This story centers around a plant known in North America as the Japanese Sago Palm, Sago Palm, or occasionally the King Sago, and I’ve heard Samauri Palm, a botanist will call it Cycas revoluta. It’s a really cool looking tropical plant especially if you trim it properly. They’re very hardy and need no maintenance other than trimming the branches off every spring. HOWEVER — this species is 250 million years old, there’s very few living species on this planet that have survived that long with as little change as the Sago Palm. It had to survive on a planet full of hungry dinosaurs, so it learned how to defend itself. Be very careful, their fronds (leaves) do have a toxic sting, I have 10 of them and get stung all the time, but as anyone who raises roses knows, it’s the price of growing beauty.
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Back in 1972 Dennis Delaney moved from West Virginia to south Georgia before it became fashionable to move south in your later years. Dennis moved because he got a job offer at the St. George, Georgia water plant, so disliking the growing influx of tourists in his hometown of Harpers Ferry WV and the madness of his job in York PA, he and Linda May pulled up stakes and moved south.
The tiny city of St. George is right on the Georgia/Florida state line in a unique place where the normally east/west state line runs north/south following the St. Mary’s river as it comes out of the Okefenokee swamp and creates the Georgia Hook, an area where Georgia dips deep into Florida. St. George is the farthest south you can go in Georgia, in fact, straight east of St. George is Jacksonville Florida.
Dennis and his wife Linda May grew up in the West Virginia countryside near Harpers Ferry, children of the great depression, but they learned that the land would provide and that’s how their families survived. Then came World War 2 and after a quick wedding Dennis marched off to war. He returned four years later, a changed man; built up in some ways, shattered in others, but still Dennis, and Linda May cried with relief that Her Man was home.
After a period of readjustment Dennis and Linda May settled into a happy life in nearby York Pennsylvania. They spent most of their time in York but returned to visit home and kin in Harpers Ferry almost every weekend. Eventually the area was building up so much that when the opportunity arose in St. George they spoke about it, prayed over it, then returned to the deep rural life they love, this time in the “Southest” part of Georgia. Although there were no mountains, they were back in the country, but they weren’t far from the city of Jacksonville, and the best part — no more winters!
Dennis and Linda May bought a rambling ranch home on a large spread of land just outside of St. George, a tiny community of 3 churches, one gas station, one five and dime, one restaurant, and one stop sign. Darnell’s Five and Dime was a small general store with basic items, and it also had a soda fountain and ice cream, and as always, The Boys. The Boys were, and still are, fellows from the local area who gather most every day to “jaw.” Nothing makes a hot, humid north South Georgia summer day go by like conversation over a cold soda or maybe a snow cone with good friends.
That’s where Dennis met Yoshi Nakamura, a local character. Yoshi is a retired schoolteacher and a funny guy with an infectious sense of humor, he and his wife Chima moved here to teach at the county high school, Yoshi teaching biology and sociology, and Chima teaching math and psychology. The property they bought has an actual greenhouse which the Nakamuras put to great use and now that they’re retired, they spend most of their waking hours in the greenhouse. Yoshi and Dennis both have a deep fondness for gardening and Dennis would like nothing better than to develop a Japanese style garden on the small island in his pond and Yoshi was brimming full of ideas. It was a match made in heaven and he and Dennis became friends.
Yoshi’s passion was a tropical plant from the south of Japan called the Sago Palm, sometimes called the Samurai Palm. The Sago Palm is a beautiful plant but it’s not actually a palm though it looks like one. The Sago Palm has a crown of palm like fronds with sword shaped leaves that grow in two parallel lines off a central stem. The female Sago can grow up to 15 feet tall while the male grows to 8 feet tall. In the spring the male plant grows a huge phallic shaped cone that produces pollen while the female plants grow a truly ugly flower that produces seeds. The cone and the flower are normally gone by summer. Both sexes will grow nodules at their base which sprout fronds. These nodules are called pups and can be cut off the trunk with a well-placed chop from a shovel, then planted and will form roots creating a new sago.
In the spring of each year the fronds on the Sago die, and new fronds will sprout from the top. When newly sprouted, these fronds are soft and silky in texture, but eventually they harden, and the leaves become parallel rows of vicious little swords. The Sago Palm is sometimes called the Samurai Palm because each of those spikey leaves are as sharp as a Samurai’s katana.
Yoshi was trying to develop a strain of Sago whose fronds would remain soft to the touch all year long. He did come up with several varieties, unfortunately they remained identical in appearance, and he never found one that remained soft; however, he did develop a variety that had some interesting properties, and he dubbed those the Hentai Sago Palm.
With Yoshi’s help Dennis and Linda May’s island was soon transformed with pathways, gardens, and a fountain that fed a stream which trickled into the pond. The island is reached by a peninsula that ends ten feet short of the island. To reach the island Dennis built an arched bridge from the peninsula to the island painted a beautiful scarlet red and on the island side of the bridge Dennis built a torii, the traditional Japanese gateway which symbolically marks the transition from the mundane to the sacred. Dennis and Linda May didn’t consider their island garden sacred, but they did think it was pretty.
To mark the “completion” of the garden (even though no garden is ever actually complete) Yoshi presented Dennis and Linda May with a good sized example of his prettiest strain, the Hentai Sago Palm. “Enjoy my baby,” grinned Yoshi as he gave Dennis the palm, “And don’t let her prick you, if you know what I mean,” and he winked at Dennis. Dennis thought that was a bit odd, Sagos are spikey and getting stuck with their sword like leaves is a common occurrence. Also, the Sago secrets a toxic substance, while not fatal to a human, it does make the sting a little more painful. “Is this variety more poisonous than the others?” Dennis asked. Sago Palms can be fatal to dogs, and their labs were the loves of their lives.