Golden Cane Palm

Dypsis lutescens, the golden-stemmed clumping palm that screens a fence line faster than almost anything green.

Dypsis lutescens · Also known as Areca Palm, Butterfly Palm

The golden cane palm is Brisbane's default answer to an ugly fence or a too-close neighbour, and for good reason, because few plants throw up a tall, soft, tropical screen as quickly or as reliably. It grows as a dense clump of yellow-green canes topped with arching fronds, and you'll hear it called golden cane, areca palm and butterfly palm, all the same plant doing the same generous screening job.

We use it constantly for that one talent, turning a bare paling fence into a wall of green in a couple of seasons and softening the boundary between a deck and whatever sits behind it. It is genuinely easy to grow in our climate, though it is not entirely a plant-and-forget proposition, and knowing where it drinks and where it drops litter is the difference between a screen you love and one you resent.

In a Brisbane garden

This is a plant our climate loves, and through the warm, wet months a well-fed golden cane will surge upward and fill out into exactly the lush green screen people buy it for. Two honest caveats shape how we use it: first, it drinks, and a golden cane kept short of water through a dry Brisbane winter goes pale, thin and yellow rather than deep green, so it belongs in a bed you're willing to water rather than a genuinely low-water garden; second, it is a litter dropper, shedding old fronds and, with age, quantities of small seeds that will sprout, which makes it a poor choice hanging directly over a pool where you'll be scooping after it constantly.

It also has a way of growing broader and taller than the tidy nursery pot suggests, so we give a clump real room and thin the older canes out over the years to keep it seeing light through the middle rather than becoming a bare-legged thicket. Placed with those habits in mind, on a fence line, along a side boundary, or as a soft green backdrop to a deck, it is one of the most useful screening plants we have in Brisbane, which is exactly why it turns up in so many gardens here.

How we design with it

Screening is the golden cane's whole reason for being in the plan, and it is one of the first plants we reach for in our guide to screening plants for Brisbane when a client wants height and privacy on a boundary in a hurry. In a tropical garden design it doubles as the leafy backdrop that everything else is arranged against, giving even a modest planting a sense of enclosure and lushness.

In a small garden we place it deliberately rather than in a long row, using a single clump to block one specific eyesore or borrow privacy from exactly the angle it's needed, because a golden cane spreads wider than people expect. We keep it back from pool coping to save you the daily litter clean-up, plant it where you'll water it, and thin the canes as it matures so it stays a graceful screen rather than a solid green wall.

Where we write about golden cane palm

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