Trees I Love To Hate

It's all about indigenous and non-indigenous. It's like opening a zoo in Minnesota that features animals from Africa and India. It's like snow boarding in Los Angeles or crocodile hunting in Anchorage.

Enter the lowly palm tree, of which there are over two thousand kinds, but only two basic types are commonly known, the date palm and the coconut palm. Two-thirds of these specimens grow in the tropics, even though some have been planted in northern England. This is one hardy plant.

However, and that's a capitalized 'however,' planting a date palm that grows 100' high anywhere north of San Luis Obispo, California, borders on insanity. They look completely out of place in colder climates.

Granted, we plant non-indigenous trees here and there that can still fit the landscape and are marked with a sense of compositional attraction, like redwoods in the Central Valley or mimosa in the Santa Clara Valley. But to stick a giant, tousle-topped toothpick of a palm tree in the cool climes of northern California is just plain unnatural (sic).

Thanks to my friend, Don Dahl, for this photo he couldn't resist taking, since his dislike for palm trees only equals mine. Like he says, "There's nothing wrong with a palm tree that a chainsaw won't fix." Photo taken on an unkown street in the tropical paradise of San Mateo, California.