nurturing this garden since the early ’80’s and today it boasts an impressive array of mature palm species - Ceroxylon, Hedyscepe, Rhopalostylis, and Howea to name a few. In the garden you will also encounter many beautifully grown and rare palm companion plants that are a testimony to the breadth of the gardening knowledge and growing skills Darold has honed for more than four decades. Address: 2563 33rd Avenue, San Francisco 94116, between Ulloa and Vicente Streets. Darold notes, it’s fairly easy parking but be very careful not to overhang driveways. New members and palm friends welcome! The Eureka Valley garden of Thom Berninzoni: Thom Berninzoni and his partner Antonio Cristillo began retaining and building their garden on a steep slope on the East-facing side of Twin Picks above the Castro District in 2005. The garden consists of multi-level decks (three) interconnected by lush planting spaces containing more than 40 species of palms. From mature Rhopalostylis, Livistonia and Howeas to miniature Chamaedorea, Linnospadix and other palm treasures, the garden boasts many pleasant surprises as you work your way down the stairs amongst the four levels. The palm collection is connected by a lush tapestry of palm companion plants - orchids, ferns, neotropical blueberries, bromeliads and more rarities. Address: 34 Short Street, San Francisco 94114. The closest major intersection is Clayton/Market. Flora Grubb Gardens 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm: Society members will gather at Flora Grubb Gardens, for an introduction to the nursery, a members’ meeting and auction. Bring bites to share and plants for the auction! Address: Flora Grubb address is 1634 Jerrold Street in San Francisco’s Bayview District. SIGN UP FOR APRIL 20 MEETING   Apr 20 San Francisco Open Gardens and Meeting Event: April 20 Saturday, April 20: San Francisco Open Gardens and Meeting Event 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm: The San Francisco gardens of Darold Petty and Thom Berninzoni will be open from 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm for self-guided tours and walk-throughs. The gardens are small city plots and cannot accommodate every one at once, so please choose your own schedule for the 2 hour open window. 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm: Society members will gather at Flora Grubb, for an introduction to the nursery, a members meeting and auction. Bring bites to share and plants for the auction! (Addresses provided with registration confirmation.)   Register Free Website Palm Society Announcements Lakeside Palmetum Membership Species List You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link at the bottom of every email. Northern California Palm Society | 290 Margarita Drive, San Rafael, CA 94901 www.palmsnc.org Unsubscribe daroldpetty@gmail.com Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice Sent by caroline@northerncaliforniapalmsociety.ccsend.com powered by Try email marketing for free today!

Well it's still pretty palmy. Westchase area today

You laugh but you know it's true! But the irony of the street names below LOL "FALLEN PALMS", "BURNING PALMS"😆 will be there in person soon, stay tuned. this was in cold west Houston btw

additional sabals on a separate planting project ( west nasa parkway ) at least 100 will be planted I assume. cidp looking better alrupdate on the medical center planting still tied up .

kids bike for scale and also shows live oak giving canopy to these 2 palms

Here's mine just south of Houston in League City. Its been in ground for 4-5 years now and I protect when temps get near 20. During Palmageddon it saw 15 degrees covered with a blanket and plastic but no heat because we didn't have power. It completely defoliated and took a LONG time to start pushing new spears. The next year it saw 17 with blanket, plastic, and a reptile heat bulb underneath. Fared much better, but the side with the light retained some green while the backside was defoliated. This past winter my low was 19.8 and it got a blanket, plastic, and 2 heat lamps and it came through looking pretty good overall. It's in full sun and this is the wettest, swampiest part of my yard.

Looks like a Chrysalidocarpus plumosus

The South Florida Palm Society will have their first show and sale in eight years. The sale will take place on April 27-28, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm on the west side of the University of Miami campus, just steps from the Gifford Arboretum. Hundreds of common, uncommon and extremely rare palms and cycads will be for sale from local growers who are always willing to answer questions about planting and maintaining the species they offer. Two tours of the Gifford Arboretum will also be given each day, all free of charge. Additional information including directions is provided at www.southfloridapalmsociety.org . Please Note: This program, while located at the University of Miami, is neither the responsibility of, nor endorsed by the University of Miami.

I disagree. Mine were defoliated in the 2022 Christmas Freeze (min 19F, trunk protected), by December 2023 they were both back to looking fantastic again. (Granted, they have both been defoliated again but are putting on good growth now. Low was 18F with trunk protection again). Starting with the front yard Queen. First pic was when it was cleaned up on February 18 2023. Next pic is on Jan 2 2024. I had not gotten a pic of it in December, but it still looked pretty good. Pic 1: Pic 2: Next is the back yard Queen. First pic was taken February 18 2023, the day it was cleaned up. It had NOTHING, much less to start with than the front yard Queen. Second pic is December 3 2023, with a crown that looks pretty good. Pic 1: Pic 2: So basically, Queens can recover much faster than you think. A Queen that receives no help in its recovery process will obviously take much longer than Queens like mine, which were helped thru the process and were back to looking pretty good again by the end of the growing season.

For my fellow Houstonians, I stopped by Caldwell today in Rosenberg and they have a bunch of big Englerii for sale. $600 seems reasonable considering the lack of availability around here. I believe they are closing their doors for good next month but nothing was on sale yet. I'd assume they're going to have to firesale some of this stuff soon, they still have a pretty large inventory.

I came across the tallest Saw Palmetto (Serenoa repens) I have ever seen last Saturday. It is growing south of New Smyrna Beach in the Canaveral National Seashore. It is easy to find. Go down A1A into the CNS and then make a right onto Eldora Rd. (River Rd.). It is at the north end of parking lot 7. This is the parking lot before the Eldora ghost town. The main stem is about 15-16ft tall and is growing into a Sand Live Oak (Quercus geminata).

Not the same plant but I just noticed this

Now peachy let me tell you a story about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees………..🤣

Melaleuca bracteata has done very well in far South Texas, most forms were unaffected by the ‘21 freeze. A weeping form from Longreach is the prettiest but seems to be a little more tender than other forms. In Arizona M. lanceolata looks similar but has somewhat smaller leaves. Another pretty hardy viminalis cultivar is ‘Slim’, it took the ‘21 freeze but can have chlorosis issues here, about like ‘Little John’, another hardy one. The cultivar ‘Boyette’ has both cold and chlorosis issues here. ‘Harkness’ is known for its tolerance to alkalinity in Australia but did terribly down here, going downhill as soon as it went into the ground. There is one unnamed cultivar down here, probably a hybrid, which was probably the same thing that was growing in San Antonio before 2021. It looks like a scraggly viminalis x something (citrinus?) but it handles cold very well and has large showy blooms. I’m guessing it is some cultivar that a wholesale nursery like Greenleaf discovered in some yard and started propagating it, it is closest to ‘Red Cascade’ but not quite the same. There are a couple of other clones that have been in yards here for many decades that also do well.

All grown in my greenhouse but I keep them outside between april to october

@dada that's a great palm, especially for $700! I have several of them here in the swamps of Floriduh with 2-3 feet of clear trunk. They seem to be pretty water-tolerant, though I am in sand soil that drains really fast. A couple of things to look for: I'd mark the new spears with a sharpie, horizontally across the spear leaf to the ones next to it. Watch out for the thorns! This will tell you if the new spear is growing. Expect it to be mostly stationary for a few weeks, at least. A good sign of survival is if it grows steadily an inch or so per week. Take some up close photos of the base of the trunk and each head. That way in a few weeks you can compare pictures and see if things are improving or getting worse. I mention the base of the trunk because it's always possible they "cracked" a trunk in transplant. And at the top you can compare photos to see if the fronds are opening up (i.e. good water supply), or shrinking and closing (i.e. it's not pulling in enough water). Going from memory of what it used to look like probably isn't going to work all that well, in my personal experience. On fresh plantings the normal advice here is to wait 1-2 months before fertilizing, and use a smaller dose than "normal" for the first fertilizing. The recommended fertilizer here is an 8-2-12 ratio (or similar) like PalmGain or Florikan. The normal dose is 1.5lb of 8-2-12 for every 100sqft of canopy. For a palm that size, roughly 6' overall diameter, that's 3.14*3ft*3ft = 28sqft. So 1.5lb * 28sqft / 100 = 0.42lb of 8-2-12. It's just a guideline, and is based on Florida soils. If it were my palm I'd buy some PalmGain off of Amazon and give it a light sprinkling in a couple of weeks, and follow up with about a half pound in 6-8 weeks from now. For watering, make sure you are hitting the rootball that they dug. It'll take months and months for it to really grow out into the surrounding soil. Just avoid any high pressure spray on the trunks, as this can cause rot. Splashing water from a hose probably won't hurt anything, but there are a lot of cases with sprinklers hitting trunks and killing palms. So don't put a hose sprayer on the trunks with a high pressure nozzle.

You want the soil continuously damp down below(deeper than) the rootball by about 2-3 feet. It will take 2-3 years for the roots to grow back and the palm will become established. The top, new leaves will be somewhat slow(possibly shabby looking) this summer, and then pick up as the roots (re)establish. I would hold off on fertilizer til next spring. Nice specimen palm!

A couple of my Howea F. have this condition , one has a very large “foot” . I used to sell seeds to a Palm grower that did Kentia’s and had hundreds of volunteers on his massive property and he told me to take what I wanted, this one seedling was just different than all the others so I dug it up , wrapped it in a napkin and planted it in my courtyard . I noticed it grew very fast for a Kentia and the trunk had this “condition”. The photo really doesn’t show how swollen it is but you get the idea.Harry

Between the green leaves and fairly slim trunks they all look like mules or possibly ‘Jubutyagrus’ IMHO. Most Jubaea x Butia are heavier trunked even if F2 or F3 generation. F1s can also vary but here’s an extra thick specimen growing in FL:

Queens aren't that tropical...I was thinking more along the lines of royals and foxtails 😆. Queens are one of the cheapest and most available palms, they'll be back. No but seriously a lot of non-palm zone 9b/10 stuff make for great dieback perennials. I don't care if guava, star fruit, or June plum die to the ground occasionally...I'll still get a ton of fruit in the years that they don't die. Just put an atemoya in the ground to test. Tons of tropical foliage/"houseplants" you can grow this way too like many Ficus and Schefflera.

Bizzy finally snapped out of zombie phase and is pushing a spear again. This is my survivor that made it through the last 3 polar vortexes (although I had to cut it after the previous 2). This year it went unprotected at a low of 19.8°.

I am in zone 7a, though due to the microclimate I would not be suprised if it were a bit more like 7b or 8a. The palms are at my parents house, which is very near the Five Mile River (undubtedly providing a little warmth), and have good winter sun exposure along the southern side of the house. I don't, unfortunately, have an absolute low temperature these palms have seen over the years, though they see low single digits a few nights every year. The truth is the CT coast is a lot more mild than most would think, thanks to the Sound and the myriad of little peninsulas and coves that surely give rise to neat microclimates. Boring garden habits are probably why we don't see more experimentation there. I would say for the needles try to choose the location that gets the best winter sun and out of the wind, and always take heavy snow/ice off if you can!

The southeast Florida coast seems to take on tropical monsoon (am) and/or tropical rainforest (af) characteristics compared to the rest of South Florida that is more tropical savannah (aw). Not sure if that is the Gulf Stream's doing, or some other factor.

Ive heard of them and am from Setauket, close by, but i never visited them. I will check them out. maybe they do mail order.internet i will check them out because i have a trachy in Woodbury CT where i live (attached dec 2023 photo) and i have grown it from seed since 2005 and its huge now, so i need to find another way to protect it be well, DrZ

I got it several years ago from the guys at Island Wide Palm Company in Medford out on the island. They could probably get one made for you if you provide the specs. It works really well, and though my palm is getting a bit large to "easily" cover it really does work well.

Another CT palm guy here, looking to share what I have been growing for some time in Norwalk. I have had this Trachycarpus in the ground in a very nice microclimate for roughly 6 years- I cover it from Christmas to early March every year with a zip-up frost cloth and use Christmas lights on the coldest nights. The Needles are always left unprotected-they do great! I have a few small sabal minors recently transplanted from Delaware that I hope will take off in the summer heat. Updates to follow!

Haha I doubled down on the tropical stuff this spring too 😆 People have been planting more cold hardy stuff these past few years and look what keeps happening...Plant more tropicals guys!!! The more tropicals you plant the more tropical the weather becomes LOL

You said it out loud. Now we’ll have to wait another year.

Nice fat filifera in Lago Vista, Texas

@Cade Nice, definitely one we should keep an eye on for seed in the future.

2021 survivor in humble update

A nicer looking mule. Still think most of them are ugly 😜

Life finds a way😝 even after 18.5F. Discount rack Chamaedorea cataractum with just normal leaf mulch, a majesty with a 2 gallon jug of water and a bedsheet, and Lytocaryum hoehnei with a cardboard box.

Not a challenge for these palms but they were massive. Pictures don’t do them justice.

Just noticed a clearance Majesty corpse in my yard that I just hadn't pulled out yet is still alive after 20 degrees this past winter.

@Harry’s Palms Their fruits have high amounts of oxalic acid which cause the chemical burns and the numb/tingling sensation - definitely something to avoid contact with. I'm still trying to figure out what these guys want in Houston, although its probably just a couple of winters without severe freezes to let them put on some size. I've seen some great plants locally in both deep shade and a fair amount of sun, some in much colder areas than where I live. I have several in raised beds, ~3 years from seed, the most recent RPS A. ryukyuensis batch, which I am sceptical is a separate species. Canopy seems to protect some of the leaves, even when I give them all really solid cover during freezes, and they definitely yellow out when they get direct sun. The two pictures show plants only about 1 m apart, but the back ones get some canopy cover. All had identical protection consisting of large painters buckets filled with dry leaves during our recent freeze (-7c/19f). One of the ones on the left in the first picture doesn't seem to be recovering which is a bit disappointing. Others elsewhere in the garden without canopy look the same.

$97 worth of king palms 😆

Good to know about the fruit! I have only had about a dozen fruit from mine but I had garden gloves on when I harvested them for a friend. When I was in Kauai I found some C. Mitis fruit and cleaned the seeds to bring home , my hands went numb followed by a tingling that lasted almost an hour. It must be a Caryotoid thing. Harry

These can definitely take some cold. I have one in the ground in zone 9a and it has seen its fair share of low 20s/high teens without issue. Here is one that is fruiting where I work. Whatever you do, don't touch the pulp of the fruit with your bare hands. It gave me one of the worst skin reactions I have ever had in my life, and I have had some pretty bad ones due to different plants.

These are great palms. I have one in full sun most of the day and it is more compact. I’ve had it for almost 30 years . It gets inflorescence and that stem dies but more come along , sort of like Caryota Mitis . I had it in a pot for almost 4 years before moving to this house and planting it . We don’t get that cold here but good to hear they can take cold weather as well as sun and wind. This is a partial view , it can certainly fill in an area.Harry

Thanks for sharing. Mine is slowly coming back from 12f. First year in the ground.

Weird thing is that the fronds don’t get damaged, but the next new spears collapse before opening. I just cut em off. It keeps trucking. I have 2 more that are pretty solid too. I’ve seen some burn on fronds below 20 but not much

Moody gardens (Galveston) today Still no new palms being planted just some tropical shrubs 🤷‍♂️ @Xenon sorry lol.

Absolutely agree with your statement. You can enjoy the looks of an evergreen palm tree even in cold winters . No defoliation just always looking great. I wish here in San Antonio they would plant Sabals in masses . I see an increased number of Sabals though. One of the best palm in zones 9b and under in Texas.