LANDSCAPING WITH PALMS, THE STATE OF THE ART

Unbridled population growth assures us that the earth will become an increasingly man-made place. There is a continuing and growing need to recreate nature, either to ameliorate our exploitations of nature, to enhance, soften or hide what we build, or to provide escape into a great variety of gardens of our own making. Conscious Landscape architecture is a multi-faceted art, and it has a long and fulsome history of evolution.

Landscaping with palms is an art within landscape architecture. It began when the first palms were either purposely planted or not cut down because they were wanted for reasons beyond that the fruits were edible or that the fronds would thatch a roof. The history of landscape architecture with palms may be long, but it is not fulsome, and, responding to a huge amount of poor usage of palms, we can hope we are only at the beginning of its development. Palms are extraordinarily sophisticated and individual sculptures, celebrations of space, and if they are not carefully selected and placed, they can make a confused mess of paradise.

What is so different about designing with palms that qualifies it as a separate 'art', you may wonder? I am not talking about the art of growing or of transporting or of planting, although a landscaper of palms should know these things, but of selecting palms to relate to the landscape, to architecture, to open space, of mixing and matching and grouping, of knowing growth habits, of showing their best features, and yes, of making them dramatic. If through history landscaping with palms has meant placing those which are locally available along streets or in city squares, today it is a far more complex challenge which can only be met by designers who have innate sensitivity, art training, or both, and who know much about an expanding number of palm species.

Landscaping with palms would be a less stressful pursuit if more general information about palms were to reach a broader public. Mass media, especially television, seems mesmerized by elephants or lemurs or praying manti or nudibrancts, creatures which move conspicuously; there is almost no focus upon the more quietly dynamic world of plants on which we and ultimately all creatures depend for our lives. If even the peoples who live in palm growing areas have surprisingly little information about them, the human being is pre-disposed to liking palms. The 'tree of life' in the Bible was a date palm, a symbol of survival in the desert. Perspiring faces are fanned by palm fans. In cold places palms symbolize comfort and relaxation and the luxury of achieving those states. Conversion of the casual friends of palms into palm lovers occurs most often when people look carefully and closely, when they attempt to analyze palm structure,

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