Sabal tamaulipensis is a solitary fan palm from the dry limestone hills of northeastern Mexico, where the species climbs the San Carlos Mountains of Tamaulipas and neighboring Nuevo Leon. Stiff, rounded, blue-green fans are held on arching stalks above a trunk that stays short for many years, so young plants read as a fountain of palmate leaves close to the ground. In habitat the palm can eventually reach fifteen to twenty feet, though cultivated plants are slow and often stay compact, and older specimens sometimes recline on a horizontal trunk rather than standing straight. Small, fragrant, creamy flowers give way to round black fruit in the wild.
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.
Sabal causiarum, the Puerto Rican Hat Palm, is the heavyweight of the palmetto family. A single smooth gray trunk swells to as much as four feet through, the thickest of any Sabal, and rises forty or fifty feet beneath a crown of enormous costapalmate fans six feet across, stiff and deeply divided, each with a conspicuous tan ligule at the base of the stalk. Cream flowers on branched stalks longer than the leaves give way to round black fruit. Where the native palmettos read as graceful, this one reads as monumental.
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.
Sabal louisiana, the Louisiana Palmetto, is best pictured as a dwarf palmetto grown large. Where the familiar Sabal minor stays stemless, this palm builds a stout trunk in time and carries broad, blue-green, fan-shaped leaves on a far more robust frame, which is why the plant has been passed back and forth in the books, treated sometimes as a form of Sabal minor and sometimes as a hybrid with Sabal texana.
Sabal mexicana, the Texas Palmetto, is a large, robust fan palm once known as Sabal texana. In the United States the palm is native to the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and formerly ranged northward along the south Texas Gulf coast, while the wider distribution reaches through eastern Mexico into Central America. The species resembles the cabbage palmetto of the Southeast but reads as heavier and more massive, and the much larger seed is the surest way to tell the two apart.
Sabal minor, the Dwarf Palmetto, is the hardiest of the native fan palms and the one most gardeners can grow. The palm stays essentially stemless, holding a low fountain of stiff, blue-green, fan-shaped leaves straight from the ground, with the growing point set safely at or below the surface. Erect fruiting stalks rise well above the foliage and carry small black fruit about a quarter inch across.
Sabal palmetto, the Cabbage Palmetto, is the classic palm of the Southeastern coast and the State Tree of both South Carolina and Florida. Blue-green, costapalmate (fan) leaves crown a straight trunk that thickens to about a foot and a half across, and the whole reads as the very image of the coastal South. The palm grows commonly to around thirty feet and climbs considerably taller in Florida.
Sabal rosei, the Llano Palm, is a handsome fan palm from the Pacific side of Mexico, ranging through the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco, where the palm covers the coastal plains, the llanos, by the hundred thousand. Thick, blue-green, leathery fan leaves give the plant a bold, sculptural quality, and the slim, straight trunk is either patterned with a neat spiral of old leaf bases or swept clean to reveal the ring-like scars beneath.
The trunked palmettos of Brazoria County, Texas have kept botanists arguing for the better part of a century, and this palm is the latest word in that argument. Along the San Bernard River and the wet riparian woods of the upper Texas coast stands a population of palmettos that build real trunks, sometimes fifteen feet of them, in country where Sabal minor is supposed to stay flat on the ground. For years the plant passed through the nursery trade as Sabal × texensis, the Brazoria Palmetto, and that is the name our seed came under. In 2011 Douglas Goldman and colleagues ran the DNA and published a new name, Sabal × brazoriensis, for what turned out to be an ancient natural hybrid between the Dwarf Palmetto and the Cabbage Palmetto, Sabal palmetto, rather than the Mexican Palmetto most people had guessed.
