Cabbage palm (Sabal palmetto): what the agencies record

This page reports what US federal and state publications say about one tree. It does not identify trees from descriptions or photos and does not say what should be done with any tree. The family overview, tree species in the agency records, explains the sources and holds the comparison table. This is the one palm in the family.

At a glance

Item	What the source records
Scientific name	Sabal palmetto (Walt.) Lodd. ex J. A. and J. H. Schult., palm family (Silvics); no infrataxa (FEIS)
Other names	Carolina palmetto, common palmetto, palmetto and cabbage-palm (Silvics); sabal palm (UF/IFAS); cabbage palmetto (FEIS, Florida statute)
Size, Silvics	Mature trees straight and unbranched, 10 to 25 m (33 to 82 ft) tall and 30 to 61 cm (12 to 24 in) in diameter, with a dense well-rounded crown
Size, UF/IFAS	A full round canopy on a trunk 10 to 16 inches in diameter and up to 40 feet tall; leaf blades 3 to 4 feet long on stalks 3 to 6 feet long
Federal legal status, FEIS	No special status
State tree	Florida, by statute 15.031; UF/IFAS also names it the state tree of South Carolina

Native range and sites

Silvics of North America (Agriculture Handbook 654, volume 2, 1990, chapter by Wade and Langdon) calls cabbage palmetto the most northerly and abundant of the native tree palms. It records the range from the Florida Keys north through south-central Florida to Cape Fear, North Carolina, with a separate population reported at Cape Hatteras. From North Carolina to the Florida line it hugs the coast, usually within 20 km (12 mi) of the ocean. The handbook also records the Bahama Islands outside the United States, and FEIS adds Cuba and says the tree is cultivated in Hawaii. FEIS lists the states as Florida, Georgia, Hawaii and South Carolina.

Silvics says the tree grows on sandy shores, along brackish marshes and in seacoast woodlands, takes a broad range of soil pH, salinity and drainage, and prefers neutral to alkaline soils with near-surface calcareous sands, marls or limestone. Average annual rainfall across the range runs from 1000 to 1630 mm (39 to 64 in). The handbook says low winter temperatures apparently limit the horticultural range, which runs more than 160 km (100 mi) north and inland of the natural range. UF/IFAS gives the cold hardiness as about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly USDA Zone 8b, and says the palm is fairly tolerant of salt spray on the foliage but not of salt in the root zone. Silvics says the species can form pure stands up to about 10 ha (25 acres) in freshwater areas, called river hammocks along a river and cabbage-palm hammocks or palm savannas inland.

No annual rings, and the root system

Silvics says palms have no cambium as such, so they produce no annual growth rings, and that average growth rates are unknown; one ornamental in south-central Florida reached 9 m (30 ft) tall and about 76 cm (30 in) across including leaf bases over a 16-year span. FEIS lists the wood as unusual looking for the same reason. Leaf bases, called boots, stay on some trunks and fall off others, and Silvics says the diameter is exaggerated when they stay on. For how rings are normally read in other trees, see the page on tree rings, cores and age.

Silvics describes a short, bulbous underground stem ringed by a dense mass of contorted roots commonly 1.2 to 1.5 m (4 to 5 ft) across and 1.5 to 1.8 m (5 to 6 ft) deep, with tough light-orange roots reaching 4.6 to 6.1 m (15 to 20 ft) into the soil. It adds that the tree grows extensive adventitious rootlets along the trunk up to the high-water mark, a cylindrical root mass that may reach 1.8 to 2.4 m (6 to 8 ft) across, and so can withstand 2 m (6 ft) swings in freshwater level but not lengthy tidal flooding. UF/IFAS reports a related finding from a 1984 study: cut roots do not branch and make new tips but die back to the trunk, and are replaced by large numbers of new adventitious roots from a root initiation zone at the base of the trunk. It says young trunkless palms have no working zone yet, and that a new root system can take 8 months or longer, during which the palm lives on water stored in its trunk.

Flowers, fruit and seed

Silvics says the flowers are perfect and creamy to yellowish white, borne in arching or drooping clusters 1.5 to 2.5 m (5 to 8 ft) long from April to August in south Florida but for only 4 to 6 weeks from mid-July in North Carolina, and pollinated by bees. The black fleshy fruits are 5 to 13 mm (0.2 to 0.5 in) across and hold one hard brown seed. In one southwest Florida hammock an estimated 1,530,000 ripe fruits per hectare (620,000 per acre) were produced in a year; after 6 months 9 percent held intact seeds, 1 percent were infested by beetles and 89 percent had been eaten or removed. Silvics names a bruchid beetle (Caryobruchus gleditsiae) as the major cause of seed loss and says water carries seed along the Atlantic and Gulf shorelines because the seed floats and tolerates salt water. UF/IFAS reports that seedlings look much like grass, and can take 15 to 30 years to form a visible trunk in nature, much faster in nurseries.

Fire, wind and other damage

FEIS says the palm grows where ground fires are frequent and crown fires rare, protected by a deeply embedded terminal bud on a fire-resistant trunk, and that very severe fires on deep organic soil can kill it by consuming the soil, destroying the roots and the support. Silvics adds that fire lets it form pure stands, and rates it the most wind-resistant tree in south Florida, though Hurricane Donna in 1960 caused extensive damage on Palm Key in Florida Bay. Silvics says that in its native setting only a rising sea level, hurricanes and organic-soil fires are harmful, calls the tree apparently free of damaging insects and most pathogens, and mentions bole cankers.

UF/IFAS (ENH-733, revised March 2024) is more detailed. It says stressed and transplanted palms are attractive to the palmetto weevil, whose larvae excavate the crown stem and kill the growing point. It lists three lethal diseases: Ganoderma butt rot, a soilborne fungus that decays the lower 3 to 4 feet of the trunk and shows wilt only after 80 to 90 percent of the trunk cross-section has rotted; Thielaviopsis trunk rot, which needs a trunk wound to enter; and Texas phoenix palm decline, a phytoplasma spread by phloem-feeding insects, confined mainly to counties in west central Florida when the fact sheet was revised. It says potassium and magnesium deficiency are the nutritional disorders met in this palm. It also calls two sights normal or harmless: a V-shaped clear area in the leaf blade, and peeling of the pseudobark on the trunk, whose cause is undetermined. The wider palm pests are on the what attacks palm page.

Uses the sources name

Both handbooks say the name comes from the edible terminal bud, which tastes like cabbage, and that taking the bud kills the tree. FEIS lists the wood as sea-worm resistant and splinter resistant, used for wharf pilings, poles, broom handles and table tops, the leaves for canes, scrub brushes, thatch and baskets, and the fruit as food for black bears, raccoons, bats, wild turkeys, white-tailed deer and many birds. Silvics also records that young fronds are shipped worldwide each spring for Palm Sunday, and that the flowers give a dark-amber honey. FEIS says heavy use as a landscape tree is depleting natural stocks. Florida statute 15.031 designates the sabal palmetto palm as the state tree and says the designation does not limit commercial use. South Carolina law (section 1-1-660) adopts the palmetto tree as the official tree of that state.