Sabal or Windmill?

Is there an easy way to tell the difference between a sabal palm and a windmill palm? I would never choose a windmill over a sabal, but sometimes I cannot distinguish between the two when I see them on the roadside.

Windmill palms have a kind of fibery stuff that looks almost like loose, rotted burlap hanging around the base of the leaf stalks, and Cabbage Palmettos don't.... Also, whilst Windmill palm leaves are archaetypical fan-palm leaves, Cabbage Palmettos leaves are what is termed Costapalmate... I.e. look kind of like a cross between pinnate and palmate. I hope this clears things up a bit. I used to make the same mistake until I learned these tell-tale features (When I was stationed in Japan, I was wondering how Cabbage Palmettos got there, until I learned the difference, and I now know that all the fan palms I saw in and around Yokosuka are Windmills.... I even saw several Windmills planted in the town square of Chenhae, S. Korea).

Hikaro, are ya sure it was Windmill (Trachycarpus fortunei) or Waggies (Trachycarpus wagnerianus)? Your comparison is perfect.

Oh, I'm 98% sure they were all windmill..... Windmill Palms have been cultivated in Japan for centuries, and have since escaped cultivation and grow wild there.... The leaves, trunks and other growth habit matched all the descriptions of Windmill palms that I've read on this site.....

And those windmill palms in your pic look exactly like some of the ones on the US Navy base in Yokosuka, (and other areas in Japan that I've been to), although the taller ones only had about 3 ft of the hairy stuff just below the leaves, with the rest of the trunk being bare.

I just talked to my friend today who is in Singapore but spent quite a while in Tokyo and he said the waggies so I'm thinking maybe in the Tokyo area Waggies are more common and Windmill outside of the Tokyo area??? Here's a pic of a Waggie down the street from me.

Could be that they are T. wagneri..... How tall do Waggies get, and how fast do they grow? The reason I'm asking is that the ones I saw growing around Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka and surrounding areas got around 25-30 ft tall (6-9M) and seemed to grow pretty fast.... I got a pic of some of the palms growing in S. Korea (which appeared to be the same type) for reference, and were the same height as the Japanese palms:

Well it's hard to see in the pic. Waggies are slower to grow from seed but seem to pickup after 4/5 years. The best way to tell them apart is the stiffness of the leaves and how close to the trunk the leaves are. Maybe Waggies and fortunei are mixed up as they do cross. As you can see in the 2 pics the fortunei doesn't do that well in wind whereas the waggie is stiff and takes it fine.

Yeah, I took that pic with my first digital camera in 2001, and it didn't have a zoom lens......

Since you say that T. fortunei hates windy areas, then the ones in S. Korea and Japan are probably T. wagner..... It was alwasy windy in S. Korea, and also in the Kanto region of Japan.... Even though Yokosuka was somewhere on the order of Zone 9a/8b, the winters FELT colder than here in PA (zone 6b) due to the constant, damp wind that just seemed to blow straight through you.....

Guess it depends on what sort of winds you are talking about... one of the reasons T fortunei is called the windmill palm is it looks great in the wind. Here in So Cal they take winds up to about 50mph in both 100F down to 25F temps... and though they can brown tip a bit if not watered well, well-watered individuals usually don't look the worse for wear after high winds. I would actually say it would be one of the better palms for windy areas here in southern California. But T wagnerianus is obviously even better still having much stiffer leaves and less space to capture the wind. And I have no experience with either species in climates that approach their hardiness limits.

European Fan Palm "Vulcano" has better wind resistance, stiffer leaves, compact dense crown.