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The Foxtail Palm is endemic to a very small part of Australia, originally decorating the boulder-strewn, exposed gravel hills of the Cape Melville range, wholly within the Cape Melville National Park.
Flowering: White flowers stalk that comes from the base of the crownshaft.
Foliage: Variance of greenish colours; deep green to light green colours. Received its more commonly known Australian-English name from the appearance of its foliage, which is in a shape of a fox’s tail.
Fruits: 2 inches long. Olive green to green in the early stages. Orange red when ripe.
Trunk: Similar to the king palm, the foxtail palm trunk is smooth, thin, and self-cleaning. It grows a single, double, or triple trunk that is slightly spindle-shaped to columnar reaching heights of about 30 ft. The trunk also has a closely ringed, dark grey to light gray colour which slowly turns more and more white. The crownshaft of the foxtail palm is light to bright green and slightly swollen at the base.
After it became known to the world, the Foxtail Palm's seeds were so highly sought after that a thriving black market trade formed, with illegal collectors nearly decimating the in situ populations. The species propagates readily in cultivation and this ultimately reduced the pressure on the wild population. It has become widely distributed across the world, being progressively planted out as one of the "world's most popular" palms.
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