Gardens by the Bay, Flower Dome

Flower Dome in Gardens by the Bay opened in November 2011 to the public. South American, South African, Australian plants. Mediterranean cool and relatively lower in humidity. Chilean Wine Palms or Jubaea chilensis are from the South American nation of Chile. Overpruning of fronds and/or nutrient decifiency affects the trunk's taper; causing it to develop a bottleneck trunk, which is also known as "penciling". The narrower trunk could lead to fracturing. Makes fronds smaller and skinnier. Been 6, 7 years since the palms arrived in Singapore and they still have not overcame the penciling issue.

From the Palm Tree Doctor blog:
In addition to preventing malnutrition, proper maintenance fertilization provides the following benefits:

• More cost effective to keep palms healthy than replace
• Greatly increased size and fullness of the canopy
• Allows each frond to stay greener longer
• Allows self-cleaning palms to drop their dead fronds more rapidly
• Improves ability to survive hurricane force winds
• Accelerates recovery after storm damage
• Increases cold hardiness

 Penciling palms in differing severity. One in the background was in its death throes.

In order to harvest the sap to make wine, the whole palm have cut down, hence the name. Extremely slow-growing, making large specimens like these a rarity.

 A slightly narrow trunk would represent leaner days, quite usual for single trunk palms of larger girth - whether in the wild, nursery-grown or planted in the landscape.

I think this was the one in the middle of the Chilean wine palms' group photo. Has smaller and narrower fronds.