Brad's Tropical Paradise

Like everything else in the world, opinions vary, even about how much to trim a sago palm. Since this is the day of the internet, you can find a very wide variety of opinions, all within seconds of Googling. This is my opinion. My goal here at the Tropical Paradise is to have a beautiful, and lush, garden. I like the look of palm trees, but an average suburban lot is way too small for full-size palm trees, which look great from a distance, but up close they're telephone poles. My solution to that problem was to plant sago palms. And I really do want them to look like miniature palm trees, or ferns. So I trim them hard every season. I've had this one for many years, and it's grown to that wonderful point where the trunk is actually a trunk, not just a pineapple shape. And I just love to see the trunk of a palm tree, or sago palm, neatly trimmed. So I trim off all of the previous year's growth. Sago palms, as you know, aren't really palm trees, they're cy...

I've had cycads in my garden for many years now and this is the first year that I'm doing what I call "strategic trimming". And it just has to do with how cycads grow. If you're familiar with cycads, this will make sense. As you know, cycads grow in flushes, and during that time their leaves are soft. Once the flush is finished, the leaves harden off, but if there's an obstacle, like another plant, that smushes against it during a flush, that leaf will harden off in smushed-up way, and will look like that forever. And in the past this hasn't been a problem as my cycads were small enough that they really didn't make contact with anything that might smush them as they flushed, but in recent years I've noticed some smushing, which looks terrible. So this year I'm doing something about it. I'm calling it "strategic trimming". While the plants are flushing, I'm watching what they might smush into, and am trimming away obstac...

I fell in love with sago palms at first sight. I had asked one of my co-workers for advice on what I should plant in my backyard in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) when I first bought my house over twenty years ago, and when I saw a photo of a sago palm, I knew that I had to have one! The good news is that they do great in the Phoenix area, and the bad news is that they're kind of expensive, and are fairly easy to accidentally kill, usually with kindness. If you found this post after killing an expensive sago palm, I can relate, I've been there. And over the years I've learned what to do. So this is a "learn from my fails" story. First of all, they'll live in full sun, even in Phoenix, but they'll suffer, and look terrible. Find a place with some shade. The one in the pic up there is up against the east-facing wall of my house, and near a tree with dappled shade, which are perfect conditions. Don't plant a sago palm where it will get...

I like living in the Phoenix area, the cost of living is much lower than in California, and it's less crowded. But it gets very hot. I mean waaaay hot, crazy hot. And one of the things that I've done here is to create the illusion of the coolness of ocean breezes in the tropics - with cycads. If you're not familiar with the term cycad, it's not surprising. They grow beautifully here in the Phoenix area, but they just haven't caught on like petunias have. So they can be difficult to find at your average garden center. So please don't go wandering into Home Depot asking some overworked person where their cycads are. All you're gonna get is a weird look. But don't despair! Most people who look at cycads just imagine that they're small palm trees. But they're completely different plants, and besides if they were small palm trees they'd outgrow the space in a season or two. These plants are miniatures, and that's the secret of why they ...