Tree of the week: Windmill palm

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Good morning, Curlin, and welcome to sunny Santa Anita. It is warm and dry in my corner of town, a perfect Saturday for the pumpkin patch. These are the small pleasures even a worldwide recession can’t take away: watching a big horse race on TV, taking the kids to a neighborhood Halloween display. And, of course, reading Pieter Severynen’s Tree of the Week with your Saturday morning coffee.

The Windmill Palm – Trachycarpus fortunei

If ‘cold hardy’ is not the first characteristic one associates with the Windmill Palm in Southern California, it is because it just doesn’t get cold enough here. But see this tree standing snow-covered in Scotland or Alaska’s panhandle, or at 7,000 feet elevation and 10 degrees F in the central and southern mountains of its native China, and you realize this is no ordinary palm. It actually dislikes tropical heat and humidity.

The windmill palm grows at a moderate rate to up to 30 feet tall by 10 feet wide. The slender trunk is covered with a dense layer of black, burlap-like, fibrous leaf bases; with age this cover gradually drops off the lower trunk, thus making the ringed stem look thicker at the top than at the bottom. The tree looks best when massed, in part shade and with regular water in fertile soil, but it will take full sun, considerable drought and most soils. The 3 feet long petiole (leaf stalk) is toothed; the circular, fan shaped leaf consists of dozens of 3 feet long dark green leaflets, that are silvery below. Male and female flowers on bright yellow flower stalks occur in spring on separate trees. Round, half-inch blue fruit follows fertilized female flowers.

This easy-to-grow but tough and long-lived tree has been cultivated for thousands of years in China and Japan. Its coarse but strong sheath fiber was used for making ropes and coarse cloth. The German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold brought it to Europe in 1830. It was spread worldwide from Kew Gardens in England. The genus name means ‘rough fruit,’ while the species was named after Robert Fortune, who saw the tree cultivated on the Chinese island of Zhoushan (another name for the tree is Chusan palm).

Thanks, Pieter.

Photo Credit: palms4u.com