The most planted palm in the Shire
Cocos palm — the queen palm, Syagrus romanzoffiana — went into thousands of Sutherland Shire front gardens through the seventies and eighties. It grows fast, it looks tropical, and it was cheap.
It is now widely treated as an environmental weed across Sydney, because it seeds prolifically and birds spread it into bushland. Councils generally take a much less protective view of it than of native canopy trees.
The rat problem is real
A cocos palm fruits heavily and drops sticky orange seed for much of the year. That fruit is food. The skirt of dead fronds hanging under the crown is shelter. Put the two together next to a roofline and you have created permanent rat habitat with a ladder attached.
Flying foxes feed on the fruit too, and the seed itself is reported to cause problems for some animals that eat it. Either way, the mess lands on your driveway and your car.
Falling fronds
A dead cocos frond is heavy, it has a hard base, and it lets go without warning. Over a path, a car space or a play area, that is a genuine hazard rather than a nuisance. Canary Island date palms are worse again, because every frond carries spines that cause nasty puncture wounds and infections.
Annual maintenance versus removal
Maintenance means removing dead fronds and cutting off the seed heads before they ripen, usually once a year. It solves the falling frond hazard and most of the rat attraction, and it keeps a palm you might actually like.
Removal ends it. Given cocos palms are commonly exempt species and the maintenance is an annual cost forever, plenty of owners decide the palm is not worth keeping. The palm removal page explains how they come down and why the disposal cost looks high relative to the height — palm trunk is full of water and very heavy.
Confirm the species and the current exemption position with Sutherland Shire Council before cutting. Not every palm is a cocos: Bangalow and cabbage tree palms are natives, are common in the moister gullies at Engadine and Menai, and are more likely to be protected.
Never cut into the crown
A palm has one growing point. Cut into it and the palm dies — there is no regrowth from lower down the way there is on a tree. Anyone offering to "reduce the height" of a palm is describing removal with extra steps.
The stump afterwards
Palm stumps are fibrous and wet rather than woody. They clog a grinder and they rot slowly. Excavation is often the better option, especially if you want to replant in the same hole — see the comparison of stump options.
For a quote on one palm or a row of them, call (02) 9538 7974.