Pseudophoenix sargentii

buccaneer palm

No doubt one of the most celebrated uses of plants is for alcohol. An incredible variety of plant sugars are fermented to form intoxicating drinks. The buccaneer palm, amongst other types of palms, produces sugars for use in its inflorescences (flower stalks), which can be harvested either from the trunk or from the inflorescences themselves and fermented to make palm wine. Settlers were also able to harvest, cook and eat the bud at the top of the palm, but they no doubt limited this practice after realizing that harvesting the bud kills the palm, thereby negatively affecting palm wine supply. Spanish settlers utilized this Florida Keys native as a food source for their pigs, since the seeds contain a good amount of oils and fats. This was, unfortunately, another way early settlers contributed to the decline of the palm – by eliminating seed sources for subsequent generations. I have never seen fruits borne on our buccaneers, so here's a video to get an idea of what they look like:

The only populations of this palm in the United States were found in the 1950s on Elliott Key and Sands Key just east of Miami, and Long Key in the Florida Keys. Nearly all the palms on Elliott and Sands Key were cleared for development and hundreds of the palms were removed from Long Key to be sold as ornamentals. By the early 1990s the palms had disappeared from Long Key and Sands Key, and less than fifty palms remained on Elliott Key. Although the plant’s range does extend into the northern Caribbean, population trends there are similar to Florida’s.

Unlike other palms, buccaneer palms are not closely related to any other extant types of palms besides those in the same genus. The palm’s fruits are dark red when mature, each seemingly randomly containing anywhere from one to three seeds, which is one notably unusual characteristic.

Buccaneer palms are very slow growing and tolerant of salt spray, alkaline soil and harsh conditions in general. When young, the leaves are oriented in one plane (the tree appears flat) but they develop a radial orientation as the tree grows older. Although the palm is an attractive one, a disease discovered around 2008 at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami has been affecting cultivated plants throughout southern Florida. Our specimen of buccaneer palm planted in 1995 here at Kona Kai died in 2012 after its top rotted, possibly due to the same disease affecting palms at Fairchild.