There has been a long debate and confusion about Nova , a mysterious variety yet to be described.

Since 2007, we have been traveling in the stone gate area and collecting seeds seeds from different sources in this topographically and climatically complicated area for the purpose of figuring out what Nova is. Based on four years of exploration in the habitat , actual experience with thousands of seedlings grown in the field and pot,together with exchanges with other growers, we come to conclude that first of all there are 2 forms of Nova, the narrow form and the wide form and most importantly Nova the narrow form is existing as an undescribed new variety in the wild apart from in cultivation.

A long story about the discovery of Nova in the wild full of ups and downs.

In 2007, apart from collecting Trachycarpus princeps from stone gate and first Nova seeds in the village, we obtained a handful of unknown seeds from palms of a local farmer living at a soil mountain who said his father grew from T.princeps seeds which we doubted 1 year later and the palms also displayed apparently white powder to the underside of leaves. Therefore, we traveled to the stone gate area a second time again in 2008 to check the mother palms and found that the mother palms did have apparetnly white backs similar to those of T.princeps and plus the leaves are somewhat evenly cut to halfway which confused many people. These palms are different from other Nova with which we previously saw in the village with no or little white powder like T.fortunei and moreover, 1 day later we found dozens of more similar types in the wild of the mountain ,nearby his house. Without any reliable information available for reference at that time, so we tentatively named them as T.princeps-cultivated due to the white backs ( NOT the second form of T.pricepes-cultivated with different seedling found in late 2009 in a limestone rocky mountain, dozens of kilometers away ) as opposed to the nova we previously found in the village at the bottom of the mountain. After 4 years of cultivation and observation, we come to find that the seedlings from the farmer's seeds in the mountain are quite like the other Nova we collected in the village with both putting out narrowly and evenly split leaves like T.princeps ,except that the first source from the mountain are inclined to producing somewhat more bluish colorations to the undersides whereas the Nova we found in the village are not , like T.fortunei in this respect.

So it can be initially concluded that Nova,namely the narrow form is a new undescribed variety distributed in the wild, producing consistently even and narrow leaflets with relative apparent white powder to the undersides of leaves.

The following are the general features for Nova which people could use to distinguish from other varieties,

1)evenly and narrowly split leaflets like T.princeps, which T.fortunei doesn't share

2)slender trunk and elongated petioles like T.martianus

3) normally bending tips

4) deeply but relatively evenly cut leaves, UNLIKE T.fortunei

5) V-shaped fronds in seedlings

6) white powder to the undersides of leaves when getting older, not as apparetn as T.princeps, but more obvious than T.fortunei

7) very fast growth rate which NO officially recognized trachycarpus can match, it is unanimously proved also by some growers in the world.

It is most likely that some growers obtained the seeds from different sources which could be mixed by the unsuspecting collectors,just like the supply of scare or none T.princeps seeds mixed with other seeds for export by some other suppliers till today .Therefore, they get mixed seedlings and no consistence of evenly and narrowly split leaves is observed whiles other growers do detect such special feature .That inconsistency as a result makes people skeptical of Nova existing as an independent variety,though clearly quite different from T.fortunei.

The following are photos of T.nova in the wild as well as its seed and leaf comparison with other trachycarpus.

Here is a link that might be useful: more photos of T.nova in the wild and cultivation