Took some photos today in Austin's Mayfield Park Preserve and the adjoining grounds of the Laguna Gloria museum. There are many hundreds (at least) of Sabal mexicana volunteers of all sizes growing here in the woods. Winter is a good time to more easily see them among the temporarily leafless trees and other plant life.

In the 25 years I've lived here, I've seen them dramatically increase in population.

Here is one small section of Mayfield with some of the younger specimens.

Some larger ones here growing below a limestone ledge along the lake shore and among ancient live oaks.

Next door on the Laguna Gloria museum grounds, there are several forested acres along the lake with tall bald cypress and other trees, and hundreds more "wild" S. mexicanas.  Until a couple of years ago these woods were a thicket and really hard to walk through. The museum recently cleared out much of the brush (mostly invasives like Ligustrum sp.) but to their credit they left the palms alone.  Some of these are lager, with a few feet of trunk.

For scale, that little round dot on the cypress trunk (lower center of the first photo) is an inch-wide Parks Dept. tree tag, and it's about 4 feet above the ground.

 

Edited January 25, 201610 yr by eevans

More examples from Laguna Gloria.

 

These wildings are offspring from some decades-old specimens growing on the nearby main grounds of both parks, which again are immediately adjacent to each other.

E.g., here are some of the old trees in the main gardens in Mayfield Park, in the gardens above the preserve (which is mostly in lower-lying ravines below a limestone cliff):

 

And here are some of the parent trees on the main grounds of the Laguna Gloria art museum:

Your pictures aren't showing for me.  A permissions problem?

Yeah, I even tested it in the "So you want to add a photo?" topic, but I guess I don't have the Google Photos sharing set right after all. Not even sure it's do-able now.

I'll just have to upload the images the old-fashioned way and re-post, I guess.

Thanks for the heads up.

Took some photos today in Austin's Mayfield Park Preserve and the adjoining grounds of the Laguna Gloria museum. There are many hundreds (at least) of Sabal mexicana volunteers of all sizes growing here in the woods. Winter is a good time to more easily see them among the temporarily leafless trees and other plant life.

In the 25 years I've lived here, I've seen them dramatically increase in population.

Here is one small section of Mayfield with some of the younger specimens.

Some larger ones here growing below a limestone ledge along the lake shore and among ancient live oaks.

 

Next door on the Laguna Gloria museum grounds, there are several forested acres along the lake with tall bald cypress and other trees, and hundreds more "wild" S. mexicanas.  Until a couple of years ago these woods were a thicket and really hard to walk through. The museum recently cleared out much of the brush (mostly invasives like Ligustrum sp.) but to their credit they left the palms alone.  Some of these are larger, with a few feet of trunk.

For scale, that little round dot on the cypress trunk (lower center of the first photo) is an inch-wide Parks Dept. tree tag, and it's about 4 feet above the ground.

More examples from Laguna Gloria.

 

These wildings are offspring from some decades-old specimens growing on the nearby main grounds of both parks, which again are immediately adjacent to each other.

E.g., here are some of the old trees in the main gardens in Mayfield Park, in the gardens above the preserve (which is mostly in lower-lying ravines below a limestone cliff)

Nice habitat photos.

Yes eevans, I have noticed the same thing on my occasional trips to Austin and San Antonio. They seem to naturalize easily in central Texas. Several independent reports from 200+ years ago tell of the river courses in the southern half of Texas lined with palm trees. I suspect that the palms froze out in all of Texas but the Rio Grande valley during the little ice age when the climate was severe by today's standard and are currently reestablishing themselves northward. As recently as 1940 San Antonio has been down to zero which would have killed the Sabal mexicanas. There are reports from the 1700s of ice sheets spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi river when the river froze down past New Orleans. As an analog, there are early reports of Royal palms in Northern Florida from a few hundred years ago that probably froze out there also during the little ice age. If the current climate warming trend continues, the southern part of Texas will have a lot of S.M. similar to how the Sabal palmetto is common in the S.E. U.S.

Two years ago when I was in Austin there was a young S.M. that had a seed stalk hanging over the side walk where I was walking. I casually grabbed a handful almost absent mindedly while walking by and now have a dozen seedlings in pots.

Ed in Houston

Well if they're anything like the S. mexicana at Mayfield Park, you'll have your hands full in a couple of years.  The tree in the picture below is in my backyard (central Austin, in creek terrace soil full of clay and limestone rubble).  I raised that from a seed I picked up in Mayfield almost exactly 20 years ago.  I grew it in a gallon pot until it had a couple of fan leaves, then put it in the ground about 18 years ago.

I always read that S. mexicana is a slow grower, but this population at least seems pretty vigorous, at least for the local soil conditions.

BTW, I also planted some of those seedlings in my parent's yard in rural Harris county NNE of Houston, in very wet and often saturated clay soil (aka "black gumbo"). They have not died, but they have never even formed a trunk and often look yellow-y. Quite a contrast from the Sabal minor that thrive there in the very same conditions.

S. Mexicana will naturalized here in the dfw area as well. I literally have thousands of plants spread via stolen seeds from rats and other critters sprinkled around my 8 acres. I keep mowing over most of them during the summer and they still haven't died. These seedlings survived the 2011 winter here and mature trees didn't burn either.