Why in the World is the Palmetto Our State Tree?

“A sweet Southern lady with a silver perm and flat pearl earrings struck up a conversation with me while standing in line at Aldi’s. (I shifted a frozen pizza in my cart so she couldn’t see my three bottles of wine and box of beard dye—the first, a gardener’s elixir and the second, well, if I’m going to be on TV, there are some vanity issues to address.) I put my swollen left hand behind my back. Earlier in the day, pruning a palm, I’d run into a wasps’ nest.”—Jenks Farmer

Mr. Farmer’s Garden

By Jenks Farmer

COLUMBIA South Carolina—(The Pendletonian)—December 2024—“Aren’t you the fellow I saw on TV talking about flowers?” she asked, adding, “That must be such a relaxing career.” A sweet Southern lady with a silver perm and flat pearl earrings struck up a conversation with me while standing in line at Aldi’s. (I shifted a frozen pizza in my cart so she couldn’t see my three bottles of wine and box of beard dye—the first, a gardener’s elixir and the second, well, if I’m going to be on TV, there are some vanity issues to address.) I put my swollen left hand behind my back. Earlier in the day, pruning a palm, I’d run into a wasps’ nest.

A few “relaxing moments” flashed before my eyes–that time I watched a work truck sink ever so slowly into what turned out to be a Confederate-era septic pit; the quiet, pre-dawn drive with a rattlesnake nestled under my pickup’s front seat, both of us too scared to disturb the peace; and the time someone handed me a Tupperware full of ashes and asked me to scatter their Pop in some “pretty garden.”

“Yes’m,” I replied, “I get to spend all day with flowers and gardeners are really nice people.”

I do love chatting with people, making small talk, trying to connect to some distant relatives. The line was slow. Despite her perm and pearls, she was a technology whiz, flipping through photos on her phone. She said, “Do you mind if I ask you something? What in the world is wrong with my squash? I bought them on the clearance rack right here at Aldi and they grew gangbusters, but now . . .”

I didn’t need to see her photos. I could have diagnosed the problem from Alaska.

“Squash borers. You’ll have to pull the plants up and burn them. We just can’t grow yellow squash through our summers here anymore,” I said. “We have new pests now,” I almost added, “since the climate’s heated up,” but I caught myself: she might be a climate change denier and I didn’t want any conflict ruining this relaxing moment.

Squash borers, convict caterpillars, chamber bitter weed, and armadillos. They’ve all moved north with global warming. But sometimes, I don’t want to talk about it.

Sometimes I just want to say, “Look, let’s talk about something more interesting, like how the South’s radish farms were devastated by Prohibition.” Any topic more compelling (and safe) for check-out line chat or dinner party conversation. My chance came when I noticed the young man in front of us was wearing a South Carolina state flag tree t-shirt. “Hey,” I said seriously to the pearls and perm lady, “Can I ask you something? Do you know that our state tree isn’t really a tree?” (An interesting and diverting conversation ensued, much more colorful and lively than decimated squash.)

And, going forward, that’s what I plan to do in this column for all you Pendletonians reading: tackle topics more diverting than squash-borered-squash.

Forget the usual gardening advice. We all have an awesome resource of Clemson’s Home and Garden Information Center for that. I’m here to share the odd, the obscure, and the downright fascinating―the kind of horticultural tidbits that’ll make you the star of any backyard barbecue or grocery store line. Get ready for some stories.

Eventually, we’ll parse fact from fiction, I might throw in some tailgate philosophy of gardening, and, along the way, tell you about some very cool plants to add to our landscapes.

Speaking of philosophy, in gardening, the basics of plant science don’t change. But things do change and our understanding of plant science changes, too. Even the plants we can grow change. Not too long ago, nobody would think of planting our state tree, the palmetto, in the Upstate. But these days, they grow tucked in at the Greenville Zoo and at the entry to the Botanical Gardens in Clemson. It’s our state “tree,” so it is appropriate that in today’s new climate, it grows almost everywhere in the state.

There are two interesting questions about the state tree. First, why is a plant that naturally grows only on our sandy coast the state tree? That answer involves more than South Carolina history, as this tree is almost as important as the bundles of tea leaves at Boston Harbor (at least in terms of plants involved in the American Revolution).

In 1776, the normal attack mode for the British was shooting cannonballs from ships towards forts on land. That worked on normal forts built from real trees. Real trees have wood, hard as it might be, that tends to snap, crack, and break under force. But South Carolina’s Fort Moultrie was built from (you guessed it) palmetto logs.

The palmetto’s trunk could not be more different from that of a tree. Technically, it’s not a tree at all. Instead of being hard and dense inside, bundle after bundle of strong, thin, wiry, flexible strands run up and down it. Botanists distinguish and categorize plants based on structures like this. From a botanical standpoint, palmettos are more closely related to corn and grass than they are to most trees. Technically, palmettos are not trees but sort of like giant corn stalks. Cannonballs don’t shatter them: they lodge in the fibers. But palmettos are tall and hard-trunked, so most of us think of them as trees.

The fort held up, the attack failed, and that’s why our most iconic native plant is both honored on our state flag and, botanically correct or not, stands in as our official state tree.

Miss Perm-and-Pearls was impressed. The young man in the palmetto t-shirt asked her, “Is he telling the truth?” Miss Perm-and-Pearls vouched for me: “He was on TV last week. He knows what he’s talking about.” As the young man turned to pay, Miss P & P offered me a little advice, “You don’t need that,” she said, pointing to my beard dye. “You look distinguished, and a little gray denotes wisdom, trust, so when you tell a story like that, young folks believe you.” Something about the way she said it made me think she didn’t wholly believe me.

Like any good Southern storyteller, I may embellish a bit when it comes to pearl earrings and snakes in a pick-up. That’s because I believe it is stories that draw people close, bring us together, and then convey larger truths and endlessly fascinating (and true) details about the natural world.

That’s what I hope to do in this column and in all my writing. And I promise y’all this: when it comes to plants, gardens, and horticultural history, I’ll be telling the truth.

To order Jenks Farmer’s books, click on the book covers below: