like Disneyland .....

My love of palms and all things bamboo, led me down south to a wholesale nursery out on Pine Island.  Like visiting Disney, I became surprisingly excited.  Walking, touching, looking up & looking down, and surrounded by many exotic sounding names (using common names below) and all the while, being guided by an impassioned nursery employee, just excited as I.  And me, just wandering everywhere, from areas of the smallest potted seedlings to acres of an abandoned and overgrown, old growth nursery.

Palmco Nursery, Bookelia, Florida - 600 Acres
(wholesale grower & large exporter of specialty palms & bamboo).


Coconut palm seedlings, with young potted bamboo in the background

a multitude of large landscape palms, prepped, trimmed and root-wrapped for shipping, shipped for domestic and international markets.

3 large Cuban Royal's being loaded for transportation for the Port of Miami, being shipped for a new resort in the Caribbean.

'Wild Date' palm with fruit

'Wild Date' intentionally grown to lean for ornamental landscape purposes

an old growth and abandoned Coconut palm grove (Reclinatas in background) 

old growth 'Cuban Royals' left abandoned on ten 'back' acres. Today, too hard to individually access, to labor intensive to harvest

young 'Slender Weaver' bamboo in containers

'Nana' bamboo

'Golden Hawaiian' bamboo

'Guadua angusifiolia', is the largest "neotropical" bamboo and native to Central & South America. "Guadua" bamboo is commonly used for construction - used as a local, native building material, as well as, being used worldwide for commercial quality applications. This large, tall straight bamboo is also noted for it's leafy, spiny thorns and heights that top 70 feet . Not commonly grown in the US, but most impressive and majestic - and now, a newly found friend.