Ardent palm collector and grower Larry Black, a long-time International Palm Society and Palm Society of Southern California member, has assembled one of the finest, well grown collections of subtropical and tropical palms and companion plants in California. In 2022, on one of my many visits to his modest but unusually diverse garden in Fountain Valley in Orange County, about 50 km southeast of Los Angeles and seven km from the Pacific Ocean, Larry brought to my attention a clustered, moderate-sized Chrysalidocarpus lanceolatus (until recently Dypsis lanceolata) that he had obtained from a palm grower in Hawaii as D. lanceolata ‘Compact Form’ (now C. lanceolatus ‘Compact Form’). He had two, mature specimens, both obtained from the same Hawaiian source and at the same time, planted together in a planter next to his back-yard swimming pool, each with similarities but also with some minor differences.

Larry suggested to me that these two plants differed from a plant in his front yard that he had also obtained from the same grower in Hawaii as Dypsis lanceolata (now Chrysalidocarpus lanceolatus). A close examination of this C. lanceolatus in the front yard showed some striking differences with the two in the back yard. I compared both the front- and back-yard plants with the literature (Dransfield Beentje 1995) and decided that the front-yard plant, although not a perfect match, was likely C. lanceolatus while the two back-yard plants were clearly more different. 

Continued...