Sabal birmingham

Sabal 'Birmingham' is one of the hardiest fan palms an American gardener can grow, and the palm owes its survival to Woodlanders. Well-established specimens come through USDA Zone 7, deep into country where an ordinary cabbage palm needs coddling and near-perfect siting just to limp along. Broad, costapalmate, deep green fronds rise on a stout, slowly building trunk, giving the unmistakable palm silhouette hundreds of miles north of where the family usually stops.

The story begins in Birmingham, Alabama, with a Miss Eva Alexander, who raised a single palmetto from seed she had bought from California and grew the plant on for some forty years. Whatever the seed's true identity, the palm she nurtured proved astonishingly tough, surviving freeze after freeze below ten degrees Fahrenheit and at least one plunge below zero, temperatures that should have killed any palmetto outright. When Miss Alexander died in 1976, the remarkable palm was donated to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

The original tree declined at the Botanical Gardens and was gone by the early 1980s, and the whole singular lineage might have died with it. That the palm survives at all is down to Bob McCartney of Woodlanders, who recognized what was at stake, collected seed from the original tree before it was lost, and raised the seedlings on at the nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. Woodlanders first distributed the palm to gardeners, and virtually every Sabal 'Birmingham' growing in America today traces back to that rescue and that propagation work. This is, in the fullest sense, a Woodlanders introduction.

The exact parentage remains an open question. Sabal 'Birmingham' was once guessed to be a cross involving Sabal mexicana, though the very slow growth and hard-won cold hardiness point more convincingly to a hybrid of Sabal palmetto and Sabal minor, both of which grow wild in Alabama. The palmettos are woven through the human history of the Southeast, long furnishing thatch, basketry fiber, and, from some kinds, the edible heart, and the fan silhouette remains an emblem of the coastal South.

Patience is the price of admission. Even a well-settled plant grows slowly, a twenty-year specimen standing perhaps nine feet tall and fifteen wide, with decades more before the palm approaches the great heights the species can eventually reach. That deliberate pace is a virtue in a smaller garden, where the palm gives lasting structure without threatening to outgrow the space. Site 'Birmingham' as a specimen in full sun to part shade in well-drained soil, where the fronds can be read against sky or a plain wall, and grow a cold-hardy palm with a genuine piece of nursery history behind it.