april on the desert - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

The Palm
... Prince of
Desert Plants
By EDMUND C. JAEGER, D.Sc.
Curator of Plants
Riverside Municipal Museum
ONE WINTER afternoon I made camp in a
lonely desert canyon in which there grew a wild
grove of palms—five dozen sturdy veterans with
giant tan-brown skirts of turned-down leaves hanging to
the ground. The grove was beautiful and primitive. Fire
vandals and lightning oil summer storms had never struck
these crowns of leaves.
Between the giant palm pillars were open spaces deeply
covered with fallen leaves and flower stems which crackled
underfoot. In one of these openings I placed my provision
bag and canteen, and spread my blankets. A tiny current
of alkaline water slowly trickled along the rocky stream
bed below me. Besides a few bluebirds and an occasional
slight movement of palm leaves, the water made the only
sounds I heard.
I was tired because of the day's long walk, and after
a bite of apple and a bit of cheese, I turned in for the night.
"Was ever a place more appealing, more filled with
peace and calm?" I asked myself.
About two that morning I was rudely awakened from
a sound sleep by a great rustling and clattering of palm
leaves, a noise that steadily grew in intensity until it was
a harsh roar punctuated by the eerie sound of swishing,
rattling dry leaves as the violent north wind raced through
the canyon.
Sleep was impossible, there was never a time of quiet
until daybreak. This was my only experience in such a
place when the wind gods were so earnestly at work. To
this day I never see a group of desert palms that I do not
relive in memory those sublime moments. How much
more impressive are these trees when growing in natural
thick-set groups than singly or set in rows along city streets.
The palms whose entrancing wind music I so much
enjoyed are known as California fan palm (Washingtonia
filifera), a name established in 1879 by Hermann Wendland,
the great German horticulturalist. Except for the
cocoanut and date, palms of the genus Washingtonia are
among the most widely planted of the many hundreds of
kinds known. They are natives of California, far western
Arizona and northwest Mexico. It is interesting to note
that before the noble fan palm was introduced into cultiva-
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tion in Mexico and the United States, it already had become
well established in European gardens. According to Samuel
B. Parish, early botanist of San Bernardino, the first seeds
probably were collected near Palm Springs and sent to
Europe by George W. Dunn.
In 1750—250 years after the discovery of the New
World—the famous Swedish botanist, Linnaeus, published
his notable Species Plantarum (a listing of all known plants)
which contained but eight palms. Today 1200 species are
on our botanical lists.
First white men to see the native western fan palms
undoubtedly were the 16th century Spanish explorers. As
far as I have been able to learn, few of them made mention
of palms in their journals, perhaps because their principal
interest was not in natural history, but in riches, adventure,
military conquest and the spread of their religious faith.
The discovery of the fan palm was made by Lieutenant
William H. Emory's party of the United States-Mexican
Boundary Survey in 1846 on the final days of their long
and arduous journey from the Missouri River to San Diego.
They were moving up the sandy wash of Carrizo Creek
when they saw the leafy crowns and pillars of palms projected
against the cliffs of the gorge.
In the years since, this palm has been found in numerous
canyons and gulches of the Colorado Desert mountains
and foothills from Snow Creek in the San Jacinto Mountains
to the Sierra Juarez and San Pedro Martir of
northern Baja California. Many of these stands in the Baja
ON DESERT TRAILS WITH A NATURALIST
APRIL, 1959