Gold Coast Gardener

August 20, 2006

By Gene Joyner, Extension Agent
Palm Beach County Cooperative Extension Service

Palms in area landscapes are coming back now and looking a lot better since they’ve had a good rainy early part of the summer, but if your palms in your landscape still aren’t back to what you think they should be because of hurricane damage, make sure that you fertilize this month with a good quality palm fertilizer. Palms should be fertilized every 3 to 4 months, but following severe damage they can be fertilized even more often.

Hopefully we won’t get any additional storms later this fall that would do further damage to palms and many people are adding new palms to the landscape, too, because palms do give a very tropical look to anyone’s landscaping. If you don’t want to put palms outside, they make excellent house plants or patio plants as well and there are many shade loving palms available through local garden centers and retail nurseries that sell palms.

In the outside landscaping many of our native palms are doing much better in the landscape now that they’ve had several months to recover especially royal palms that were beat up badly by last fall’s hurricanes.

Queen palms, sabal palms and others have made almost a complete recovery in many communities. Date palms also fared a lot better than many palms and have bounced back now to form an attractive feature in the landscape.

If you’re new to the area or don’t know a lot about palms, you’ll be amazed to find how many different types are used in south Florida. Well over 1,000 types are grown here either in the landscaping or in containers in palms collections.

If you want to see one of the largest collections of palms in the western hemisphere, take an hour and a half drive to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami on Old Cutler Road. They have over 80 acres, much of which are devoted to palms and some of the specimens in the garden have been planted over 75 years.
Locally you can see collections of palms in places such as the Mounts Botanical Garden at 531 North Military Trail in West Palm Beach and the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden in West Palm Beach.

If you would like to find out about some of the really rare palms that are available, attend one of the monthly meetings of the Palm Beach Palm and Cycad Society. They meet the first Wednesday of each month at 7:30 at the Mounts Building Auditorium, 531 North Military Trail in West Palm Beach. They have very interesting speakers and they also have raffles at meetings which enable you to pick up new palms to add to your home landscape.

The Palm Beach County Extension Service has some excellent publications on palms which are free and can be picked up at their offices during normal business hours.

If you’re having landscape problems with existing palms and want some free advice, call the Palm Beach County Extension office. Dial 233-1750 in the north and central county area or 276-1260 in the south county area.