Wallichia disticha

[The Palm Nut]

I have had a number of disticha palms some germinated from seed and some purchased as seedlings. I have yet to harvest seed from any. Having only one to reach maturity last year which produced a healthy flowering head but subsequently no seed. These palms may well be unisexual needing male and female plants for fertile seed. Others out there might be able to shed light on this. But I have come to realise that these are extremely tough palms. From seedling to 5 year old in my climate (6 inch base trunk)  you can transplant these with little setback if any and Iam talking about little care to root damage providing its done in spring. I would expect older ones could be transplanted with good success rates, though I have heard that this may well cause them to set seed prematurely.

If others out there have gathered experience with these I would like to hear from them.

Mike

[quaman58]

I'm no deep expert, but I was given a couple small seedlings a bit less than two years ago. They have now grown to about 2 ft. size--they were fairly slow at first, as are many small plants. But they seem pretty resistant to the cool winters here, and they've each been moved a couple of times, without any problem. I still can't make up my mind whether these prefer full-on sun from an early age, or a more filtered area. Any thoughts on that?

Bret

[Ken Johnson]

I HAVE SOME BIGGER ONES AND HAVE WATCHED OTHERS GROW AND FRUIT (THEN DIE).

They bloom from the top down, each palm having 10 or so spikes. They are monocarpic so they quit growing new leaves when they start to bloom and then die when they are finished!

 They are a strong palm, cold is ok, sun is best, transplant is easy, shock may cause them to bloom early and they are a beautifull palm. The reason we don't see more is that they can die in just a few years from looking their best!

[bgl]

Mike,

This is my experience with W. disticha: I planted 4; 3 in 1996 from 1G pots (the palms were probably about 12 inches/30 cm tall, or so) and the 4th one went in the ground in 1999 from a 5G pot, so may very well have been from the same seed batch.

Today, all four are about 20-25 ft tall. Three of them began to flower about 2 yrs ago, the 4th one not yet. They have all produced a few inflorescences but no viable seeds until just now! The only one with viable seeds is a good distance away from the other 3, probably close to 400 ft or 100 m., which leads me to believe you can probably get viable seeds from a single individual. I'm going to harvest these seeds tomorrow, but just now I climbed up on a 16 ft ladder, leaned out with the camera and aimed it towards the fruit. Unfortunately, a little bit out of focus, sorry about that. The seeds are viable and there are two seeds in each fruit, with one side of each seed (the side facing the other seed) perfectly flat.

One very unique and interesting characteristic about this palm (other than the fact that the fronds open up in one plane) is that they all seem to lean heavily in one direction. I planted all four straight up (the "normal" way), but all four have a dramatic lean to them, a la the leaning tower of Pisa. I'll see if I can get a good shot of one of them tomorrow (too late now, it'll be dark soon).

Bo-Göran

[The Palm Nut]

Hi Bo-Goran

The seeds produced on mine were much like you have discribed, each seed of a size 1mm to 3mm. Unfortunately none germinated for me which made me believe they were not viable. The photo looks just as mine did before harvesting.

Maybe my winters are to cold for seed to survive, this seems to be the case with other tropical palms I have.

Thanks for the information and good luck with the seeds, please keep me informed on your germination success with these seeds.

Mike

[bgl]

Mike,

I harvested the seeds today, cleaned them and hopefully in a few months I'll have some seedlings. I'll keep you posted. The seeds are oval in shape and 9-10 mm long, so I don't believe yours were mature or viable, based on their small size.

Here's the individual that I got the seeds from. It's the palm in the center of the photo. You can see the long (dead) infructescence, which I cut down in order to get the seeds. It had to be close to 6 ft in length.

Bo-Göran

[bgl]

And here's another individual, displaying the dramatic lean that I mentioned above. And yes, this is the best shot I could get!