Sabal etonia

Sabal etonia, the scrub palmetto, is a small fan palm found nowhere in the world but Florida, where the palm is a signature of the sand pine scrub, most abundantly along the ancient dunes of the Lake Wales Ridge. The specific epithet etonia comes from the Etonia scrub of Putnam County, the country where the species was first collected, so the botanical name carries a Florida place with it.

Most of the trunk lives underground. Scrub palmetto usually holds a stem that runs beneath the sand, sending up only a low rosette of leaves, though now and then a short erect trunk appears above ground. Four to seven stiff, costapalmate, gray- to blue-green fans rise from the crown, each blade three feet across or more, arching in the strong, structural way of the genus. That buried stem is an elegant answer to a harsh home: in a habitat shaped by periodic fire, drought, and lean sand, the growing point sits safely below the surface and the palm simply resprouts after a burn.

Despite that deep-Florida origin, scrub palmetto proves remarkably cold hardy, thriving throughout Zone 8 and even into Zone 7. One of the plants in the photograph grows in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a long way north of the Florida scrub, and Woodlanders was among the first nurseries anywhere to offer the species to gardeners. Fragrant creamy-white flowers open in spring, held on branched sprays, and give way to glossy black fruit, in the manner of the palmettos that have long fed wildlife and furnished thatch and fiber across the Southeast.

In the garden Sabal etonia reads as a bold, low fan of blue-green among plants that share a taste for sun and sharp drainage. Site the palm as a specimen in a gravel or xeric bed, at the front of a dry sunny border, or in a sand-scrub or native planting, where the arching leaves can be seen from the side and given room to spread. Slow, drought-tolerant, and unbothered by heat, poor soil, or deer, this is a distinctive and genuinely rare palm for the collector and the native-plant gardener alike.