Hyphaene Species, Doum Palm, Fan Palm, Gingerbread Tree, Ilala Palm

I love this palm.! I got curious about this family or genus of palms some time ago because I heard it branches when fully mature and espe...Read Morecially since some of these can take high heat like we have in the deserts of southern Arizona.

I saw someone selling seeds on e-bay and took a chance at it to order them and sow the seeds. First of all, the seeds are huge.! Well, they looked that way at first because they are covered by the dried up fruit. I thought how would I get them to sprout unless I soak them in water. So I had an idea to put hot water on them almost to the boiling point and let them soak several hours. After that, I scraped off the fruit as much as I can. I still wondered how the seeds could sprout as they are covered with a very hard hull. I thought maybe drilling very small holes through the hull and being careful not to drill through the center where the kernel of the seed is would help. To get an idea what kind of drill I used, I didn't do it with any type of hardware drill or drill bit but used the "dremel" drill used in fine crafts with a very small drill bit in it.
After all that, I then planted the seeds in a huge 5 gal. pot and planted them in I think late May or June. The pot was outside on the West side of the house. All I did is kept the soil very moist. I was skeptical that they would sprout, but they did after 1 to 2 months. Almost all the seeds came up from a total of 5-6 seeds. Later on most of them died for a reason or another that I can't remember about. After the seedlings got large enough, like say a few inches tall then I transplanted them. They say this palm has a large tap root and don't like being transplanted and could die in the process. That pot was about to fall apart and looked shabby, so I broke it on it's sides in several places and tried to separate the plants very carefully without disturbing any roots.

I read that this palm originates out of the hot savannahs of Zimbabwe and Zambia on the African continent.

The palm I have now is in a very large pot about 10 gal. size. I just grow it in regular potting soil mixed with some sand. This plant I guess is drought tolerant maybe due to the taproot growing down to get water when planted in the ground. This palm loves heat and does well with almost all day sun. I have it on the southeast side of my house. Despite the fact that this palm has very thick fronds that feel rough, it doesn't like very cold i.e, below freezing. I tried to cover it last winter when it went down to below freezing and the wind would blow off the cover. I noticed some fronds turning brown and dying but this palm did recover from that. I do give it granular fertilizer for palms and it seems to do ok and maybe grows faster from it.? I think if anyone wants to grow something different in a palm for the southwest then get some of these palm seeds to try.

Synonymous with H. natalensis now, this palm seems to be the most widely cultivated in the genus. This palm is unique in that it branches...Read More above ground level. It is cold hardy into the lower-mid 20s, making it popular throughout Central and South Florida. It is related to both the Bismarckia and Latania genera.

This is one of my favorite species for So Cal. It is common (relatively, for palm nuts), is pretty hardy to frost (once it's been in the...Read More ground for 4-6 years), wind, drought and has a lot of leeway in soil quality. Seedlings will often be defoliated by a frost, but often will grow back. It is a branching palm, though usually only branching at or near ground level. It has large, costapalmate, stiff whitish grey-green leaves. The petioles are black with white, ochre, orange, some green and rust... can be a very colorful palm. It is a bit slow for commercial landscaping, and needs very deep pots to be germinated and grown up in (deep roots). The roots are very deep in the wild, surviving in areas of African and Madagascar that get little rainful- survives on ground water.