Compartmentalization in Palms?

TreeWorker

Being trained in the UK, I didn't get taught a thing about Palm trees...

I'm new to Australia, and don't have much experience with palms at all. I've been reading up on palm biology. My understanding is that since they don't put on radial growth, they can't seal wounds (say, from spiking.. you hack!). I hear that palms don't have the ability to compartmentalize decay or defend themselves against fungal pathogens or wounding and so surely they must be extremely susceptible to disease?

Yet, I hear palms don't often get attacked by pathogens?
Surely there isn't something right here?

Does anybody know about CODIT in palms? How effective is it, and how do the "walls" differ when you don't have any growth rings and your vascular bundles are distributed throughout the stem?

Thanks in advance for satisfying my curiosity

Eric Frei

Wounds are permanent however as the entire diameter of the palm is vascular it does have the ability to resist decay similar to the way the vascular cambium of a tree has resistance to decay.

In the Shigo model wall 1 is the plugging of vessels to stop the up and down passageways. Palms likely have that too.

Wall 2 is the inward movement of decay blocked by heartwood, palms just have more vascular systems and sapwood equivalent all the way through.

Wall 3 is the rays helping prevent radial decay, none in palms but all is vascular and living.

Wall 4 is new altered cambium growing outward, palms do not do that.

So as you can see palms do have a couple of methods. Also the most powerful resistance to decay in trees is cambium, the living wood so palms fair well in that area as all is living. As with trees there is good and poor compartmentalisers, I have found this with palms also.

I have seen 10 year old scarfs (notches) cut in palms and then someone decided not to fell them, they didn't rot all the way through because the living vascular system has decay resistant qualities, accelerated and increased when wounded just like trees.

Heck, if you do not wash your saw out the palm juice will eat away the alloy, that's some serious sap.

In the quoted post below you can see that the spike holes didn't just keep rotting. You can see that there was something going on to stop decay. So in my opinion to say palms do not compartmentalise is a fallacy.

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Garry Brockley

palms do put on radial growth you will often see large striations on palms after wet weather its just not done in the sameway as dicotyledons, the lack of cambium layer per say has great advantages in hot weather climates, palms are very good at comartmentalising wounds, i've removed palms that have been spiked thier whole life 15+ years old and they have coped perfectly fine; when you ring up the main trunk you some times see the kind of thing eric has shown but it is by no means the norm just a good example of the palms defences at work.

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TreeWorker

Thanks for your replies.

It's nice to see you have an understanding of Dr Shigo's CODIT walls

So, because palms don't contain a cambium layer and have their phloem and xylem in a number of vascular bundles... am I right by thinking you could totally ring bark or even debark a palm and it would have little to no effect on the tree? No signs of dieback or other visual signs of decline in health? Not that I would even dream of doing such a thing. Even cutting a chunk out of a palms trunk, like what was said about being being scarfed and left for years...

this is crazy!

Eric Frei

Yes that is right and I have seen plenty where the home-owner has done that hoping to kill it, but it lives on.

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TreeWorker

Strange!