A slice of paradise in Vancouver
Despite their lack of coconuts, our palm trees should remind us just how lucky we are
In February 2015, I was in Ontario visiting a friend who lived in Barrie.
If a visit to Barrie is the last item on your bucket list, trust me, you can go ahead and die now.
Anyway, the point of this column is not to slag Barrie, which I am sure is abundant in the most lovely citizens. The point of this column is to talk about palm trees.
You see, I left Barrie around midnight for Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, where I was booked on an early morning flight home. The drive from Barrie to Toronto is 80 kilometres of good road heading south. There was, however, a problem. I was driving in a blizzard and could rarely get the car to safely move beyond a speed commonly assigned to a school zone.
The drive from Barrie to Toronto took almost as long as the flight from Toronto to Vancouver.
When I arrived in Vancouver, it was sunny and warm. I got in my car and headed downtown, where I hit a Sunday morning traffic jam around Smithe and Beatty. I rolled down the window to ask the flag person what the holdup was all about and she told me someone was hoisting a palm tree onto the roof of a highrise.
I found this odd for a number of reasons.
As I sat in my car motionless and with the windows down, I recalled how 12 hours ago it was like I was driving the steppes of Siberia. Now, in the same country, I’m stuck in traffic waiting for someone to plant a palm tree on the roof of an apartment building.
The other thing I found odd was the notion of the palm tree itself.
Until that moment, I really had no idea we could grow palm trees here. Now that I know we can grow them, it seems I see them everywhere, including on a private property just outside city hall.
I phoned David Tracey, author of the Vancouver Tree Book, to ask about the palms in our city. Tracey is an arborist. He is also the executive director of Tree City, a small non-profit that was started in 2005 to help people and trees grow together.
(Arborists, incidentally, are destined to become the new firefighters — respected by all, wholly believable, trustworthy and fully in service of the greater community good. But I digress. That’s another column.)
“The palms that are in Vancouver are windmill palms (Trachycarpus fortunei),” he told me.
“Most palms would not survive here. They would not appreciate our cold and wet climate. These palms are native to China, Burma, North India. They can grown in the cold and once they get established, they can withstand some pretty chilly weather.”
That said, not all the palms planted in the Lower Mainland have survived.
“If you have a rainfall and the water gets in the crown (the living part on top) and that water freezes, that’s how you can kill them. But that obviously doesn’t happen much. They’re all over town now.”
As for the fruit of these magnificent plants, Tracey has never seen any. But he tells me they bear drupes, which are yellow or blue-black kidney-shaped stone fruits that ripen right around now.
“I don’t know if they are edible,” he said. “I haven’t heard of anyone eating a drupe from one of our palms, but I have to admit, I haven’t tried.”
It seems coconut palms would be so much more utilitarian. Tracey laughs and suggests, with global warming, planting them to corner the coconut trade in our country might not be a bad idea.
I asked Tracey if he can tell me something remarkable about the palm trees of Vancouver.
“Just the fact they are here,” he said. “When you see them, you do this double take. It’s like, for a moment, you are in Mexico or California. They always strike me as jarring in the landscape, but I really like them. They make me stop and think, ‘How the heck did that get here? Whose idea was it to plant these?’”
Already in many parts of Canada, there is snow on the ground. Not here, of course. We’re so fortunate. I asked Tracey for some final thoughts on the miracle of palm trees in the Great White North. His response was a little mischievous.
“Put some sunglasses on, head to English Bay, take a photo of yourself underneath the palm and mail it to a friend in Toronto.”
Or, say, Barrie.