Palm Trees Bloom

Who knew?

The Sable Palm is a palmetto, but I mistook that in an earlier post and called a regular low shrub that is also a palmetto and called a palmetto the South Carolina state tree. The Sable Palm is the real state tree and is on the South Carolina flag.

Here’s a link to that flag if you want to see what it looks like.

https://www.google.com/search?q=official%20south%20carolina%20flag&tbm=isch&client=safari&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8QtI8BKABqFwoTCOijv6_EtIADFQAAAAAdAAAAABAG&biw=1435&bih=787

And here’s what the blooms look like. They have been “blooming” for several weeks now.

Here’s a close-up.

Fruit does form after these blooms–a tiny pea-size darkly colored edible fruit–but it is mostly seed and skin.

Local people say that when the blooms die back, they are a mess to clean up. That is probably also true for the palm fronds when they die as the tree grows upwards and forms new palms.

The dried upwardly facing pieces on the trunk are the remnants of old palmetto fronds that died. This area of the palm is called the “boot.”

And that’s all I know about the South Carolina state tree for the moment.