Nearly Native Nusery trip

April 24, 2021

I ordered a bunch of palms from nearly native and drove down today and picked them up! Well worth it, one of the best trips I’ve made at least palm and general plant wise in a while. First off I have some experience growing plants in general, I’ve kept house plants for years and years, grew up organic gardening and composting with my grandfather. I have over 40 fruit trees and bushes, yuccas, cactus, palm trees, tons of flowers, keep a vegetable garden each year. Do a fair amount of landscaping. I only say all this for reference, I was in the presence of a master today. What Jim has done at their property is nothing short of amazing. He literally transformed the whole landscape into the garden of eden. They have every native flowering and fruiting and nut bearing tree, plant, and flower of must be close to the whole south east. Unbelievable really what I saw. This was not a standard nursery we’ve all been to. He has transformed the whole landscape and has so many mature plants and trees that they take cuttings, collect seed and germinate, dig up seedlings, offsets and shoots. Pot these up and they live outside unprotected year round. In most cases feet away from where they sprouted until someone comes and buys it. Literally everything they sell is bullet proof....at least for their local area. For our purposes here are their palms trees. FYI this is in Fayetteville, GA. All palm trees onsite in the ground were grown from seed according to Jim. Oh nothing just a 10’ tall needle palm.Sabal Louisiana, those are trash can lids for reference. Sabal Louisiana This is where things got weird for me, I must have walked past these 4 times, grabbed the petiole, the leaves and was just in amazement.I’ve been around my fair share of palmettos. The pictures don’t do them justice. I’m 6’2” and the tips of the leaves were far over head had to be 10’ at least, have to be 6’ wide, I finally asked Jim what they were he said sabal mexicana that he grew from seed 16 years ago. All the sabal mexicana they sell he’s grown from the seed harvested from those palms. Far out of my league at identifying the rare varieties of sabals, He said this is sabal tamipulas, if you look close it’s pushing inflorescence. They plan on selling those once they get a bunch potted up.