How do you measure that palm?

Clear Trunk


There are many ways to measure a palm. We use clear trunk as it provides a fairly definate metric. Generally accepted ways to measure palms are as follows:

  • Container Size: Smaller plants will often sell by the size of their pots, such as 5, 10 or 15 gallon. This is a great method, though you may wind up paying for more dirt than palm.
  • Overall Height: This method measures from the tip top of the highest frond to the dirt.
  • Canopy Width: Just as it sounds, the horizontal spread of the leaves, which really depends on how well one trims their tree on any given day.
  • Diameter of Trunk: This method is sound given that most palms grow at a known rate. But what a difference it makes when figuring out if the leaf bases are part of that measurement. And it takes a bit of math to divide the circumference by pi. Who can bother?
  • Clear Wood: This method measures pinnate palms to the crownshaft and proves difficult to apply to palmate or costa palmates with persisent leaf bases.
  • Clear Trunk: While the trunk or stem of any given palm will vary dramatically in height and diameter, all palm stems share a similar morphology, terminating at the shoot apex, which is basically the cone shape at the top of the trunk, called the leaf generating meristem. For this reason, all our prices are based off of clear trunk measurements.