Cabbage palm

Value to bees

Nectar

High

Pollen

High

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Worked heavily by honey bees and by a range of native bees, flies and beetles. The flowers are small, open and shallow, which makes them accessible to short-tongued insects of every kind.

Worth knowing

A good summer nectar and pollen source, and a useful bridge across the southeastern dearth.

Flowering

In flower

June to August (northern hemisphere)

Summer flowering, later than the other southeastern flows, which is what makes it useful.

When nectar flows

Substantial where the palms are numerous, from very large flowering panicles carrying thousands of individual flowers.

Year-to-year variation

Reasonably dependable, and valued particularly because it comes after the spring flows have ended and colonies would otherwise be in dearth.

What it does to the honey

Medium amber, with a distinct fruity sweetness and a slightly tangy finish. It is more assertive than gallberry and less spicy than saw palmetto.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun, tolerant of salt, drought, flooding and hurricane wind — one of the toughest landscape trees in the southeastern United States.

Size

10-20 m tall.

Native range

The southeastern United States coastal plain from North Carolina to Florida, plus Cuba and the Bahamas.

Suits

Large gardens

• Exceptionally tolerant of coastal salt and of hurricane wind.
• Slow to establish after transplanting; palms move poorly and need patience.
• Hardy to roughly -8 °C, so it is a genuinely subtropical to warm-temperate tree.

What it looks like

A single-trunked fan palm with a rounded crown of large costapalmate fronds, and long branched flowering stalks carrying thousands of small fragrant cream flowers, followed by black fruits.