Cabbage palms: the insidious, surreptitious, cuckoos of the Florida retail landscape

This post complements Chapter 9 Cabbage Palms in the Landscape in my book, The Palmetto Book: Histories and Mysteries of the Cabbage Palm, published by the University of Florida Press.

How are cabbage palms analogous to cuckoos? Their sneaky strategy for survival.

Eurasion reed warbler raising a common cuckoo. Photo by Per Harald Olson from Wikimedia commons

Cuckoos lay their eggs in other bird’s nests unnoticed and then the unsuspecting parents accept the interloper. That’s pretty much what cabbage palms are all about in parking lots and various retail landscapes. This morning I encountered a great example at Home Depot.

Volunteer cabbage palm has insinuated itself into a parking lot landscape.

The palm in the photo above was not planted as part of commercial landscape. Seeds from nearby palms found their way (birds? raccoons?) to this parking median and germinated. Benign neglect is a common feature of parking lot landscapes — they are installed at some cost, with good intentions and drip irrigation, but with time they decline and are assaulted with desire paths. Small cabbage palms are hard to kill and nearly impossible to uproot. So once they reach a certain undocumented size they start being accepted as part of the landscape.

You can see it here on the Property Appraisers website.

You may wonder how it can be determined to be a volunteer? It doesn’t appear on the earliest images of the parking lot, and it is much smaller (and more robust) than palms are typically transplanted.

This palm is now producing fruit of its own, with predicable results.
The next generation of cabbage palms germinating under the presumptive parent

Eventually, as the installed landscape continues to decline, word will come down to rejuvenate the parking lot landscape. Where oaks were planted they may be removed (because the risk managers noticed the roots were lifting the asphalt nearby creating a potential tripping hazards), languishing and half-dead shrubs will be removed, and mulch will be brought it. The question is whether the cabbage palm/s will be allowed to remain.

UPDATE

The final stage (acceptance) appeared a few weeks later. Instead of being removed as an interloper, the palm was trimmed – reflecting the perception that it belongs there. Subdued, but still alive, it now has successfully infiltrated the commercial landscape – a nearly impossible task for other tree species.

Keep your eyes open — you’ll see other examples of this phenomenon. For example, here’s a volunteer cabbage palm I spotted at Lowes. Good news: it will be shading the bench on the other side.

This volunteer cabbage palm probably replaced some other plant and has been allowed to grow.