Natural Lowcountry: Shaggy cabbage palm feeds our present, protected our past

As palms go, it may be short on looks, but the cabbage palm (Sabal palmetto) makes up for its shaggy appearance with its adaptability and resilience.

This native plant grows almost anywhere in the Lowcountry, and it's remarkably tolerant of soil type, drought, high winds, salt spray, and winter freezes.

It has an unbranched trunk capped by a thatch of ragged, fanlike leaves. The leaves can be huge -- up to 12 feet long if you include the leafstalk.

When old leaves die and break off, the leaf bases (called "bootjacks" or "boots") are left behind, creating a distinctive crisscross pattern on the trunk. Some cabbage palms retain their old leaf bases into old age. Others eventually shed them and have smooth, ringed trunks. These differences are probably genetic.

The leaf bases provide shelter for palmetto bugs, anoles, and other animals, plus germination sites for seeds of other plants.

In mid-summer, cabbage palms produce small, whitish flowers, then black spherical fruits -- food for squirrels, raccoons, wild turkeys, and deer. The Seminole Indians ground the fruits up into flour.

Also edible are the large leaf buds at the tip of the trunk, which can be eaten raw (as "hearts of palm") or cooked. Supposedly they taste like cabbage--hence the common name, cabbage palm.

But harvesting this "swamp cabbage" (an arduous process, incidentally) kills the tree. Better to purchase cans of commercially grown hearts of palm from the peach palm (Bactris gasipaes), imported from Costa Rica or Ecuador.

Other parts of the cabbage palm have had uses: the leaves for mats and baskets; the fibers for scrubbing brushes; the trunks for pilings and furniture.

Cabbage palm logs were used to build Fort Moultrie, from which early colonists, led by General William Moultrie, defended Charleston against a fleet of British warships in the Battle of Sullivan's Island on June 28, 1776.

Not surprisingly, cabbage palm is our state tree -- featured prominently on license plates, the state seal, the state quarter, and the state flag.

Vicky McMillan, a retired biologist formerly at Colgate University, lives on Hilton Head Island.

This story was originally published September 19, 2015 at 10:16 PM with the headline "Natural Lowcountry: Shaggy cabbage palm feeds our present, protected our past."