Plant Wiki

The open plant encyclopedia

Know any plant.
Grow it well.

Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.

  • 13,000+plants with full pages
  • 365,000+plant species worldwide
  • 220+countries covered

Common in

See all

The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.

What do you want to do?

Popular plants

Browse all plants

See them in 3D

All plants in 3D

Browse plants

Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.

Plant Wiki › Browse plants

Fountain palm

Livistona chinensis

Also called Fan palm, Chinese fan palm, Chinese Fountain Palm, Chinese Fan Palm, Fountain Palm

In Singapore: Chinese Fan Palm, Fountain Palm, Serdang, Chinese Fountain Palm (Grown in Singapore)

Fountain palm
Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Cookie assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0

A subtropical fan palm from east Asia, usually grown as an ornamental tree in gardens and conservatories. It does best in warm, bright, humid conditions with some protection from cold.

Family
Arecaceae (Palm family)
Grows as
Tree, Palm
Light
Full sun, Part shade
Water
Water regularly during growth and let the top layer of soil dry slightly between waterings.
Soil
Well-drained, fertile potting mix or garden soil.
Temperature
18–30 °C; hardy to about -6 °C (USDA zones 9-11), so protect from frost.
How easy
Easy
Native range
S. Japan to China (Guangdong)
Climate
subtropical

About

Livistona chinensis, the Chinese fan palm or fountain palm, is a species of subtropical palm tree of east Asia. It is native to southern Japan, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, southeastern China and Hainan. In Japan, two notable populations occupy islands near the coast of Miyazaki Prefecture, Aoshima and Tsuki Shima. It is also reportedly naturalized in South Africa, Mauritius, Réunion, the Andaman Islands, Java, New Caledonia, Micronesia, Hawaii, Florida, Bermuda, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

How to grow it

The palm is cultivated as an ornamental tree in gardens and conservatories. It is hardy in USDA zones 9-11, tolerating temperatures down to about 22 °F (−6 °C). They are often grown as a landscape palm in hot and wet tropical and subtropical climates like eastern Australia, Southeast Asia, and the southeast United States.

This plant can become a weed, or in some ecosystems an invasive species, in places such as Bermuda, Hawaii, Florida wetlands and on some Caribbean Islands.

Other Livistona plants

Australian Fan Palm · Livistona benthamii · Ribbon Fan Palm · Livistona endauensis · Livistona

[Contains information from Leaf Area Index (LAI) and Heritage Trees from data.gov.sg (National Parks Board), made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0]

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Livistona chinensis by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.

The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.

Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.

Credits & terms

Identify a plant

Point at a leaf or flower and snap. One plant in frame works best.

Your photo
Starting camera…