Orange Crownshaft Palm Areca vestiaria orange form

Areca vestiaria is a stilt-rooted rainforest palm from Sulawesi and the Moluccas that forms a slow clump of slender trunks, each lifted clear of the soil on a cone of exposed roots. The orange form is the selection where the colouring runs strongest: an orange crownshaft, orange stalks, and an orange flush through emerging leaves. It is grown as a collector's courtyard palm, in a shaded tropical planting or a pot, where the crownshaft and the root cone are close enough to look at properly.

Colour that only holds in warm, humid air

Treat this as a warm, frost-free, humid plant and everything else follows. In practice that means tropical and sheltered subtropical coastal gardens, a heated glasshouse, or a bright warm room. It takes part shade to full sun in humid districts, though young plants prefer filtered light, and it wants moderate watering with regular attention through summer in soil that holds moisture and still drains. Growth is slow. The failure mode is cold and dry air: a cold snap or a run of dry wind scorches the leaflet margins and burns the crownshaft colour out, and because the palm is slow, damaged leaves stay on it for a long time before they are replaced. The other trap is planting depth. The stilt roots are meant to sit above the soil surface, so do not bury the cone when you plant or when you top up mulch, and keep the mower and edger well away from it. A large pot suits it, and a pot is easier to shift under cover when a cold night is forecast.

Orange crownshaft against the felted Dypsis

The comparison buyers usually want is with the crownshaft palms from Madagascar. Redneck palm and teddy bear palm both carry rust-brown felt on the crownshaft, they are far larger, tougher and more open to sun and wind, and they work as landscape specimens or grouped screening. Areca vestiaria is the opposite proposition: small in scale, fussy about warmth and humidity, and grown as a close-range plant for a sheltered courtyard corner or a pot rather than as a structural palm. Take the Dypsis pair for a garden bed, and this one for a protected pocket or a container that never leaves the veranda. More options sit in the palm range.

Feeding for crownshaft colour

Prune only what is fully brown, cutting the stalk close to the trunk without cutting into the crownshaft, since that is the feature you are growing it for. Do it in warm weather. Feed little and often through the warm months with a controlled release palm fertiliser carrying magnesium and potassium, and stop as the weather cools, when a slow palm cannot use it. Mulch over the root zone but never over the stilt root cone. Indoors or under glass, keep humidity up and wash the leaves occasionally, since dry air and spider mite are the usual causes of a shabby plant.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 2 sizes, from 250mm up to 300mm, priced from $119.00 to $169.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot the plant arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. These mid-range sizes balance establishment speed against immediate presence, and they are the usual choice for general garden planting. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to when to plant in Australia.