We were regaled with the history of Project Artaud and stories of growing up with a dad who was in love with palms. Apparently, being a lover of rare species means classy garden parties with the elite, phone calls from Africa offering rare fifty pound seeds that look like 'a woman's pelvis,' international seed trading, jungle expeditions, tree climbing and intrigue!
I have not only a newfound appreciation for palms of all stripes, but this sense of Yes This Is What It's All About.
Palms, it turns out, grow really well in San Francisco because it's always cold at night, but never gets a chill - something palms love.
Probably the most awesome plant was this:
That thing is seriously at least three feet wide, and they can live for over a hundred years. Monks called wine made from this beast ethereal (you drain the trunk like sugar cane), but wine making was outlawed in Chile just in the nick of time to save them from extinction.
As monocots, palms don't produce secondary growth like most trees you see with annual rings of old xylem produced by the vascular cambium.
| Monocots | Dicots |
| (xylem & phloem in bundles throughout stem) | (xylem & phloem organized into rings) |
Palms do all their horizontal growing first - before growing vertically at all - since they can't put on girth later on. To give you an idea, this palm is three years old:
By comparison, fast growing dicot trees could be six feet tall at three years old. Just imagine how long it takes the palm to get to this size:
We got to take home those Nikaud palm seedlings, since Benjy's adult tree was so prolific with seeds - in those red pods - and he treated us to fresh coconuts and plates of Medjool and Zahidi dates. Such a magical day.
1 comment:
YES! I've always loved palms because they remind me of home! Palm Street, Huntington Beach is a fabulous place to see the tallest palms ever. Whenever I see a palm around here, I get a bit homesick, but in the good nostalgic kind of way.
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