Sabal Minor Strange Growth (New Growing Point?)

[JDH23]

Hello all, I hope you are doing well. I’ve got a short story that, hopefully, will be of interest to at least someone. 
 

Today I was checking on some of my Sabal Minor I have growing in pots and I noticed something quite strange with one of them. As I was looking around, I noticed something green poking out of the top of the soil. 

My initial thought was that some squirrels had unintentionally planted some kind of seed and it had germinated in the pot, so I went to pull it out and I noticed upon further inspection that this appeared to be a new oddly shaped spear coming up. This baffled me, as all of the Sabal minor I own have been repotted twice and I haven’t to my knowledge put any additional seeds in the pots, which would rule out another seed being sporadically germinated. As I thought about it, this would be an unusually massive initial spear to emerge from anything I’ve germinated, so I decided to pull back some of the soil between this spear and the already growing Sabal to investigate. That’s when I noticed this:

It appeared that the new spear was attached to and growing from the already growing Sabal, which was a bit confusing since to my knowledge Sabals are not supposed to sucker. I’ve heard of Sabals forming a new growing point, but nothing like what I was seeing. It then occurred to me that this specific specimen was an oddball relative to all the other Sabal Minors I have. It had been working on its newest emerging spear for roughly 2 months now, and it always seemed to just be the top of strap leaf poking out at a less than 45 degree angle (you can sort of see this in the first and third photo). Out of curiosity I gently tugged on its emerging spear, and in doing so I slightly moved the odd new growth. 

 

So, it seems that the newest emerging spear of the Sabal Minor is actually attached to the odd spear coming up from the soil. Although I didn’t get a photo of it, I dug slightly deeper and saw that there’s a root growing in the middle of the two spears.

I’m perplexed how this even happened or really what is even happening, as it seems the growing point (or another growing point?) of the Sabal Minor migrated from the middle of the already growing plant to about an inch over. No clue how that even happened. There’s so many questions I have, especially about what is going to survive, but those will be answered in time (or by someone reading this, because I sure don’t know what’s happening). 

[Ben G.]

I had the same thing happen to one of my sabal seedlings about ten years ago. It was really unique and thought I would keep really close eye on it over the years. Instead, I can't recall what happened to it at all. I may have planted it in the ground at a former home, I may have given it away inadvertently, or one of the growth points may have eventually died. I really wish I had paid more attention to it.

So keep us up to date on what it does over time.

[PalmatierMeg]

For some reason, maybe damage or disease process, a Sabal will send up an alternate growing point. It does this as a last ditch effort to survive a "perceived" threat to its wellbeing. Sabals are solitary palms and do not cluster. The seedling will funnel its resources into this new stem, which eventually takes over photosynthesis duty. The original growing point will shrivel. Eventually you will never be able to tell where the new one began and the old one ended. My Sabal miamiensis seedling did that circa 2009. I really thought it was dying until the new one took off. Pretty neat trick by a tough palm.