winters makes it highly valued by palm enthusiasts, landscape designers and gardeners. It is grown successfully in cool climates such as the UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, western Poland as well as southern and western Germany. In the UK it has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. In North America, mature specimens can be found growing in the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest, the upper southern states, and Mid-Atlantic states. Commonly lower tolerance limits of are cited for mature plants. Young plants are less hardy, and can be damaged by only . The cultivar group Trachycarpus fortunei 'Wagnerianus' is a small-leafed semi-dwarf variant of the species selected in cultivation in China and Japan. It differs in rarely growing to more than tall, with leaflets less than long; the short stature and small leaves give it greater tolerance of wind exposure. It has often been treated as a separate species T. wagnerianus in popular works, but is now included within T. fortunei. Sokolov et al., 2016 found one healthy specimen in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Individuals of the T. f. '' subspecies have lived outside in the Connecticut town of Woodbury continuously since the early 2000s with protection, where some winters have reached . Nomenclature The species was brought from Japan (Dejima) to Europe by the German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold in 1830. The common name refers to Chusan Island (now Zhoushan Island), where Robert Fortune first saw cultivated specimens. In 1849, Fortune smuggled plants from China to the Kew Horticultural Gardens and the Royal garden of Prince Albert of the United Kingdom. It was later named Trachycarpus fortunei, after him. It was first described by Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius in 1850 in his Historia Naturalis Palmarum but under the illegitimate name of Chamaerops excelsa. The names Chamaerops excelsus and Trachycarpus excelsus have occasionally been misapplied to Trachycarpus fortunei; these are correctly synonyms of Rhapis excelsa, with the confusion arising due to a misunderstanding of Japanese vernacular names. See also Hardy palms Gallery References Further reading Beccari, Odoardo: 1905 "Le Palme del Genere Trachycarpus", Webbia; I Beccari, Odoardo: 1920 "Recens Palme Vecchio Mondo", Webbia; V Beccari, Odoardo: 1931 "Asiatic Palms, Corypheae", Annals of the Royal Bot. Gard. Calcutta; 13 Martius, Carl Friedrich Philipp von: 1850 Historia Naturalis Palmarum, Band 3 Stührk, Chris: 2006 "Molekularsystematische Studien in der Subtribus Thrinacinae, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gattung Trachycarpus H. Wendl".