Can anything survive under a royal palm

[ruskinPalms]

Hi all.  Is there anything out there that is suitable to be planted under a royal palm? I’m not sure what could take 50 pound fronds falling onto it. I was thinking maybe Serenoa repens. Any other suggestions?

Thanks!
 

 

[NickJames]

27 minutes ago, ruskinPalms said:

Hi all.  Is there anything out there that is suitable to be planted under a royal palm? I’m not sure what could take 50 pound fronds falling onto it. I was thinking maybe Serenoa repens. Any other suggestions?

Thanks!
 

 

I think those would be fine...if established. I’m not sure how a new planting would do? Are you planting under a young royal palm and simply planning for the future?

[redant]

28 minutes ago, ruskinPalms said:

Hi all.  Is there anything out there that is suitable to be planted under a royal palm? I’m not sure what could take 50 pound fronds falling onto it. I was thinking maybe Serenoa repens. Any other suggestions?

Thanks!
 

 

I have lots of things under royals, sometimes they get smashed a bit but most survive. Key here is plant the royal in the area with the other stuff already in place. Once the royal gets it's roots going you will have a tough job digging into the ground.

[redant]

Pay no attention to the sick king to the right, that is going away shortly, replaced by a Jamaican tall.  I planted a small royal into the palmetto,

[ruskinPalms]

3 hours ago, NickJames said:

I think those would be fine...if established. I’m not sure how a new planting would do? Are you planting under a young royal palm and simply planning for the future?

This is the royal in question. It is young still.

 

[ruskinPalms]

Just for giggles, same palm July 2019.

[ruskinPalms]

It would probably grow even faster if I actually watered it 

[NickJames]

1 hour ago, ruskinPalms said:

Just for giggles, same palm July 2019.

Nice!!! Yeah, those could fall on even young saw palmetto now and be okay. So by the time they’re massive the saw palmetto should be well established. I’ll also post a photo of the infamous Port Orange royals so you can see what they did. 

[NickJames]

They used some sort of cactus (?), split leaf philodendron, and bougainvillea if you’re looking for nothing non-palm. 
 

but I’m liking the saw palmetto idea

[Palm Tree Jim]

Not sure a car in the driveway would do well when a frond drops.

[sonoranfans]

These serenoas are indestructible, at least by falling objects.  I had a big maple taken out and it fell on one of my serenoas, pretty much making a 6' tall overall palm into a 2' tall one.  Two years later its thicker and bigger than ever.  Once the underground trunk gets established they grow faster.  You could cut or shape them a little too, and you might need to do that since they get rather large in time.  My oldest (3) serenoas, coming up on 10 years in the ground have trunks running parallel to the ground witha  single palm 15-17' wide.  They are occupying a much large space than I ever intended.  They are a great privacy screen once they get some size.  The difficulty with these for me is in trimming the older dead leaves.   You need a pole lopper, I found a fiskars (sliding mechanism) one from HD and it works great.  You dont want your bare forearm in there trying to lop off dead leaves and you will need to reach way in there in time.  If you dont remove the dead leaves, growth down low will stunt and you will get spear pull on the new suckering trunks lowest to the ground in wet season.  You dont want old dead material reastricting the air flow down low.  Also be aware that they can get 10' tall, one of my older ones has gone vertical, not sure where that stops.  

[Valhallalla]

Here is an example of how Serenoa with some liriope can look when left to grow more or less freely beneath a royal palm. I had always admired this clump and a similar one about a block away. I liked the way the Serenoa grew quite tall (~ 6-8 feet) near the center of the planting and it certainly never flinched when heavy fronds dropped from above. There never seemed to be much maintenance that had to be done besides occasional trimming around the perimeter and picking up a dropped frond every now and then. Unfortunately, the city (Dania Beach) recently removed all of the Serenoa from these two plantings. It was replaced by some truly hideous yellow colored mulch and common landscape shrubs under the royal. From what I could tell they only removed plant material from the surface. I suspect (and hope) that there are some subterranean Serenoa stems still alive that will push some new growth through while the falling 50 pound royal fronds crush the new common plants over time.

[sonoranfans]

I have a livistona saribus under one of my royals along with a clump of veitchias.  The veitchias have strength in numbers and are positioned to protect the roof(9' from the trunk), that saribus has taken a few hits but the heavy part of the royal leaf is by far the crownshaft and I have never had the crownshaft hit the grow point of that saribus.  Extracting a royal leaf from the crown of a saribus is something to be done very carefully with those teeth on the saribus.  The royal crownshaft holds water the longest and is at least 60% of the weight of the leaf over 6' length while the 20' leaf is 40% of the weight overall when both are wet.  Once the leaf starts to dry, the crownshaft is even a greater % of the (abeit lower) weight.  In absence of big wind, the crownshaft doesnt fall far from the tree, its heavy when wet and goes straight down, bang!  I have found that big winds tend to snap the petioles, not rip off the whole leaf including the crownshaft.  After watching two 35-45' royals shed for years, the crownshaft only falls far from the tree when its dry, thus not heavy.  That said, those royals look like they could still scratch the paint of a new car or even dent it, so I'd say they are likely too close.

 

[redant]

18 hours ago, ruskinPalms said:

This is the royal in question. It is young still.

 

A falling frond would probably bend that fence.

[DoomsDave]

I have 9 Royals on my place, and it's in California, and they're big, most of them.

Three of them are R. regia, which produces the heaviest leaves. My biggest one produces leaves that weigh 60 pounds when they fall. There's two borenquenia, three oleracea and a princeps. All except the princeps are more than 30 feet (10 M) tall.

As observed, they can dent cars. Also, I'd avoid planting one near, say, a patio where Herr von Eggshellskull might be relaxing, and get conked by one. Or a little baby in a carriage. Or near a roof with solar cells or one of those gorgeous stained glass skylights on it. Or that big rack full of ceramics just out of the kiln. (Yep, that happened, though not to me.)

Plants in general are okay, the big exceptions being anything that's brittle and fragile. One of my borenquenias dropped a brownie on a Chamadorea tepijilote, and busted the trunk in half. Adios, tepijilote. An immediately adjacent Justicia ("Shrimp plant") was banged up but recovered without a problem. Plants that would get pruned anyway like hibiscus or roses should be fine, though they might need a bit of tidying now and again after a big fall. Things like cacti can be a problem, if you plant cacti under a swamp thing . . . .

As noted, extracting fallen leaves from thorny plants can be painful, or fun, if you're a major masochist.

I think those Serenoa would be great, along with Chamaerops humilis, Rhapidophyllum, Nannorrhops, or clumping Chamadoreas. Single trunkers can break. Palms that get conked on the growth bud usually recover after a while.

 

 

[DoomsDave]

3 hours ago, Palm Tree Jim said:

Not sure a car in the driveway would do well when a frond drops.

Maybe one of those troop-transport thingies? Or a VW "Thing"?

[DoomsDave]

21 hours ago, ruskinPalms said:

This is the royal in question. It is young still.

 

 

2 hours ago, redant said:

A falling frond would probably bend that fence.

I'd say more likely to get impaled on the fence.

My regias were that size in 2007 in the big freeze, and they were fine, four days of 24 F. Now they're about 40 feet.

[Palmarum]

The Serenoa usage is a good idea, with one problem; anything that drops in there you are going to have to go in and get. Maybe leave a path on the back part to get towards the interior? I have had a full-size Royal for years and there are few things that can handle that leaf drop. I weighed one for the fun of it once, and was 85 pounds (38.5kg).

At one time I built a loose structure of 2x4's as a leaf brake to protect smaller stuff underneath. The other material, such as inflorescences and those giant spathes have to be considered as well. Eventually, you will have lots of seed that will love to germinate in that Serenoa shelter. They will slowly emerge as a forest of determined seedlings that might be tricky to remove.

Ryan

[James B]

I’d say at that size Archontophoenix as they will keep up as best they can with the growth of your Regia.

[redant]

22 hours ago, Palmarum said:

The Serenoa usage is a good idea, with one problem; anything that drops in there you are going to have to go in and get. Maybe leave a path on the back part to get towards the interior? I have had a full-size Royal for years and there are few things that can handle that leaf drop. I weighed one for the fun of it once, and was 85 pounds (38.5kg).

At one time I built a loose structure of 2x4's as a leaf brake to protect smaller stuff underneath. The other material, such as inflorescences and those giant spathes have to be considered as well. Eventually, you will have lots of seed that will love to germinate in that Serenoa shelter. They will slowly emerge as a forest of determined seedlings that might be tricky to remove.

Ryan

I have a big double by where my seedling nursery is. I had to build a structure of 4x4 and 2x4 to keep the fronds from destroying the nursery and everything in it.