The historic palm trees of Sahuaro Ranch, Glendale, Arizona


The Sahuaro Ranch (yes, it's been misspelled that way for over 100 years), which is between 59th Avenue and 63rd Avenue and Peoria and Olive (south of the Glendale Main Library and north of Glendale Community College) in Glendale, Arizona has a lot of amazing historic palm trees.

If you live in Phoenix, you see palm trees all of the time, and it you may be wondering what I'm talking about. Come to the ranch with me, and let's look up.

Most of the palm trees around Phoenix, which are commonly called Mexican Fan palms (Washingtonia robusta), come from Sonora and Baja California. They grow very quickly, and are the ones that you see along Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. And because they grow very quickly, they became much more popular after the 1920s. The ones in the photo at the top of this post aren't fan palms, they're date palms. And the difference is in the structure of the leaves.

A date palm has leaves that I like to describe as looking like a feather duster. A fan palm, as the name implies, has leaves that look more like a fan. Since I prefer the look of a date palm to a fan palm, I have a tendency to describe fan palms as looking kind of like toilet bowl brushes. Once you see it, you'll know what I mean.

Date palms are from the Middle East - they're the ones that grow in the desert in areas that can get precious little water - you know, in an oasis, surrounded by sand. And once you can see the difference between a fan palm and date palm, then you'll be impressed at how amazingly tall the date palms at Sahuaro Ranch are. I really don't know how old they are, but since they grow slower than common fan palms, date palms that are that tall are pretty darned old.

By the way, the date palms at Sahuaro Ranch were actually planted to produce dates, not to just look nice. There were several places around the valley where date palms were planted for crops, the most notable one being the Black Sphinx Palms at 44th Street and Camelback. The date palms that you see being planted nowadays are dateless (like seedless watermelons) because the fruit is messy when it falls. This is the reason that date palms weren't planted much in the 20th Century, and why they're making a comeback.

This cluster of palms is on the east side of the historic houses. If you enter from 59th Avenue there's a parking lot area that very few people use. The tree that I'm leaning on is a date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) and since I'm about six feet tall, the tree is, uh (I'm not very good at math), really, really tall.

Thank you for visiting the ranch with me!
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider supporting history adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

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