PALMA, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 43 
SABAL MEXICANA. 
Palmetto. 
SPADIx elongated. Fruit often 2 or 3-lobed, with 2 or 3 seeds; seed-coat dark 
chestnut-brown. 
Sabal Mexicana, Martius, Hist. Nat. Palm. iii. 246, i. t.S, Chamzerops Palmetto, Schott, Mex. Bound. Surv. i. pt. 
f. 2-7, t. 5, f. 4 (1833-50). — Kunth, Enum. iii. 246. — ii. 44 (not Michaux) (1857). 
Hemsley, Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. iii. 410. — Sprenger, Bull. Sabal Palmetto (?), Havard, Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus. viii. 
Soc. Tose. Ort. xiv. 317. — Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. 524 (not Roemer & Schultes) (1885). — Coulter, Contrib. 
xxv. 135. U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 452 (Man. Pl. W. Texas). 
A tree, with a trunk from thirty to fifty feet in height and often two and a half feet in diameter, 
marked with distinct rings, and covered below with bright reddish brown rind and above with the wide 
persistent sheaths of the leaf-stalks. The leaves are cuneate below, dark yellow-green and lustrous, five 
or six feet long, often seven feet wide, and divided nearly to the middle into two-parted segments, which 
are about two inches wide, with thickened pale margins separating into long thin threads; they are 
borne on petioles seven or eight feet in length and an inch and a half wide at the apex, the ligulas 
being about six inches long; erect when they first unfold, they gradually spread at right angles to the 
stem and finally become pendulous. The flowers, which in Texas appear late in March or early in 
April, are borne in the axils of the acute scarious persistent bracts half as long as the perianth on the 
stout elongated simple or rarely branched secondary branches of a spadix which is seven or eight feet in 
length, with stout ultimate divisions. The fruit ripens early in the summer and is about half an inch 
in diameter, with thin dry flesh, and globose or often two or three-lobed by the development of the 
second and third carpels. The seed, which is nearly half an inch broad and about a quarter of an inch 
high, is very dark chestnut-brown, with a broad shallow basal cavity and a conspicuous orange-colored 
hilum, and is marked on the side with the prominent micropyle. 
In Texas, where it was first detected about seventy years ago by the Belgian botanist Berlandier,’ 
Sabal Mexicana grows in the rich soil of the bottom-lands of the Rio Grande from the neighborhood 
of Edinburgh nearly to the Gulf, with Ulmus crassifolia, Acacia Berlandieri Fraxinus Berlandieriana, 
Leucena pulverulenta, and Erythrina herbacea ; and below the Rio Grande it ranges southward in 
the neighborhood of the coast to southern Mexico. 
The wood of Sabal Mexicana is exceedingly light, soft, and pale brown tinged with red, and 
contains thick light-colored rather inconspicuous fibro-vascular bundles, the outer rim, about an inch in 
thickness, being softer and rather lighter colored. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 
0.2607, a cubic foot weighing 16.25 pounds.’ 
On the Gulf coast the trunks of Sabal Alexicana are used for wharf-piles, and on the lower Rio 
Grande its leaves are cut almost as fast as they appear to supply thatch for houses. In southern 
Mexico it is cultivated to produce leaves which are manufactured into hats.2 In Brownsville, 
Matamoras, and other towns on the lower Rio Grande, Sabal Mexicana is frequently planted as a street 
tree, and in some of the gardens of Monterey noble old specimens exist. 
1 See i. 82. ” Garden and Forest, iii. 356. 8 Heller, Bonplandia, ii. 157. 
