How far north do palm trees grow?

How far north do palm trees grow? The furthest North you can grow palm trees successfully is coastal Norway, or about Vancouver, Canada in North America.

Wild palms in the US stop around North Carolina on the East coast. A planted Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) can live outside near 5F. This means that the Northern most location in the US that palm trees can survive and reproduce is around Seattle on the West coast.

So you're trying to figure out if a palm can live in your city. You've seen them in photos of Seattle, the Carolina coast, or sitting under a zone 7 gardener tag at Home Depot. Zone pushers will tell you that you can grow palms all the way up in Canada... but at some point you really do hit a wall. There is only so far North you can go before growing even the most cold hardy palms becomes impossible.

If you take into account the entire Northern hemisphere then Northern Europe will take the gold medal. Parts of coastal Norway and Ireland have successfully grown the Chinese windmill palm outdoors long term.

In almost all cases the palm tree that will grow this far North is indeed Trachycarpus fortunei.

A Warning About Fake Cold Hardy Palms

There are a lot of palms out there that get sold as "cold hardy," and they look the part until the first real freeze. A Queen palm can really only take about 25F. Coconut palms die even before the first real freeze.

Although it's not wrong for a nursery to sell those plants, most of the time they are sitting in a garden section of a store in a climate that can't actually support that palm outdoors.

The Northern Most Location For The US to Grow Palms

You'd think farther South would always be easier for palms but Seattle sits way up around 47N latitude. Most winters there only get down to about 18F. Nashville is a lot farther south and still sees about 3F in the winters. Once you have those numbers, the planting list pretty much writes itself. You see it's the hardiness zone that matters, not the latitude. With that in mind you might notice that even Alaska has hardiness zones that could hypothetically support palm growth.

But we're talking about locations that can reliably grow palm trees long term, so the answer here is Seattle, Washington. And at this latitude only a windmill and European fan palm can really survive. The Washington state palm growers guide has that outdoor list if you want to poke around further. Seattle also gets snow some years. That's a different question: can palm trees survive snow.

Although a windmill palm is the one people plant farthest north, it does have its drawbacks. A night near 5F can make Chinese windmill palm look pretty rough, and some folks wrap it on the worst nights. I wouldn't count a wrapped palm as a normal outdoor plant personally for this guide.

There's a 2018 paper in Scientific Reports that looks at a slightly different question: where can palms reproduce on their own, without a gardener? They put that around a coldest-month average of 36F. That's not nearly the same as planting one and keeping it alive. Washington, D.C. gets down to about 13F, which is too cold for palms to go wild, but a planted windmill palm can still live there.

How Far North Wild Palms Reach

European fan palm (Chamaerops humilis) is a palm that grows wild in Italy, around 44N. Kew lists it as the only palm native to mainland Europe and the Northern most naturally growing palm in the world.

Where I'm from on the South East coast of the US, cabbage palmetto (Sabal palmetto) is our northern most tree palm that naturally grow and reproduce. The Forest Service has it marked all the way up the coast up to Cape Fear, and there's a leftover group at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Dwarf palmetto (Sabal minor) although not a tree, is a shrub palm that makes it into Virginia and Oklahoma.

Palms You Can Plant Farther North

The chart below will give you a good idea of some palms you can plant that will survive farther north, in colder winters. The temps come from our palm tree species pages you can click into to review further.

Palm	About	Try it here
Needle palm	0F	Nashville, Maryland, a sheltered New York yard
Dwarf palmetto	0F	Same winters as needle. Stays a shrub
Chinese windmill palm	5F	Seattle, Portland, D.C. New York if you really stay above 5F
European fan palm	12F	Seattle, Portland, D.C. Not Nashville
Cabbage palmetto	15F	Wilmington and the Carolina coast. Native there

Questions

What is the northernmost native palm?

European fan palm, on the Italian coast, around 44N. In the US, cabbage palmetto is the northern tree palm. It follows the Carolina coast.

Can palm trees grow in New York City?

You can, if you mean needle or dwarf palmetto. New York City gets down to about 8F.

Can palm trees grow in Seattle?

Yes. Seattle only gets down to about 18 degrees Fahrenheit, so I would plant windmill and European fans there.