Get to Know our State Tree, the Cabbage Palm (aka Sabal Palmetto) with Jono Miller

Get to Know our State Tree, the Cabbage Palm (aka Sabal Palmetto) with Jono Miller The Environmental Conservancy of North Port YouTube https://youtu.be/a2eXPhjwDv4?si=prrbqiwRBkWvuyOv 7/14/2025 0:02 so welcome everyone tonight we're going to get to know our 0:08 state tree the cabbage palm with john o'miller tonight's event is being hosted by the environmental 0:14 conservancy of northport we're a 501c3 non-profit land conservancy focused on the acquisition of land in 0:20 northport and surrounding areas for the preservation and protection of and education about our local area 0:26 natural habitats flora and fauna to include the threatened gopher tortoise and the florida scrub j 0:32 since our launch in february of 2020 we've been focusing our land acquisition efforts in a neighborhood of north port 0:38 that hosts an active population of the florida scrub j along with the northern quail and gopher tortoise what our ultimate goal is to 0:45 obtain and conserve undeveloped parcels in all neighborhoods of the city and surrounding areas 0:50 harbor heights port charlotte englewood and beyond in an effort to create a balance between development 0:55 and our local environment our harbor heights chapter is now active and other chapters are in the planning stages 1:01 to learn more visit our website ecnortport.com or look us up on facebook or instagram 1:10 jono miller is a natural historian environmental educator and activist who has worked for half a century to understand and 1:16 protect the wild places in southwest florida the more jono learned about cabbage palms the more unanswered questions he 1:23 discovered that led to his master's thesis in florida studies program at usf in st 1:28 petersburg ten years later after traveling around the coastal southeast investigating this common but poorly 1:34 understood palm the university press of florida published his book the palmetto book histories and mysteries of the cabbage 1:40 palm the cabbage palm helps make up our local area's native tree canopy together with the 1:46 slash pine and live oak and unfortunately of the three trees it is the one that remains most largely 1:52 misunderstood tonight jono will tell us about the histories and mysteries of this beautiful native tree 1:58 and help us to better recognize the importance of its conservation in our landscape so jono you can take it from here 2:08 myself and try to get set up here 2:18 okay so um okay i'm gonna stop sharing and come 2:25 back at it a different way let's see here um back to you start 2:34 share 2:43 keep your fingers crossed here we go so um yes i have written a book and i 2:50 will talk about it at the end but this is not uh an author reading passages from the book type of presentation this is really 2:56 just what it says which is an introduction to uh the cabbage palm and so i'm going 3:01 to start with some basics the cabbage palmett's scientific name is 3:07 sable palmetto and it's in the palm family and we'll talk more about that later if people are familiar with palm trees 3:14 the sort of iconic palm that most people are start with is the coconut palm 3:20 and a coconut palm the canopy has very conspicuous individual fronds 3:26 they're very quite distinct the fronds are feather-like and the technical term for that is pinnate typically you can 3:32 see the scars around the trunk where the leaves with bronzer attached they frequently lean 3:39 they typically are fatter at the base and gets skinnier as they go up and they're typically found in coastal 3:46 settings and that's compared with the cabbage palm the cabbage palm has a denser more spherical canopy 3:53 can sometimes be hard to see the individual leaves the fronds are called costa palmate and 3:59 i'll explain that later the leaf scars are typically kind of hard to see that tree is typically vertical although 4:06 you can find it in just about any orientation the trunk typically does not taper and 4:11 they can be found both right along the coast and also inland all the way across the state 4:18 so the historic range of the cabbage palm was peninsular florida up the east coast to the southernmost 4:24 tip of north carolina but not as far west as 4:30 the florida border on the gulf coast it's believed that they could live in a 4:35 much broader area potentially i think this illustration is a little exaggerated but if you go to 4:41 inaturalist and look at their map this is where people have reported 4:47 uh finding cabbage palms now there are two other sable species 4:53 that are found in florida one is sabolatonia this is sort of in a garden setting 4:58 but it's typically a scrub plant it grows in white well-drained sandy soils in the 5:05 scrub and it's seldom if ever develops a trunk it stays low and likewise the swamp 5:10 palmetto sable minor is found in wetland areas and it also seldom develops a trunk 5:19 now i mentioned costa palmate the cabbage palm has an organ and it's frond called acosta it's sort 5:25 of a spear-shaped point and that's where all these different leaflets or leaf segments are 5:30 attached and because of the that structure being there there are many more 5:35 leaflets that can be attached than you would see on say a sao paulo so that's why the the fronds are have so many different 5:43 ribs to them and they have what are called boot jacks 5:50 and that's confusing to people the boot jacks are these spiky remnants of the leaves that 5:56 frequently encircle the trunk they're very distinctive and if you have a windstorm uh you can 6:03 see all of these are pointing in the same direction typically in a wind storm the part of the leaf 6:10 where it's snapped off points in the direction that the wind came from that's just how their aerodynamics work 6:17 and this is a demonstration of how to use a boot jack 6:29 jono i'm just going to interrupt you really quick sure i failed to say after i clicked record that if anyone has any questions as we 6:36 go along please go ahead and type them in the chat sorry about that that'll be fine so in 6:41 florida if we want to take our boots off we can just find an old cabbage palm boot jack and step on one end of it and pull the 6:47 boot off elsewhere in the u.s they have to manufacture boot jacks and they're a real thing so 6:55 it confuses a lot of people the cabbage palm comes in two different forms one is when the boot jacks are still 7:01 surrounding the trunk and the other is when they've fallen off and so the 7:06 ones that are still have their boot jacks are called booted and the ones that are don't are called slick if you go to buy 7:12 one so uh what's distinctive about the cabbage palm leaves is that they 7:19 die and just stay in place they don't fall off quickly they have to eventually 7:24 basically rot away or get burned off so the leaves are kind of interesting 7:30 and how they're arranged they see on the right sometimes it looks like all the um 7:36 fronds are lined up but actually each frond really comes off roughly 135 degrees 7:45 rotated from the previous uh frond so if you look at the green ones there 7:53 how they spiral around the number seven one is not particularly close to the number eight 7:58 one so common mystic misconception is that 8:04 palms are grasses um you can find plenty of places online that will tell you that palms are 8:11 grasses that's part of what's not great about the internet 8:17 if you have the old golden nature guide when you're growing up as i did they would have an illustration 8:22 of the monocots and you can see the palms are in one family and the grasses are in the other family 8:28 another family so it's pretty common that people say that palms or grasses it makes as much sense 8:34 as saying pineapples or cattails or lilies or orchids they're in 8:40 completely different plant families it's just that they're both monocots is what people are trying to get across and don't always make it that 8:47 far cabbage palms are really long-lived at least 200 years they can live and 8:54 they're very slow growing here's a photograph that was taken at new college you know when it was still a 8:59 ringling mansion in 1943 or 1944 and then i tried to go back and stand in the same 9:06 location to take this subsequent photograph in 2018 so 75 years separate those two 9:13 photographs and yet you can see it's only gotten up really to the second story 9:21 contrary to rumor cabbage palms can produce a lot of shade the number of articles 9:27 that have been coming out recently about cities that are cutting back on the number of palms they're planting for 9:33 different reasons but one of the reasons they cite is that they're not producing enough shade 9:40 but the fact is they're simply not planting them close together enough so here's a here's shade from a single cabbage palm 9:47 here's a smart guy at walmart people know it the true sign of a floridian is someone 9:53 who parks in the shade rather closest than close to the front door of the walmart 9:58 and you can see they're actually producing shade and this is a picture from the canopy 10:04 walkway at miac river state park and this is a place down in glades 10:09 county called boar hammock and uh you cannot see the ground it's 10:14 just complete uh dense cabbage palm canopy so um what we get lulled into is when 10:22 people specify replanting of trees they'll talk about how many stems or how many trunks 10:29 they'll say well you have to plant this number of trees well no one really cares about the number of the trees what people care 10:36 about is how much shade they're producing so if instead of specifying uh 10:42 that we want you know one one tree or two trees to replace every tree 10:47 we should be saying we want this many square feet of shade within five years and however you can get that go for it and then we could we could see 10:55 palms being planted more frequently because they do produce a lot of shade cabbage palms are routinely overpruned 11:03 this is where my mother-in-law lives this is in saint augustine and this is a 11:09 very abusive [Music] practice 11:17 and now we have the audience participation segment now this takes about four minutes so if you need 11:23 to go check something in the oven you can do that but what i'm going to ask you to do is watch the next scene this little 11:28 video and i want you to count how many green cabbage pump fronds are being cut off 11:34 this tree this is at the sarasota downtown library so you can ignore the brown fronds you can ignore 11:41 the plume stocks but just try to keep track of how many are cut off 11:47 to gain an appreciation of just how much of the tree's total photosynthetic capacity is being 11:53 eliminated in a short time so here goes 16:16 okay so i got 35 i get a different number every time i watch it but the point is 16:22 they're removing the vast majority of all the living leaves on the tree you would never consider doing that with an 16:27 oak tree or a maple tree or any other tree so it really cuts into the productivity 16:33 of the plant and if you watched you probably noticed there's several occasions when he was using a single 16:38 hand holding the chainsaw with one hand i believe that's an osha violation 16:44 so this is a really bad practice and luckily the standards 16:50 have changed i'm about to talk about that johno i'll tell you that in the chat uh there were some guesses 42 16:57 39 and 25. yeah it's a it's hard to tell they go by really fast some are on the 17:03 back side sometimes it's hard to tell a brown one from a green one but what remains is the fact that 17:10 they're really taking uh the vast majority of the living sustenance of the tree away 17:18 oh no it doesn't want to advance oh here we go um so 17:25 historically the american society of abort culture which are a group of arborists that try to develop 17:31 professional standards the way professional organizations do and they had a policy 17:37 that you should not remove any frond above a horizontal plane they called it nine o'clock to three o'clock 17:44 and so they would have illustrations in their documents that look like this do not remove live healthy fronds above the horizontal 17:53 um but they also said um that you could you could remove more um 18:02 that you shouldn't remove green fronds at all but so they were sending this mixed message 18:07 and uh what happened is they revised these pruning standards in 2017 and now there's no mention of 18:14 this nine o'clock to three o'clock stuff what it says now is that you you're only 18:20 the only reason to remove a green frond is for clearance so if it's blocking your sidewalk your driveway 18:26 a road if it's touching a building if it's near a power line sure go ahead and cut all the green 18:32 fronds you want but um that's just for clearance uh you're not supposed to remove green 18:38 fronds for any other reason so these are the standards that the official standards adopted by the 18:44 governing organization and if you see people that are pruning green fronds away that are not for 18:50 clearance as we saw in that video uh they are not following the adopted 18:56 professional standards and when challenged these people say well we're just doing what the owner wants us to do 19:02 well that may be true but they should they should at least be telling the owner that they're being asked to 19:07 violate professional standards for their industry 19:13 so uh there's again an example of an overpruned palm and the recommendation is to allow them 19:22 to have their full natural spherical canopy and when you remove so many fronds it makes them more 19:28 susceptible to disease more susceptible to cold more susceptible to strong winds and it takes away 19:36 the tens of thousands of flowers that they have that pollinators rely on and takes then 19:42 they don't when they prune the flower stalks off then you don't get the seeds and a lot 19:48 of wildlife depend on 19:53 so ifas which is the outfit out of university of florida says some palm 19:59 trees don't need to be pruned like our native cabbage palm it automatically sheds its dead leaves 20:06 so cabbage palms are remarkably tough as a tree 20:12 they are fireproof floodproof frost proof and according to research 20:18 that was done after that really bad hurricane year a lot of extension agents went out and took 20:25 photographs of what trees did well and what trees were heavily impacted and i concluded that the 20:30 cabbage palm was the most wind resistant native tree so here's a shot of fire burning through 20:36 a palm hammock here's another image and these all these palms will survive 20:44 this is a really interesting shot i took up on egmont key and so a fire had gone through this palm 20:50 hammock on egg monkey and then there'd been a storm event that washed white sand in through the hammock 20:55 so it looks like they're in snow but you can see all the palms are re-sprouting and there's no other 21:01 vegetation to be seen they're flood tolerant 21:06 uh and this this could easily uh be seen in the estates in north port 21:13 right now this is the myakka river uh the banks of the mack river and every year the micro 21:18 river leaves its banks and the live oaks and the cabbage palms tolerate that 21:24 um they don't have a problem with it they're very few trees that can survive in those conditions 21:29 and the cabbage palm is one of them and this is what that book that i 21:35 mentioned was called stormscaping if you're interested in it and by pamela crawford and they found that 21:42 even after hurricane andrew 93 of the cabbage palms were intact and i went to 21:47 cabbage key after um charlie came through which really went right over cabbage key and yeah we found some palms 21:54 that had snapped off but most of them were still standing this is a photograph from the 22:01 stormscaping book you can see on the right a live oak that's had all of its twigs 22:07 and leaves stripped off and next to it a cabbage bomb it's kind of busted up it doesn't look great but the leaves are all there and 22:13 it will recover it's not clear that the oak will might might not you can see more cabbage bombs 22:19 in the background that look even better and here's a former 22:24 president this is in the panhandle after michael i think and you can see the pine trees 22:29 have had all their needles stripped and again the cabbage palm retains its leaves 22:36 there's no cold weather that we'll see in florida that will harm a cabbage bomb they can take 22:42 pretty low temperatures and as i said they are growing them in north carolina so 22:50 and this is a little clipping i found after the hard freeze that they had in texas and they're talking about the 22:57 texas stable palms bouncing back but other palms are struggling 23:03 now despite being tough they are threatened by a new disease called lethal bronzing and you need to know 23:08 about this a lethal bronzing is very strange you see these two dead trees 23:15 two dead trunks and then the collapsed leaves of the two more and yet if you pan down 23:22 there are other seemingly healthy uh green ones in the same location so it doesn't immediately 23:31 affect or infect all the trees in an area but it's hard to tell how how far it will go this is the gentleman 23:38 dr bader who is leading the research on the lethal bronzing phenomenon on the disease 23:48 and uh luther bronzing was first identified in texas in 1980 23:53 at it became known as texas phoenix palm decline that's how what they named it as a 23:59 common name it was first found in florida around 2006 and it's similar to a bacteria but 24:06 technically it's called a phytoplasma and a phytoplasma lacks a cell wall it's 24:12 spread by an insect vector and i'll show you this little critter in a moment and we now call it lethal bronzing for a 24:19 number of reasons one is that it's related to lethal yellowing that affected coconut palms 24:29 so this is the insect that transmits the disease hyplexius crudus 24:36 and it can get around in four different ways so that complicates trying to manage it first you could have a palm that's already 24:43 infected and it gets moved or relocated to another setting secondly it may not be infected 24:50 but it may have an insect that carries the disease that moves with it 24:56 third the insect can travel on its own that they're not strong flyers but they can get blown around by the wind or 25:01 hitchhike on cars or the phytoplasma can also occur in 25:06 other plants which seems strange but that's what happened 25:12 in in jamaica with the lethal yellowing they found that the disease was in 25:17 plants other than the coconut palms 25:27 so in terms of the symptoms the first symptom is that the flowers or the um if there has fruit 25:35 they will the flowers will die and the fruit will drop off now if you've over pruned your palms and cut off all your 25:41 bloom stalks you're not going to see that symptom the next symptom is bronzing of the 25:47 older lower leaves and i'll show you that in a minute and that bronzing progresses upward 25:54 towards the spear leaf eventually the spear leaf which is the upright the youngest newest leaf that points straight upward 26:01 will collapse and then dr bader calls it the next is the woodpecker phase because the 26:07 tree is going to die 26:14 so here you can see at the very bottom the kind of tan colored leaves that we associate with the normal dyeing of the 26:20 plant but the leaves more in the middle have this sort of strange bronzy color they're not as uh not as 26:28 gray and they have a little bronze tint to them and here you can see it moving up into 26:34 the canopy and i think in this one those pure leafs already collapsed 26:40 so again the spear leaf is the center when the leaves emerge in the center 26:46 they're tightly folded and look like a spear 26:51 and then the woodpecker phase is at the end of this now if you suspect you have uh lethal 26:57 bronzing there is a test uh it's a little complicated you need to get a drill 27:03 it needs to be sterilized so you're not getting any other genetic material you need to drill into the tree and 27:10 remove some of the material put it in a plastic bag then you got to keep it on ice you got to ship 27:15 it overnight to one of two addresses and i think it costs about 75 the price may 27:23 have changed so needless to say a lot of people don't get the testing 27:28 but if you're interested in it this is the publication you can find online that'll teach you how to do it there are other 27:35 reasons palms can die so what's the prognosis well if you had 27:40 a super valuable palm a rare one for some reason or 27:46 another species you can inject it every three months with oxytetracycline 27:55 but that may simply be holding off the disease in other words it doesn't really 28:00 cure it it just keeps it from taking over and obviously that's completely not feasible 28:06 for most people and you end up with the tree riddled with holes where you've been drilling into it 28:13 so it's i don't think it's a particularly realistic solution 28:19 once it's diagnosed as having the lethal bronzing it's fatal so if if you 28:26 have a positive test you should get it out there now once all the leaves have died and 28:31 there's no green you know the spear leaf collapsed all the others are dead it does not pose a problem a threat to 28:38 other trees the insect cannot or will not pick up the disease from a completely dead tree 28:44 it's it's that middle stage when it's been infected and then if more of the little hypoxias 28:50 feed on it then they could move it to another plant so ideally you'd like to identify it early 28:55 and remove it and if you fail and end up with just a dead tree you don't need to worry about it you can you 29:02 actually can leave it for the woodpeckers now uh cabbage palms can be 29:09 invasive and uh some people are surprised for me to say 29:14 that some people believe that native plants can't be invasive uh but they clearly can um 29:24 let's see well that does not want to advance which 29:30 is interesting i'm going to stop sharing and come back in and see if i can get back to this 29:38 point let's try this again 29:46 okay so here's mrs klj i forget this is like from the 20s or 30s this was a news clipping i found and 29:52 this is klj of tampa says she has sable palms spring up all over her yard some 29:57 have grown to be from five to eight feet in height she asks what's the easiest way to get rid of them they're very difficult to 30:03 dig up by the roots she hopes someone can tell her something that will kill the tree and also run out the trunk quickly 30:11 so this is a photograph i took in our neighborhood what looks like grass i know we can't see that you can't no okay well that's a 30:18 problem isn't it i'm gonna back out even further 30:24 let me close this 30:38 i'm gonna oh share and where did that go hold on a sec let 30:47 me put on my specs here 30:53 um we can see your screens now yeah but you can't see the screen we want to see the north port 31:03 where did that go let me look 31:09 um here this is the 31:19 okay let's try this again can you see that yeah yep let's see if 31:26 let's see if it advances so again these are these are not this is not grass these are baby cabbage palm seedlings 31:34 now this is something i see in my neighborhood these are cabbage palms that are a little older they've just come up in the um 31:43 in the lawn area and as the woman in tampa mentioned these are you cannot pull one of these 31:50 up i mean superman couldn't pull one of these up they they have a very extensive root system 31:55 and so um you can't pull them up they can be killed with herbicide but 32:01 they don't necessarily die with herbicide a lot of people don't like to use herbicides if you cut them off 32:07 they just re-sprout so then you end up in a situation like this now you can see this neighbor 32:14 my my suspicion is that this neighbor has a pair of pruning shears or lopping shears they're 32:20 not people that either own or feel comfortable using a chainsaw so all they can do is cut the leaves off 32:27 as they come out and as you can see in the various stages they just keep throwing up new leaves so 32:35 um then that eventually you know leads to this kind of situation 32:41 so um they will you know they will start to take over a setting if all you have is uh pruning shears 32:49 and you can't pull them out you can't mow them down uh you could end up with a lot of cabbage 32:54 bombs now that's not necessarily a bad thing and i'll tell you why here's a cabbage 33:02 palm and i think this is at a lowe's somebody put a bench there i guess for spouses to 33:08 wait or who knows what who hangs out at a lowe's but anyway uh this is a volunteer 33:14 you can't really successfully plant a cabbage palm that small so this they probably had some 33:21 uh you know ligustrum or something planted in that little end cap of that aisle and uh that didn't make it 33:28 and this palm germinated and it's growing up and in a few years it'll provide shade for the people that 33:34 are sitting in that bench at no expense to lowe's here's a setting 33:39 in downtown sarasota where there's only a few feet between this blank white wall and parking spaces there's one live oak 33:48 way over on the right but the majority of what's come in there are cabbage palms and they're uh intercepting rainfall they're 33:55 producing oxygen and in my mind they look better than staring at a 34:01 blank wall so the fact that they um will come in on their own as both a 34:07 curse and a blessing now i want to talk a little bit about 34:13 cabbage palms in northport this is obviously not a portion of the talk that i share with 34:18 everyone i sort of work this up specifically for northport and i'm going to start in the nona 34:24 spring area you probably all know that nona is a very important archaeological 34:30 site and you can see the spring there on the left and then all those little uh 34:37 poofs the little top nuts are the tops of the the canopy or the cabbage 34:42 palms around the spring so uh this is a 1948 34:49 aerial image of that includes uh section 33 of that township and that that blue 34:56 dot there is where the uh spring is and you can see that there were these flow ways up in 35:02 the north they're kind of sloughs sloughs are open um 35:08 you know a marshy watercourse that lacks a defined channel and then as it comes 35:13 down you can see there's more and large vegetation along the sides uh quite a bit of what appear to be 35:20 trees so this is what it looked like in 1948 35:26 and eventually we're going to look more closely at that rectangle but first let's look at what it looks like today 35:33 this is the same setting today there's that square i mentioned there's 35:39 the 33 that we saw and that blue dot represents where nona spring is 35:50 so if we zoom in we can see again dots now the 1948 aerial is not particularly high resolution they're a 35:57 little muddy looking but they're there and if we look at it 36:02 today we see a neighborhood and the majority of the tree vegetation 36:07 are cabbage palms now if you lived in that neighborhood which apparently is garbett terrace and jody avenue 36:16 and cummings road and geary terrace 36:21 that the trees you're starting out with there our cabbage palms now if i don't think 36:28 this is anywhere near the uh this is obviously if it's near known it's nowhere near the estates but 36:33 uh if there was to be a flood here the cabbage farms would do fine if there was to be a fire 36:40 there's probably a really high fuel load in those blocks and that's because there hasn't been fire recently in these areas 36:48 so if a fire were to start in any one of these it would kill any oaks probably that are 36:54 there it would kill any pines and all the cabbage bombs would come back so at least in this region of northport 37:01 this is a very important canopy tree now there is a question you can see those three lots 37:08 up near the top there's a question of uh how much how can you develop your lot 37:13 and retain the tree cover because of the size of the lots and requirements for the 37:18 green field etc but um the basic point is at least in this 37:24 portion of northport cabbage palms are an incredibly uh important part of the canopy 37:33 and just to zoom in a little more so so these are really the same cabbage 37:39 palms we were seeing in 1948 they're just older and taller obviously there's some new ones that have come in here but 37:46 then i want to talk a little bit about my kahachi this again is a 1948 ariel now 37:53 in 1948 big slough or maya kahechi had already been dredged for a number of decades i think it started back in the 37:59 late 20s and so what you're seeing here is this pale or white colored area is where the 38:06 sloo was and the sloo again was an area that lacked 38:12 trees it would have been an open marshy area a good part of the year it would have 38:19 been wet might have dried out at some point um 38:24 but no trees and no channel so the dredging the ditching that took place there actually created the first channel in 38:31 the in the slough and then you can see isolated wetlands all sprinkled around 38:38 it 38:43 and there we go so this is the outline of the current uh park and so enlarged you see it and 38:50 you're probably all familiar with the park walked along it and down here you see 38:55 the red trail now this portion where the red trail is and if we go back uh that's in it i don't know if you 39:03 can see my cursor but in this little notch this is the only part of the park that historically had 39:09 trees all the rest of the park originally was open marshy uh territory 39:15 we can see your cursor you you can or cannot we can okay good okay so here's the red 39:21 trail and it wanders around through that cabbage palm area and you notice there's this strange little pie slice of 39:28 a lot with this gentleman's house here and there's a long a ditch that drains 39:35 in that way and so if we zoom in here's here's the house 39:41 uh this is all where the red trail is running through and you can sort of see like they're 39:47 more i'm able to get in closer it looks like in this area they're more oaks and maybe pines over here 39:53 and this is the cabbage palm area well this is what it looked like in 48 39:59 so there was a big wetland over here the house apparently got built more or less in the wetland um 40:07 and then this is an area where the cabbage moms were and they they looked like they weren't quite as 40:12 tall then so they may have been coming in after that initial um dredging 40:20 so this is uh if you if you walk the red trail you find this kind of prehistoric looking 40:26 situation with these really old tall cabbage palms growing in there and again this area would probably benefit 40:32 from a fire and the trees would live so just to backtrack for a second i told you that 40:40 how problematic it was when they overpruned the cabbage bombs and yet we 40:45 know from experience that even when they overprune them the trees survive so you ask yourself 40:51 how can that be jono just told me that you're taking away the majority of the tree's ability to 40:57 function and yet if you come back in two years or however many months later 41:03 it the tree will have recovered well the reality is that these cabbage palms 41:08 were living in florida which is as you know is a lightning capital of the world 41:14 historically there were many lightning strike fires and before the advent of roads that functioned as fire breaks fires would 41:21 spread for miles and miles and so that all the plants that grew in 41:27 these fire frequent fire areas had to have a strategy so i showed you the images of the 41:34 fire consuming the palms it burns off all the brown leaves and it cooks or roasts the green leaves 41:42 and then the trees re-sprout so that palm trees starts to be pre-adapted for heavy 41:48 pruning it's a it's a tree that uh has the ability to recover from having virtually 41:54 all of its outer leaves killed and then it will regenerate from its one bud in the 42:00 center and so it's that resilience that the tree has in order to cope with the frequent fire situations 42:08 that enable it to recover from from heavy pruning but that doesn't mean 42:14 that doesn't mean it's a picnic for the tree it takes a lot of work to grow a whole new canopy so i think it is abusive uh but the 42:22 explanation for why the tree can recover lies in this setting in which 42:27 it finds itself in a fire frequent fire setting 42:32 so uh uh now we get to north ports burning question 42:37 and that is our cabbage palm trees i don't know why this is so controversial but let me wade in here so 42:45 this is a document from the u.s forest service um it was written by some folks uh 42:51 gilman was associated with the uh at uf and um it's sort of a fact sheet 42:57 about cabbage bombs and so if you look at the words that say they can get 90 feet tall 43:04 and they've got a rough fibrous trunk blah blah blah and then it says this is south carolina and florida state tree 43:10 so um it's pretty clear that it is florida and south carolina state tree in 43:16 south carolina they're referred to as palmettos which is why my book is called the palmetto book because i was 43:22 hoping to sell a few in south carolina um but some people say well that's the 43:27 dang legislature for you they don't know what they're talking about they they made it the state tree but maybe it's not a tree so you can't 43:34 can't trust the legislators oh here's ifas uf ifas gardening solutions 43:41 and the first paragraph which i will enlarge for you says nothing says florida like a 43:47 palm tree so it's fitting that the state tree is a sabopov oddly enough though 43:52 the sable palm is not a true tree and as a palm it's more closely related to grasses well luckily 43:59 they pointed out that it's not a grass that it's just related to grasses and then again they 44:04 point out that it was designated to state tree in 1953. so they're saying both yeah it's a state 44:11 tree and it's not really a tree so then here's another ifas website ask 44:18 ifas and if you read this it says disable 44:23 palmer cabbage farm is native to florida and the coastal region is north and south carolina and it's a state tree 44:29 great that that we knew that now here's the 4-h forest resources this 44:35 is what we're teaching our children so it says although it doesn't produce 44:41 true wood like a tree the cabbage farm is a tall iconic symbol of southeastern coastal environment and has therefore 44:47 been named the state tree of both florida and south carolina so this in one sentence these people are telling 44:53 you they're not really trees but they have been named state trees in two states that's 44:59 that's the take home message and that seems like that's enough okay let's go with that 45:06 but if you go if you scroll down in that same document here's what it says today the most 45:13 common use of cabbage foam is a landscaping tree the plants are slow to grow from seed so 45:18 full grown trees so having told you in the first paragraph that they're not trees now they're going ahead like a few 45:26 sentences later and telling you there are trees then they said the cabbage farm is a medium-sized tree so even this website is conflicted they 45:33 both they want it both ways they want to say that it's not really a tree and 45:38 also simultaneously it's a tree so here's an article i would recommend to you this uh 45:44 was by sarah edelman at churchill tropical garden and i'm not going to read the whole 45:50 article to you but you can look it up it's called their palms trees or maybe large woody herbs 45:58 and she asked the questions are palms trees and writes it all depends on how you define 46:03 a tree and none of these definitions gives a clear-cut answer so that seems pretty honest 46:13 and she says botanists define trees narrowly as woody plants with secondary growth now secondary growth is when the 46:20 tree grows two ways it grows upward which is primary growth which we probably think is essential for 46:26 something to be a tree and secondary growth is growing outward where the trunk gets wider with time and as i pointed out in 46:32 the early slides the trunk of a cabbage palm once it comes out of the ground it 46:38 doesn't increase in size so pumps like secondary growth in wood that create tough wood-like 46:44 echodermist according to the botanical definition palms are not trees but large woody 46:49 herbs so you know if you if you brought guests down florida and drove around and said would 46:56 you look at those large woody herbs they would be pretty confused because 47:03 people think of them as palm trees but let's move on and it even mentions they're related to 47:09 the grasses so while botanists define trees narrowly ecologists define trees broadly in 47:15 ecology a tree is any plant that functions as a tree providing habitat and shade producing leaves and 47:22 flowers stabilizing soil maintaining biodiversity and helping with climate control so this is a functional approach if it 47:30 if it acts like a tree it's probably a tree 47:37 and if we follow this definition all erect palms can be defined as trees so by erect pumps i mean a palm of the 47:44 trunk that goes up and has some height to it not those little sable miners and stable 47:50 the tonias that i was showing you but with a real trunk and then an alternative definition used 47:55 by foresters as any plant that's above a certain height to use for lumber now you cannot go to lowe's or home depot 48:04 and get a cabbage palm 2x4 but i will tell you and i could have included in this slideshow 48:10 the oldest occupied residence in volusia county was built in the 1880s it's a two-story 48:19 building with eight rooms and it's built from cabbage bomb logs 48:24 the corner posts are pine but all the walls in the building are cabbage foam logs 48:31 and it's in pretty good shape and you know probably many of you have been to my river state park and seen the 48:38 cabins that if not the cabins the little picnic shelter and some of the rustic bathrooms they have those were built in the 1930s 48:47 so yes cabbage palms can be used to build structures from and if you keep them out of the 48:53 rain they do really well 48:59 so she goes on and says none of these definitions is truly functional for palms now part 49:04 of the problems with palms is palms appear in three different functional forms 49:10 some species of palms are tree-like and are tall and have their canopies up at 49:15 the canopy level some are shrubs like the sableytonia and sable minor and some are vines 49:23 um if you ever have a red tan furniture rattan is a a palm that's a vine that clambers 49:30 around you've probably seen saw palmettos you would not consider those trees 49:37 so palms can come in different forms 49:44 no or palm trees some certainly are and fit the definitions she mentions royal and coconut palms 49:51 one thing she says more important than whether palms or trees is how much do these definitions matter 49:57 sometimes the definition is important usually rigid definitions are not needed 50:03 just enjoy your backyard beauties and leave your dictionary inside so there's her name sarah edelman and 50:10 you can find it it was a miami herald article and so you may remember these two 50:16 smiling twins they were advertising certs and they argued about whether it was a breath 50:22 mint or candy mint the cabbage palm is both a tree and not a tree if you don't want to think it's a tree 50:29 you can go ahead and you will find people to support you if you'd like to think it's a tree you 50:35 will find lots of field botanists and the u.s forest service 50:42 the cover of the trees of florida has a cabbage pump on it there's a lot of botanists that 50:47 work in the field that believe they're trees there's a lot of botanists that work in the lab and just work on taxonomy who 50:55 say they can't possibly be trees so the question is well which camp do 51:00 you want to fall in do you want to be a person that um argues they're trees or a person that argues they're not trees 51:08 so here's what i say if you want to be able to build those cabbage palms with impunity and leave them unprotected then 51:14 you need to go with the taxonomists you don't want them to be considered trees but if you want to recognize their 51:20 unique functions for shade oxygen pollinators and other wildlife and except the fact that along with oaks and 51:26 slash pines cabbage pumps represent the third crucial component in north port's native 51:31 canopy then you need to side with the with the ecologists and the field botanists who view them as trees 51:39 now uh this is the book i told you about it has 24 chapters 312 pages 25 pages of citations so 51:47 it i back up the claims and facts that i put in the book but it is 51:53 not an academic book um if you go to amazon and read the 51:59 reviews you'll see that people say it's very readable and accessible it's getting high ratings on 52:06 amazon and it's a collection of stories really different 24 different 52:13 chapters that talk about different aspects of the 52:18 cabbage palms some have to do are more botanical uh some have to do with 52:26 their role in the environment how long they live and how they lose their fronds and that sort 52:33 of thing and then some deal with the social aspects of uh building with them or harvesting the 52:40 swamp cabbage and we can talk about that when we get to questions i do have a blog it's called welcome to 52:48 the palmetto book and all things cabbage palm but to get there you just um you type in 52:54 palmettobook.blog and that will take you there and i i try to keep update and keep 52:59 information news stories and other things about cabbage palms and there's a sample chapter there you can read if you want 53:05 to read a sample chapter i'm on instagram if you want to look at my photographs 53:10 if you want to email me um you can email me the book can be found 53:16 at amazon i think i asked barbara if northport had 53:21 a bookstore and i think it doesn't they may have a copy at the library but you can order it 53:28 from the university of florida press or from amazon and so this is the 53:34 time for questions and i'll put that screen back up so if you want to write down information 53:41 about how to contact me and uh now be happy to respond to if not 53:46 actually answer your questions okay we do have a couple of questions so 53:51 we'll start at the top um okay we know native americans that lived in florida used stable palms for 53:58 many things can you speak to that and specifically is there any historical evidence that the costa slash frond was used as a 54:06 weapon or spear oof uh i don't know of any um 54:13 i i don't know of any i haven't seen anything that suggests the um costas were used as spears 54:21 um so there's a series of engravings made by a gentleman named lemoine and they are the 54:28 earliest images that got to europe of what life was like in florida 54:34 and they depict a uh settlement with a stockade with vertical 54:42 logs surrounding a an encampment and it's impossible to tell from the 54:48 drawing whether those logs are supposed to be cypress logs pine logs or cabbage palm 54:54 logs so we don't know if if they may have used cabbage palms in that manner now 54:59 we it's let me go let me start with the swamp cabbage 55:05 there's a big book on florida ethnobotany and if you look through that massive thing the 55:12 author says that it is unlikely that the native americans were eating swamp 55:19 cabbage hearts of palm cabbage palm whatever you want to call it before the arrival of metal axis from 55:25 europe and that's because if you had to cut a cabbage palm down with a conch shell or a 55:33 you know a piece of agate or something the amount of energy expended and cutting the palm down would 55:40 uh far exceed any nutritive value you could get from eating the heart so they think it really at 500 years ago 55:48 is maybe about when they started uh eating it by the same token they could have been 55:54 building with cabbage bombs and the reason for that is that if you've been to egmont key or 56:00 que acosta or you've canoed down the mike river you know that it's common for palms to 56:05 fall in when they're eroded and so if you wanted to build some sort of crude log 56:11 fort out of tom logs and you were close to a beach where they were eroding or a 56:17 river uh then you would just need to figure out a way to uh roll them or lift them and carry them to your um 56:25 where you were now they um fairly quickly 56:31 and i don't have the timing on this um it's clear that both the native 56:37 americans and then early white settlers uh relied on cabbage pumps for thatch 56:43 and there's a quote in the book from uh chief billy who talks about the practice of simply 56:49 sitting under a cabbage bomb in a rainstorm and letting the leaves collect the water 56:54 overhead and obviously you wouldn't you wouldn't need to be 57:01 uh too insightful to figure out that if the leaves were keeping you dry in a rainstorm when they were attached to the 57:07 tree that you cut and cut them off the tree and and um use them so for roofing so 57:13 for thatch so there's a chapter in the book that deals with thatch and um 57:19 uh both the native americans and as i said early settlers and it's 57:25 easy to find old photographs of fishermen shacks uh school houses and other buildings 57:33 that uh anglo or european settlers had constructed that have a palm thatch roof and palm touch walls 57:40 as well the native americans the seminoles were not that big on walls apparently 57:47 that traditional chicky has a thatched roof but open sides and then they would build a 57:52 platform a low platform maybe i don't know a couple of feet off the ground and so if there was high water 58:00 they could retreat to that platform they could sleep there and work there um and that that platform 58:06 would be constructed upon logs as well so um i think i think 58:13 to summarize they probably used cabbage palms for a number of things before europeans arrived and once europeans 58:20 arrived there was probably an explosion of using them in novel ways and also 58:25 eating the eating the hearts of palm 58:33 okay next question is when it comes to the pruning of the trees 58:39 it seems like landscapers are not required to be trained to cut them properly 58:45 do you know why that is well i touched upon that and i think what's going on is it's i think well 58:52 there are two things one is as i noticed the prior recommendations allowed people 58:59 to to prune at least up to the horizontal line but the more of the explanation and i 59:05 that i mentioned is that um so imagine the scenario you're you 59:10 have a landscaping business uh you you're called out to a homeowner association 59:16 or individual home and uh the owner tells you i want you to 59:22 prune my palms to look like frank's over there on the other lot and the landscaper says well you know 59:29 that's really contrary to our adopted professional standards and then the 59:35 homeowner says look do you want my business or don't you i want my trees to match my neighbors 59:41 i don't i just got here and i think you know i'm sensitive to what the local aesthetic is and everyone seems to 59:47 prune the heck out of these things so i either prune them the way the neighbors are 59:53 or i'll find a new landscaper well so in that situation the landscaper says okay all right i'll you know i'll take 1:00:00 your money uh it may not be my preference but i'll do it uh and the other part of that is 1:00:07 the more severely once they're up in that bucket truck the more severely they prune the tree 1:00:12 the less often they have to come back so let's say you have a contract with them to 1:00:17 [Music] treat your lawn with herbicides to break 1:00:23 up or blow leaves around and remove dead limbs or whatever and to prune the palm trees 1:00:29 well it's a real pain and it's very dangerous to get up in those bucket trucks it 1:00:34 takes a lot of time so you may be coming whatever every two weeks or every month 1:00:39 to do basic yard maintenance but you don't want to get the bucket truck out every month so 1:00:44 when you have the bucket truck or the ladder out you overdo it and get kind of 1:00:50 ambitious so that you won't have to be engaged in that kind of activity for another year or something 1:00:56 so i think that's i think it's an expeditious thing on the part of landscapers 1:01:03 to minimize the number of times they have to do that because it's it's very expensive for them and again 1:01:10 very high risk there's a there's a whole section in one of the chapters about how many people are killed and injured 1:01:17 pruning trees landscaping work and tree pruning in particular is one of the more dangerous 1:01:22 jobs in the u.s and um so that to the extent they can minimize that 1:01:29 they would eliminate that risk which just to me just sort of makes the argument like why are we even bothering to do 1:01:35 this eventually the front will fall off and your five-year-old kid could 1:01:40 drag it out to the curb and why subject anyone to the risk and the liability of 1:01:47 putting them in that bucket truck when a number you know if you imagine imagine from that scenario you watched 1:01:52 earlier imagine he's there with his holding a chainsaw with one hand 1:01:58 and then a rat jumps out of the franz or a wasp nest is encountered he starts 1:02:05 flailing around with a chainsaw the potential for mayhem 1:02:10 is significant so um i think that's really those are some of 1:02:15 the reasons why i think another inadvertent factor is a lot of people 1:02:20 um move into new housing developments where the palms were just planted and if you move into a subdivision 1:02:28 and the palms only have uh six or seven fronds you might assume that's what they're 1:02:34 supposed to look like let's keep them looking the way the way they did when we moved in here so i think there are a number of factors 1:02:41 that contribute to it and it's a shame to see people 1:02:47 dying and being injured and and hurting the trees in the meantime and eventually i hope to have a sort of a campaign with 1:02:55 a logo and some material that people can distribute particularly to their 1:03:00 homeowner associations to try and get them to save the expense and the liability of this overpruning 1:03:07 and spend their money in other ways that would be awesome thank you for that 1:03:13 those explanations i hadn't heard before especially the one about people moving into new developments that 1:03:19 makes a lot of sense okay next question how prevalent is this bronzing disease 1:03:26 uh it's in the majority of the counties in florida it's definitely in sarasota 1:03:32 county 1:03:37 it's it's more common in some areas 1:03:42 i need to talk to some of the big landscapers and find out what percent of like how it's affecting their business 1:03:48 um uh i i can't tell you i couldn't tell you much about 1:03:54 uh its prevalence in northports because i don't know but it's it's you should pretty pretty 1:04:00 much assume it's everywhere um it just may not be very uh it may be 1:04:05 very spotty in some places and as that one photograph suggested you can see a situation where several 1:04:12 trees are dying and all the other ones are healthy and you look at that you have no idea well if they come back 1:04:18 in 20 years are they all going to be dead or the ones that are alive have some 1:04:23 they're healthier they have a genetic predisposition to you know being resistant we don't 1:04:28 know so um it it is sort of the the weakest link in their story right 1:04:35 now but um i think there's still i think there's still a good investment they're a relatively cheap tree 1:04:43 and many places uh you know when you buy them if you keep them watered they'll give 1:04:49 you a guarantee that they'll come and replace it in a year or whatever some time frame so i wouldn't let that discourage people 1:04:56 from planning them but it is a issue and it remains to be seen how big a problem it becomes and what 1:05:02 kind of strategies evolve to cope with it and dr bader is working 1:05:08 on a number of at this point theoretical but hopefully eventually practical approaches to 1:05:16 limiting the spread of the disease which leads us to the next question is 1:05:22 lethal bronzing common for other palm trees other than cabbage palms yes and uh so 1:05:29 so there are a number of the palms in the date palm family there's a palm called the sylvester palm 1:05:34 and these things are big when you drive around you see the ones with the big fat trunks and the long feathery uh 1:05:40 pineapple leaves those are very valuable uh they're grown 1:05:46 in nurseries and it takes a long time to get them to a good size and they are also susceptible to lethal bronzing so 1:05:52 nursery owners are very concerned about this um and so yes i i i it's not clear that all 1:06:01 palms are susceptible um i think if you if you do a google search 1:06:07 um for lethal bronzing you can find some information that suggests the species 1:06:13 that are most likely to be affected there are probably four or five of them where there's been one instance recorded and 1:06:20 again that may be because nobody has taken the time to you know sterilize their grill and 1:06:26 collect the material there may be a lot more palms dying from lethal bronzing than we're 1:06:31 actually being recorded because they've been verified but yes there are other species that are 1:06:37 affected by lethal bronzing so that being said when thinking about 1:06:44 the future of the cabbage palm in florida and 1:06:49 clear-cut development are they easily transplantable can you move them 1:06:56 around a job site from one place to another to try to save some of them do you have any input on that yeah how can we 1:07:04 can we get back to uh what are you seeing now um you with your background okay great 1:07:13 um yes they're very easy to transplant it's it's strange it's strange 1:07:20 um when you dig up a cabbage palm all the roots die so you may 1:07:27 see like these ridiculously tiny root balls when you see a truck with cabbage palms 1:07:33 going by and you're looking to go those things aren't going to make it uh every single one of those roots will 1:07:38 die and so it has to grow an entire new set of roots 1:07:44 and that's why they prune when they transplant that's why they prune you know 95 or more percent of the 1:07:52 leaves off because a tree with no roots can't support many leaves so the key when you get a cabbage 1:07:57 palm is you have to water it very religiously you need to keep them moist if you can 1:08:04 even spray the leaves that helps but so 1:08:09 the that's combined with the other thing that i mentioned which is they're very slow growing so you can go 1:08:15 to a native nursery there's several in the area and you can buy a cabbage bomb 1:08:20 seedling and a three gallon pot or a seven gallon pot or whatever you want 1:08:25 but you know my advice is do not do not buy a hammock on the same day because it's going to be 1:08:31 20 years or more before you could even think of hanging anything on it so they do not grow cabbage palms in 1:08:38 nurseries uh the the native nurseries will sell you a small one uh for optimists or young people or 1:08:45 whatever but all the all the cabbage palms you're seeing moved around town are germinating on ranches and the 1:08:53 ranchers are allowing landscapers to come and dig these palms up 1:08:58 and then move them and plant them in a new location and so yes if you have a lot that's 1:09:04 being cleared if you have a source of water if there's a well in or you have public water whatever you can dig those 1:09:11 palms up over the tree spade or by hand hire people to dig them up move them to 1:09:18 a new location plant them in a line or plant them in a grove whatever you want keep them watered and you'll have a high 1:09:26 rate of success so yeah they're very easy to move around it breaks my heart to see developers come 1:09:32 and chop them down bulldoze them over yank them out send them to the landfill 1:09:37 and then when they're done with the with the project and they go out and buy a bunch of new cabbage palms and 1:09:43 stick them in and when they could have simply stockpiled those palms on the same property and then 1:09:48 moved them over so yeah they're they're easy to move around because that really small root ball makes them 1:09:54 very easy to handle if you have to move a big oak or a fig or something like that you've got to 1:09:59 have a very large root boil to travel with it but that's not necessary with a cabbage pan 1:10:07 all right and we have one last question do you know of any recipes that use the tree and i'm 1:10:14 assuming that means to to make the soup but right when besides making the soup do people cook any other parts of the 1:10:19 tree i i tacked on an additional question there no they're uh well you can find references to people 1:10:26 that that ground up the seeds and made a paste or something but seeds are really hard they're really 1:10:32 small i i don't i i don't think that there's much of that going on in any contemporary sense the 1:10:40 the two things with the swamp cabbage i i prefer it raw um 1:10:46 it's kind of crunchy it's sort of like water chestnuts it's sort of like cabbage it's mostly a crispy crunchy 1:10:55 white plant material that's fairly innocuous and doesn't have much flavor the actual swamp cabbage that's cooked 1:11:02 up is typically you know cooked in a broth that might have some butter or some 1:11:09 fat back or bacon or to me it ends up sort of being like stone soup by the time you're done people have added so 1:11:15 many interesting tasty ingredients that it would be pretty good without the palm 1:11:21 but yes in the book i referenced uh i described several different authors 1:11:27 and individuals and how they prefer to prepare the swamp cabbage 1:11:35 okay i do not have any more questions in the chat um so everyone this is your last chance 1:11:40 if you have anything else you think of right now type it in otherwise it looks like we 1:11:46 are done okay well barbara i want to thank you and the organization 1:11:51 uh for hosting this um uh and if you know at some point in the 1:11:57 future you'd like me to come back maybe when we're meeting in person and we could actually talk about the 1:12:02 book and i could read a few passages we could do that but i thought it was important to just get some of the basic realities of this 1:12:10 tree out and available to uh citizens of northport yes thank you so much for your time and 1:12:16 for adding in the extra couple of slides there about northport we really appreciate it so thank you 1:12:21 everyone and we'll have a good night everybody 1:12:27 goodbye