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Sabal palmetto
Also called Cabbage Palm, Blue Palmetto, Carolina Palmetto, Sabal Palm
In Singapore: Palmetto Palm, Blue Palmetto, Cabbage Palmetto, Cabbage Tree, Common Palmetto (Grown in Singapore)
Sabal palmetto is a tall, fan-leaved palm native to the southeastern US coast, Cuba and the Yucatán. It is very tolerant of salt spray, drought and hurricanes, and grows best in hot, humid summers.
Sabal palmetto (, SAY-bəl), also known as cabbage palm, cabbage palmetto, sabal palm, palmetto palm, blue palmetto, Carolina palmetto, common palmetto, and swamp cabbage, is one of 15 species of palmetto palm.
It is native to the Southeast United States Coastal Plain, the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, and the West Indies.
Sabal palmetto is a popular landscape plant in the subtropical climates of the Gulf and south Atlantic states, mostly from coastal regions of North Carolina to Florida. Sabal palm is used extensively around beach and resort areas along the lower East Coast because of its tolerance of salt spray and drought. Because of their relatively long establishment period and prevalence on southern ranchlands, few, if any are grown from seed in nurseries. Instead, established plants are dug in the wild with small rootballs since virtually all the severed roots die and must be replaced by new roots in the new location. Most leaves are removed during transplanting to reduce transpiration. Cabbage palms have excellent hurricane resistance, but are frequently overpruned to supposedly lower wind loads. Sabal palm seed germination excels in hot and humid summer climates.
Most references rate the species as hardy to USDA hardiness zone 8b.
Sabal palmetto is native to the subtropical coastal regions of the American states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and southeastern North Carolina. It is also cultivated elsewhere in the Southeastern US, in some areas of southeastern Virginia, southwestern Alabama, and southeastern Mississippi. It can also be found alongside Cuba's northern coast (from Havana to Matanzas), the Turks and Caicos, the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, and the Bahamas.
The growing heart of the new fronds, also known as the terminal bud, gives the tree its "cabbage" name, since this is extracted as a food and tastes like other undifferentiated plant meristem tissue, such as the heart of a cabbage or artichoke. It is one of several palm species that are sometimes used to make heart of palm salad. Heart of palm was commonly eaten by Native Americans. However, extracting the heart kills this species of palm, because the terminal bud is the only point from which the palm can grow, so without this bud, the palm is not able to replace old leaves and eventually dies.
Puerto Rico palmetto · Dwarf Palmetto · Royal Palmetto · Sabal rosei · Sonoran Palmetto · Palmetto
[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 Sabal palmetto 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.
