ABSTRACT
In the 1760s, when William Bartram was traveling in Florida, he found the royal palm in what is now Volusia and Lake Counties. He called the trees palma elata, and wrote that they had a “strait trunk…sixty, eighty or ninety feet high, with a beautiful taper of a bright ash colour.” There are no longer royal palms in the area, and Harper (Bartram [1791] 1958) speculated that the freeze of 1835 killed them. Zona (1996) discussed the northern Florida Roystonea in more detail.
