The Desert's Own Tree

Let me tell you a little more about these magnificent trees themselves, because the California fan palm is a marvel worth knowing. Botanists call it Washingtonia filifera, and as I said, it's the only palm native to this whole western side of the country — a true desert native, evolved to live exactly here, in these fault-fed desert oases and nowhere else in the wild. These are big trees: a mature fan palm stands fifty, sixty, even eighty feet tall, with a trunk like a great gray column and a crown of huge, fan-shaped fronds — that's where the name comes from, each leaf spread out like an open hand or a folding fan, some of them five or six feet across.

And they are old. A fan palm can live around two hundred years — so some of these giants around you were already tall when this was still only Cahuilla land, before there was a Palm Springs, before California was a state. They grow slowly, and they're patient. They don't reproduce from fire, by the way — that's a common myth; what really brings a new crop of baby palms is a good wet winter, when the seeds that the birds and coyotes have scattered find enough moisture to sprout in the damp creek soil. So the life of the grove runs on water and time: an old palm drops its fruit, a coyote carries a seed downstream, a wet winter comes, and a new palm begins a two-hundred-year life in the shade of its elders. Look up at these old ones and give them their due — they are the desert's own tree, found wild almost nowhere else on Earth, and they have been standing here, quietly, for a very long time. Walk on beneath them.