Why the palm trees of Los Angeles are dying, and why Phoenix is different


When I first moved to Phoenix, and then Los Angeles, palm trees were palm trees to me. That is, all of them looked pretty much the same. But a few years ago I started learning about the differences, and to me it's fascinating, and it explains why the palm trees in Los Angeles are dying, but not in Phoenix.

No, it's not a conspiracy, man. And it has nothing to do with smog, or freeways. It's just that most of the palm trees in areas like Beverly Hills, which were planted in the 1920s or earlier, are simply reaching the end of their normal lifespan. Stay with me on this, I'm gonna talk some Latin.

The most common palm tree with the tall, skinny trunk is called a Washingtonia robusta. They grow well, and fast, in warm climates like Phoenix and Los Angeles. To say that they grow like weeds is not an exaggeration, they often grow out of cracks in the sidewalks. Birds plant them there, you know.

Most of the Washingtonia robustas planted in Phoenix aren't nearly as old as those in Los Angeles, except for places like the ASU campus, where several of the trees along Palm Walk were recently replaced after the end of their lifespan.

Black Sphinx Date Palms, 44th Street and Camelback, Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix dactylifera

But take a second look at palm trees. There are two main categories, fan palms and date palms. I like to describe fan palms as looking kinda like toilet bowl brushes (sorry about that!) and date palms more like feather dusters. Compare the two photos in this post. See what I mean?

Now take a look at most of the new construction around Phoenix. When you see palm trees, you see mostly date palms. Actually, nowadays they're bred to not produce dates, which are messy (kind of like how they do seedless watermelons).

Date palms are the palm trees of a desert oasis. And while apparently the city of Los Angeles has no plans to replace its dying palm trees, Phoenix has no worries. Phoenix will continue to be a desert oasis. And that means palm trees.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more