Ivory Cane Palm Pinanga kuhlii

Collectors grow the ivory cane palm for its new leaf. Each spear opens bronze to reddish pink, holds that colour for a week or two, then hardens to deep green, and because the palm is clumping there is nearly always a fresh spear coming somewhere in the clump. The canes are slender, closely ringed and topped with a prominent crownshaft, and mature clumps carry small red fruits after flowering. It is an understorey palm, used for screening and softening in sheltered warm gardens and as a large pot plant.

Humidity, shelter and the exposure that bleaches it

Pinanga kuhlii comes from the wet tropics of South East Asia and wants what that implies: warmth, humidity, still air and soil that stays moist without going stagnant. Build the bed up with composted organic matter, mulch heavily and keep the root zone from drying out between waterings. Frost kills it outright, which sets the boundary. Brisbane, the northern New South Wales coast and anywhere further north can grow it in a protected courtyard or beneath established canopy, while gardeners further south should treat it as a pot plant for a warm sheltered position. The failure mode is exposure. An open position bleaches the leaves to a pale yellow, and a scorched frond never recovers its colour, so the clump carries that damage until those canes are cut out. Plant it where a wall, a fence or overhead canopy shields it from wind and from the middle of the day. In a pot, use a coarse bark based mix, keep the clump out of drying wind on a balcony, and repot before the canes start lifting themselves out of the container.

Clumping canes against solitary trunks

The other palms here are solitary, and that changes what they do in a garden. Allagoptera caudescens makes one clean trunk and a feather crown with a silver underside, so it works as a standalone specimen in a more open bed. Cryosophila warscewiczii gives you fans and an armed trunk that must be kept back from traffic. Pinanga is the one to choose when you want a screen rather than a specimen, or a palm that is safe beside a path, since nothing on it is spiny. Indoors it takes the corner while Homalomena Emerald Gem takes the bench. Set the three side by side and the practical question is simply whether anyone brushes past the trunk, and only Pinanga passes that test.

Thinning the clump and feeding the canes

Prune to keep the clump readable rather than to control its size. Cut spent or damaged canes out at ground level with a pruning saw, take fully browned fronds off close to the crownshaft, and leave anything still green alone. Do not shorten a healthy frond to make it fit, since palms neither branch nor regrow from a cut leaf. Feed in early spring and again in midsummer with a palm fertiliser carrying magnesium, potassium and trace elements, and water it in well. Broad yellow banding along the edges of older fronds is a magnesium shortfall, common in pots and sandy ground, and it corrects across a season with regular feeding.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 4 sizes, from 200mm up to 500mm, priced from $31.95 to $399.00 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.