TREE TALK | A palm for all our seasons

It’s a chilly, gray November day, and you’re longing to be in Palm Springs as you take your morning walk through Madison Park. The wind kicks up a bit, and you hear a strangely comforting rattle of foliage overhead. You look up, and there, waving above you, are the unmistakable fronds of a fan palm, their dark leaves stretching out like attenuated green hands beckoning you to a warmer, sunnier place. 

Are you hallucinating? No, you’ve just come upon a windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei), the one reliably hardy palm in our coastal Northwest climate. 

Planted in a relatively sunny spot in your garden or even on your parking strip, this palm will reach a height of 30 to 40 feet in half as many years. Atop reddish-brown trunks that are covered in hairy fibers, clusters of glossy fronds sprout out in dense bouquets. 

The leaves are fan-shaped or palmate (resembling a hand with the fingers spread) and can measure 3 feet or more across. This tree will fit neatly into the corner of a garden, making a startlingly tropical-looking focal point. 

Best of all, you can plant a grove of three to five in a relative tight space. The trick here is to put the first palm in the ground, and when it gets to 5 feet, plant the second from a 1-gallon can close to and on one side of the trunk. Plant a third small one on the other side of the trunk a year later. Thus, as the first palm grows, exposing what can sometimes look like a spindly trunk, new fronds are on their way up to partially cover it. 

And as the lower fronds get leggy or droopy, you clip them off. 

Brought indoors, these fronds can make for some dramatic dried arrangements. And when the holidays arrive, a can of gold or silver spray paint can tern them into wonderful indoor decorations, with an exotic twist. Add some red balls or festoons of tinsel in an artful arrangement. 

Once established, these palms are very undemanding. Irrigate them the first couple of summers if the season is exceptionally dry. They’ll need to be in a spot with good drainage. They are unfussy about soil and generally impervious to diseases and pests. Best of all, as our summers get hotter and drier, they are very drought-tolerant. 

In the early summer, they’ll produce great, drooping sprays of sulfur-yellow flower clusters. Each little bloom can turn into a small coconut that might very well drop to the ground and sprout a new plant. 

Use windmill palms with other plants that have a jungle-y look to them. Big-leaved rhododendrons, hardy ginger, tall-growing iris and large ferns all make good companion plants. 

But because these trees are so stirringly out of character for the Northwest, they need to be featured and set somewhat apart from the more traditional plants that fill our gardens. 

Native to China and brought to the Northwest by early plant collectors, they’ve been used here since the late 19th century and survived our coldest winters, a testament to their hardiness. Victorian gardeners adored them. 

So, no time for a run to Southern California this winter? Easy to find, you’ll sometimes see these palms for sale outside Bert’s Red Apple in Madison Park or City People’s Garden Store in Madison Valley. 

Get started on your own little patch of Palms-of-the-Cascades — just looking at one out your window will make you feel warmer.

STEVE LORTON, a Madison Park resident, is former Northwest Bureau chief for Sunset Magazine. To comment on this column, write to MPTimes@nwlink.com.