“Omigod! An alien birthing!”, was what I thought upon seeing this when I stepped outside into the front garden one day. Beautiful, isn’t it? I’m still geting used to the yearly cycle of activity of some of the larger trees out there, so this was a pleasant surprise.
Having convinced myself that it was not going to grab me in its many-fingered purple paw and do something horrible to me, I studied it for a long while, and took a few photographs. Within a day or two, it revealed its full, elegant shape. Since then, I’ve had several appear.
I love the colours.
I don’t know the name of this palm, unfortunately. Do you? It is very common around Southern California. 
There are so many varieties here (all but one brought here in the last century or so, apparently), and gardeners love them: I’ve three two (correction because the other is a variety of cycad…not a palm at all) different types in a quite small space. You can see typical streets in the city of LA with several varieties along the sides for many blocks, and several more types in the gardens of the houses on that street. My Sunset Western Gardens book gave me several names, but no pictures, and there just way too many to make a guess. Google turned up this wonderful online encylcopedia of palms, which is not organized in a way that allows for a timely identification, but does seem to have a wealth of valuable information in it. Look at the photo gallery to get an idea of just how many types there are worldwide.
-cvj
October 23rd, 2005 at 9:06 pm
[...] So I sat there for a while and reflected about how to answer the DOE’s question “what have you done for me lately?”. Of course, I left the card for my camera in my computer at home, and so could not take the pictures of the remarkable variety of palms I wanted to show you (see earlier post), but I did have my mediocre phone camera, and so you can see a bit of my view. [...]
October 24th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
Wow. I don’t know enough about palms to come close to answering your question, but those are great photographs!
February 12th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
It’s called a Nikau Palm and they grow all round New Zealand, thats where I am right now on a sunny Monday morning
) Hope this helps. All the best.
Carrie
February 12th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Thanks so much, Carrie!
-cvj
March 11th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
[...] I know that this is not a big deal to a lot of you, but just now, here in normally sunny Los Angeles, we had a blizzard of hail, looking a bit like a snowstorm for a little while. Excellent! There was accumulation on the ground for a while, and I went outside to took a snap of the rather pretty accumulation at the roots of one my cycads: [...]