Possible Coconut Sighting

Hello everyone. I'm hoping some of you have seen this palm, I really think it's a coconut.

There is a house when driving southbound Pleasant Hill Road, Osceola County and this house has a very coconutty palm growing up against the outside wall. Now, I know it sounds unlikely but it might be as lucky as the large Royals growing in St Cloud.

It has a good 10 feet of trunk (I'm not too accurate with heights but it cleared the first floor of the house. The trunk seems too slender and uniform to be a Majesty, and I know the leaves can look similar but coconuts' are longer. The palm is not very pretty like in S. FL, but it's obviously healthy enough to hold onto a crown of green in this area (Kissimmee-Poinciana)

I'll try to pinpoint the location, but hopefully someone with a sharper eye might have seen this palm. Taking a picture is too dangerous, so I won't try that haha

It is possible, they can grow here until we get a good hard freeze. I know there were some at Disney and Seaworld with coconuts growing, but of course they would probably just replace them if they freeze. Maybe because the tree is close to the house it stays warmer?

I threw some coconuts we picked up when we were in Sanibel into my garden for decoration and to my surprise they sprouted and are still growing. The cold nights we had didn't faze them. I'm not sure I want them to keep growing and then freeze and I have a big dead tree to get rid of.

I remember the vacations I took to Orlando (from NY) especially early 2000's when there were fruiting coconuts in a few yards on some road close to downtown. I do remember the coconuts at the attractions!

That's really cool! Why not let them grow as a nice gift from Mother Nature, haha
Hopefully we won't have any other cold nights and your coconuts can enjoy growing

I just think they are so beautiful and uniform. I have a peeve with queen palms, their trunks can sometimes be ugly widths...just my opinion

I think I just might let it grow, but I'll need to move it and the roots are going into the ground now, so may not make it, too close to my Florida Room now.

They are so mobile as seedlings, it's pretty amazing.

I took time this year to regret not planting any palms from the time I moved here. I moved in May which would have been a great time, but moving is hard enough.

This month, or next I'll plant a few queens, but I could have had nice sized queens if I'd planted them 4 years ago. Oh well.

Good to know, I was waiting till I did some spring cleaning in the garden and warmer nights. I'll go ahead and move it further in the back. We'll see how it goes. ☺

I'm all for the coconut tree growing!

Now that I work at SeaWorld, I pay attention to the landscaping, which I love doing. At the employee entrance there is a very tall coconut, same height as the old queens. And it was only today that I saw the many royal palms planted in front of the Doubletree a little past Aquatica.

Sunkissed,
I would use my garden hose with the nozzle down to a sharp stream to wash dirt away from as much of the root as you want. Then dig from there and trim the badly cut roots. Coconuts reproduce very well by floating down the waterways so I'm pretty sure they can stand to be up-rooted several times. (Remember they cary a large food supply with them!)

I grew up in Ft. Lauderdale and grew several coconut trees from nuts I pulled up along the ICW.

Thanks pbyrley, It really didn't have that long of roots yet, but I did move it further back away from the house. It would be cool if it did grown, but I really doubt it here, we've been fortunate to not have freezing weather here the past two winters, but our normal is to get at least one good zap of 20's sometime during the winter months.

Here is a pic of it now.

It looks good, and probably at a better price than Home Depot's $15 sprouted coconut!

By the way, the mini turtle (I think) with 'friend' pot on his back is so cute

You bet it is, but let me tell you that we had to be quick we we saw a fallen coconut around the island of Sanibel, people picked them up as fast as they fell off the trees. We got ours right after a good thunderstorm.

Here is a better picture of my little Garden Friends.

Probably the most famous coconuts in Orlando are at the Charley's Steakhouse in ICON Park off of I-Drive and at Smashburger near downtown Orlando on FL-50. The photos show them just after the December 2022 cold snap around Christmas.

Where is the approximate zone cut off for coconut palms? South of Orlando? I spent my childhood on Miami Beach and later North Miami Beach. Coconut palms everywhere including my yard. As kids we all knew how to shuck the husks with a hammer claw and punch out those three eyes with a screwdriver to drink coconut water then smash the shell to get at the meat. We had a lakefront house and during their season coconuts would drift onto our beach from neighboring properties as they fell out of trees. We used to weave dolls, grasshoppers, bookmarks, etc. from the fronds. People who came from the islands made fantastic hats and whimsical animals which they sold along the beach. As a kid I saw palms as very ordinary. Nothing as exotic as say trees like oaks which I had read turned color in fall but never actually seen one.

Depending on the amount of time one wants a coconut to survive, the line could be drawn in different spots. To survive a 1980s freeze, you're probably looking at WPB down on the east coast and hugging the coast from Ft. Myers/Cape Coral down the gulf side. There were a few that survived along the coast and on barrier islands in Central Florida, and I was lucky enough to see one on Earring Point near Wabasso.

Since the 2009-2010 winter was a very long duration of cold temperatures, but not as deep cold as the 1980s in most cases, there are a lot of growers who use that as the new benchmark. The coconut outside of Charley's Steakhouse did survive that freeze, along with a few others in select spots in the Orlando/Kissimmee/St.Cloud areas. Most of the survivors hug the coasts or were much further south inland toward Lake Okeechobee. The furthest north I know of a 2010 surviving coconut was Daytona Beach.

Currently, you can see relatively nice coconuts in most of the decent microclimates along I-4, but eventually, nature will hit the reset button.

I've seen people make the hats and other crafts down in Key West. It's awesome what all you can do with the by-products of coconut palms.

Thanks. Know I am dating myself but Florida barely had a west coast until they started draining the Everglades and the Civil Corps of Engineers began cutting across the state for what I recall was a failed barge project. It contaminated the limestone aquifers with brackish water south of Okeechobee for years and we had to filter our water. We referred to the west coast as the "left coast" and crossed on Alligator Alley which truly had alligators frequently wandering across. It was especially dangerous to travel across during blue crab mating season when there were so many on the road they would slash your tires and you'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Sanibel had a ferry. I used to go snorkeling there with friends, go clamming and overnight on the beach. Then catch the ferry back to the mainland the next day. There were no hotels or condos. Just miles of empty beach and ocean. I still have sea oats from there in a vase in my bedroom.

Everything has changed - not necessarily for the better. When I moved here over 20 years ago, you could smell oranges as soon as you got off I-4 onto US-27. Now it's all subdivisions and shopping malls. The Gulf coast is still the more peaceful of the two sides of Florida, but the growth has been exponential just about everywhere. It's projected that Polk County will have over a million people sometime in 2025.

Yes, I'm very aware of the changes. I kept my family home until a few years ago. But you cannot insure a non-primary residence in Florida and every hurricane season when things were brewing I was a wreck.