Livistona australis Australian cabbage palm

Australia is home to some 60 species of palms, with L. australis the most southerly in range (australis is Latin for “southern”) and the first to be documented by European observers. Joseph Banks, botanist on board Captain Cook’s first voyage to the southern continent called them “cabbage trees” for their edible terminal bud. He described palms with “leaves pleated like a fan; the Cabbage of these was small but exquisitely sweet.” Our sole specimen of this rare species, present since at least the 1950s in the outer northeast island of the Inner Quad, is hardly the occasion to test Banks’s claim of its culinary virtue: the apical bud is the growing point, and harvesting it kills the palm.

For more than 70 years, Stanford’s specimen was misidentified as L. chinensis. It differs from that eastern Asian species by the prominent rings along its trunk – raised scars of fallen leaf bases – and by its considerably greater height here in California. For decades, ours has sported a dramatic skirt of dead leaves, removed in 2025. Its crown is dense with rich green fronds; compare it to the sparser crowns and grayish green fronds of the California fan palms in the same island.