Cabbage Palmetto

Size, growth and what to expect

Cabbage palmetto grows slowly, and slower than the foot a year our growth estimator uses for a slow tree. Seedlings in the wild can take 15 to 30 years to show a trunk, though nursery care shortens that, and a young trunk may then rise up to 6 inches a year. It makes a palm 30 to 60 feet tall with a round crown 10 to 15 feet wide, and it can live more than 100 years.

Arching, branched stalks 3 to 8 feet long carry thousands of small, fragrant, creamy white flowers from June into August, and they draw a great many bees. Black fruits about a third of an inch across ripen in fall and hang on into winter. Birds, raccoons, squirrels, deer, black bears and wild turkeys eat them.

It grows wild along the coast from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to the Florida Keys, through most of peninsular Florida and in the Bahamas and Cuba. Its home is coastal hammocks, dunes, salt marsh edges, river floodplains and flatwoods. It also grows west along the Gulf Coast to Texas, and planted palms grow more than 100 miles north and inland of its native range.

How to grow Cabbage Palmetto

Cabbage palmetto grows best in full sun and takes part shade. A young palm stands shade, but a grown one needs sun most of the day. It is not fussy about soil and grows on sand, marl or limestone. Once rooted, it takes both drought and flooding. It stands salt spray on its fronds but not salt water around its roots. Plant it 15 feet from a wall, and set trees 10 feet apart. Keep it more than 50 feet from overhead wires.

Saplings ship potted. Nurseries move grown palms dug from pastures, but a young palm without a trunk cannot regrow cut roots, so it moves only with its root ball whole. Plant it in late spring or summer, when warm soil speeds new roots, in a hole about twice as wide as the pot. Set the base of the stem at the depth it grew in the pot, since planting deeper can kill a palm. Put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the stem. Clean the pulp off the seed, keep it from drying, and sow it fresh, half an inch to an inch deep. In warm, moist soil it can sprout in as little as 18 days. For spring, hold it damp in the refrigerator for 30 days first.

Water weekly through the first two summers. Feed it a slow-release palm fertilizer, since a shortage of potassium spots and kills the oldest fronds. Leave the green fronds on, since cutting them stunts the palm, and remove only fronds that are fully brown. Never wound the trunk, which cannot heal.

Each flower carries both male and female parts, so there are no male and female plants to pair. Bees carry its pollen, and flies, beetles and wasps visit too. Lethal bronzing, a disease spread by a planthopper, can kill it, and an infected palm cannot be cured. The disease has turned up in more than 30 Florida counties. Ganoderma butt rot and other trunk rots can also kill it, and the palmetto weevil attacks stressed, newly moved palms.