Don’t cut anything off while those leaves are green and healthy you can trim them off when they are brown and dead.
OnePragmatic
All easy with palms. Green you keep, brown you remove
cromagnone
At the moment, nothing, just enjoy it! The thing most people do wrong with palms (better understood in some other countries but less so in the UK because there’s not so many of them) is to prune them like a tree made of wood. What looks like the trunk of a palm is made of the bases of each frond (“leaf”), so the radius of the trunk (and therefore its structural stability) and the rate of height growth, depends entirely on the fronds being left to grow throughout their natural life span. This means they need to get to the brown, almost dead stage, before you prune them near to the trunk. At that point they’ve done their job for the tree. If you prune them while they’re still green or pointing up more than about 10 degrees *below* horizontal, you’re affecting the long term stability and health of the tree. If you prune green fronds you will narrow the trunk towards the top and they can never regain the lost width as the growth only takes place above.
Here’s [a photo of a mature *Trachycarpus fortunei*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trachycarpus_fortunei-Parc_du_Grand_Blottereau_(2).jpg) in relatively good health and wild condition. As you can see, there’s a good layer of vertical dead fronds at the base, and the green photosynthetic/yellow reproductive plant tissue basically floats up over time on a platform of previous growth. The dead material also provides a good bit of insulation for the new growth when the temperature drops, although *T. fortunei* are pretty damn tough in the UK when bigger than a few feet tall.
Exile4444
No. Your palm is perfectly healthy. It will kill off lower leaves naturally, at which point you can trim them off
New-Read-6245
That’s a healthy looking Trachycarpus.
It must be in a fairly sheltered spot because the leaves don’t look all battered.
Queasy-Meringue-7965
It’s magnificent!
wowens1
Thank you, everyone, for your helpful comments! I won’t cut any fronds until they’re good and brown!
MasatoWolff
I have owned multiple for over 10 years and I have always cut off the fan shaped leafs that hang downwards. Instead of pruning it once a year I keep it up throughout the year. It also promotes growth if that’s what you’re after. I cut them where the stem gets thin from the base.
SaladAddicts
I’ve got several like this and they grow better in part shade.
ExpressAffect3262
As a gardener who loves tropicals and just planted my own trachy this month, thank you for keeping it alive ha
That one at that size is worth around £400, and people just chop them up like they’re nothing.
10 Comments
Don’t cut anything off while those leaves are green and healthy you can trim them off when they are brown and dead.
All easy with palms. Green you keep, brown you remove
At the moment, nothing, just enjoy it! The thing most people do wrong with palms (better understood in some other countries but less so in the UK because there’s not so many of them) is to prune them like a tree made of wood. What looks like the trunk of a palm is made of the bases of each frond (“leaf”), so the radius of the trunk (and therefore its structural stability) and the rate of height growth, depends entirely on the fronds being left to grow throughout their natural life span. This means they need to get to the brown, almost dead stage, before you prune them near to the trunk. At that point they’ve done their job for the tree. If you prune them while they’re still green or pointing up more than about 10 degrees *below* horizontal, you’re affecting the long term stability and health of the tree. If you prune green fronds you will narrow the trunk towards the top and they can never regain the lost width as the growth only takes place above.
Here’s [a photo of a mature *Trachycarpus fortunei*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trachycarpus_fortunei-Parc_du_Grand_Blottereau_(2).jpg) in relatively good health and wild condition. As you can see, there’s a good layer of vertical dead fronds at the base, and the green photosynthetic/yellow reproductive plant tissue basically floats up over time on a platform of previous growth. The dead material also provides a good bit of insulation for the new growth when the temperature drops, although *T. fortunei* are pretty damn tough in the UK when bigger than a few feet tall.
No. Your palm is perfectly healthy. It will kill off lower leaves naturally, at which point you can trim them off
That’s a healthy looking Trachycarpus.
It must be in a fairly sheltered spot because the leaves don’t look all battered.
It’s magnificent!
Thank you, everyone, for your helpful comments! I won’t cut any fronds until they’re good and brown!
I have owned multiple for over 10 years and I have always cut off the fan shaped leafs that hang downwards. Instead of pruning it once a year I keep it up throughout the year. It also promotes growth if that’s what you’re after. I cut them where the stem gets thin from the base.
I’ve got several like this and they grow better in part shade.
As a gardener who loves tropicals and just planted my own trachy this month, thank you for keeping it alive ha
That one at that size is worth around £400, and people just chop them up like they’re nothing.
They take a lot to grow