Editing Chamaedorea overview

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===Genus Overview===
Few other groups of palms can rival Chamaedorea for
variety in foliage, size, and general habit. Highly
ornamental with their neat, green, bamboo-like stems,
they are among the most popular of palms and are
used extensively for moist, shady areas in tropical and
subtropical gardens where they fulfil a wide array of
landscape uses. Relatively tough and durable and well
suited to low light, they also make excellent house plants.
Several, especially the parlour palm and the
bamboo palm, are grown in vast quantities in North
America, Europe, Australia, and the Orient for this use.
In fact, the parlour palm, ''Chamaedorea elegans'', is the
most widely grown indoor palm.
''Chamaedoreas'' have several attributes that give them
their popularity. Their tremendous diversity is
exemplified in the vast array of species with large or small
and pinnate or bifid leaves. Such great diversity is also
reflected in stems that may be solitary or clustered,
slender or somewhat stout, and relatively long or short,
or sometimes even lacking. Plants can be dwarf, and
flowering and fruiting when no more than 30 cm tall, or
moderately large, with stems to 15 meters long. In fact,
just about every conceivable combination of leaf and stem
is represented somewhere in the genus.
Their great ornamental value is due to the diversity
mentioned above and several other factors. Being
relatively small palms, they are much more manageable
and better suited to average residential landscapes.
With few exceptions, Chamaedoreas are easy to
grow and are not particularly susceptible to
pests and diseases. They are amazingly cold-hardy; in
fact, most species will tolerate 0C(32F) without
sustaining damage and a few species will not show
damage as low as 5C(23F). ''Chamaedorea'' includes about
100 species of dioecious (i.e. separate male and female plants-Ed.),
understory palms restricted to neotropical rainforests and
cloud forests on the Atlantic and Pacific slopes from
western and eastern Mexico through Central America to
northwestern Ecuador, and the Amazonian portions of
Colombia, western Brazil, eastern Ecuador, eastern
Peru, and northern Bolivia.
The above description of Chamaedorea is an extract
from the definitive text on the genus;
''Chamaedorea Palms: The Species and Their Cultivation''
by Donald R. Hodel, 1992 and available through the
PACSOA Bookstore.


===External Links:===
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[[Category:Chamaedorea|overview]]
[[Category:Palm|Chamaedorea_overview]]