Golden Cane Palm Dypsis lutescens (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens)

Golden cane is a clumping palm that never stops sending new canes up from the base, so a plant widens steadily instead of running up one trunk. The canes are yellow-green and marked with clean rings where old leaf bases have dropped, and the fronds are soft, finely divided and strongly arching. It is the standard tropical screening palm in Australian gardens, used along fence lines, around pool pump enclosures and as a fast green wall between neighbours.

Screening with a plant that keeps widening

It grows in part shade through to full sun, with stronger yellow in the canes where light is brighter, and it wants moderate watering with more through summer. Growth is moderate in warm districts and frost is the hard limit, so it belongs in tropical, subtropical and frost-free coastal gardens. Free-draining soil suits it, sandy ground is fine, and mulch keeps the surface roots cool. Space clumps roughly 1.5 to 2 m apart along a fence for a continuous screen, and here is the failure mode: people plant them 300 mm off the boundary, the coping or the slab, and forget that the base is the part that grows. Within a few years the clump has closed into a solid thicket, canes lean out over the pool, and the yellow stems that were the point of the plant are buried inside a green wall nobody can reach. Leave the clump room on all sides and plan to thin it, not just look at it.

Golden cane against the other clumping palms

The closest match on the shelf is Macarthur palm, which clumps in the same way but reads as a rainforest plant: green ringed canes, a looser crown, bluntly cut leaflets and a slower rate of growth. Choose Macarthur for a shaded courtyard where you want the look, and golden cane where you want a screen that fills the gap. Lady palm is the third clumper, but it is a fan palm for genuine shade and grows slowly, so it screens a narrow side passage rather than a boundary. Fishtail palm clumps as well, but each of its stems dies after flowering and has to be sawn out, which golden cane never asks of you. More options sit in the palm collection.

Thinning canes and correcting yellow fronds

Cut old, leaning or damaged canes out at ground level rather than shortening them, and do it in the warm months so replacements come away quickly. Taking out a few of the oldest canes each year keeps the ringed stems visible and stops the clump becoming solid. Remove fully brown fronds at the base of the stalk, and leave anything still green. Yellowing on the lower fronds is nearly always potassium and magnesium leaching out of light coastal soil rather than a disease, so feed with a palm-specific controlled release fertiliser in early spring and again in mid summer, and expect the improvement to show over a full season rather than in a fortnight.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 9 sizes, from 200mm up to 600L, priced from $35.95 to $3309.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot the plant arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. The smaller pots hold younger plants that cost less each and establish quickly, which suits hedges, screens and mass planting where the plant count adds up. The larger sizes carry several more years of growth on the farm and give height and presence straight away, which is what you want for a single feature position or a screen that cannot wait. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to when to plant in Australia.