A friend of mine just came back from a vacation in Ireland.
He mentioned that while they were there they saw a lot of palm trees.
I can well believe that the weather in Ireland is mild enough to allow palm trees to grow there. However my friend mentioned he was told by a guide during a botanically/geologically oriented tour of the area known as The Burren that the palm trees were in fact native to Ireland, and were a relic of the time when Ireland was attached to Africa.
My Google-fu does not seem to be working well and I am having trouble finding anything on line that confirms this. Can anyone solve for me the mystery of the Irish Palm trees? Are they native? What is the species name?
Seeds would be coconuts, right? A swallow could grasp it by its husk!
I haven’t heard of palms in Ireland before now. There are a lot of things I haven’t heard of, so that doesn’t mean the guide was making it up. (The Irish would never make up stories! ) I wonder which is more likely: Palms survived over millions of years while the land mass moved north, and they’re not widely known as a marvel, or a sailor brought back seedlings from a voyage to the South Seas and planted them (and they’re not widely known as a marvel)?
There is nothing unusual in seeing palm-trees growing in many parts of the UK and Ireland. I doubt the story of them being from coconuts washed up on shore or dating when Ireland was attached to Africa (a bit of leg pulling there!) but there is a whole range of hardy temperate palm trees available to grow. As can be seen here :- The Palm Centre
You mean tourist guides actually deliver disinformation to their customers? Shocking!
(This is a phenomenon I am quite familiar with. There are bus-trolley tours of Boston that are very popular with the tourists. The drivers are notorious for delivering entertaining spiels that are remarkably short on actual facts.)
That was the reason for the OP really. I would be very surprised to learn the palms were truly native and not escapees from cultivation.
My friend said they saw some that had clearly been planted in gardens and such but others that appeared to be “wild”.
I suppose the reason that they looked wild is that, according to the Palm Centre’s web site, some of these trees have been grown in the British Isles for 150 years. I suppose in that time once cultivated gardens and other open spaces have been left to fend for themselves and the palm trees have just continued to grow there.
In south westerly facing coastal areas of England, Ireland and Scotland (even as far north as the Hebrides and Rosshire, palms will grow. In the north, only two palms are really hardy, but in the south west of England there are half a dozen that will survive. I live in South West Scotland and have half a dozen variities that flourish- the Gulf stream is kind to us!
When we were considering moving to Scotland, we wanted milder weather and there fore one of the ways that we checked was the existence of thriving palms in gardens.
In Cornwall, from where I have just moved, there was a local park with fifty foot palms.
Anywhere on this map which is yellow red or purple will be kind to palms. Most areas in dark green will support some palms.
According to this map there are no native palms in Europe north of Italy. (The triangles represent fossil distribution.) Therefore the palms in Ireland and the UK would necessarily have been planted.
My sister and my girlfriend have them in their gardens here in Belfast. In fact, my girlfriend’s house is in a housing estate so her tree couldn’t have been here at most more than 30 years.
We have Botanic Gardens here in Belfast, perhaps someone took the urge to plant them round the city? Link to the Palm House in the gardens.
There are palm species that are hardy enough to survive as far north as the British Isles - especially if they are planted in coastal areas, which do not typically get quite as cold in the winter (although they may feel colder)., but they are natives of China, not Africa).
On top of that, most of the ‘palms’ you’ll see planted in such regions are not even palms at all - they just look like them. Genuine hardy palms are really expensive to buy; far more widelay planted would be Cordyline Australis (known as the Cabbage Palm or Torbay Palm). More info here: http://www.letsgogardening.co.uk/Information/EG/plants/cordyline.htm
I can only hope that someone along the line was joking; the idea that palms survive in Ireland as a legacy from a land link with Africa is just plain ridiculous.
They are palms, yes, BUT they are certainly not coconut palms. Its way too cold for them that far north. Coconut palms can`t even be grown in southern California. Yes, I know there is one in Newport Beach, CA and there might be some others, but for the most part its too cold and too wet in the winter for them.
This is really nit-picky, I’m sorry, but they would not necessarily have been planted. The original palms, sure, but it seems likely that at least some of them now grow wild.
I think he meant that the palms alive today or their ancestors would have been imported and planted by human beings within recent historical times. This would make them non-native in my book, which was what I was trying to determine.
Thanks for all the replies everyone. Sounds like there was a misunderstanding somewhere WRT where these trees came from.
While winter temperatures in Southern California in the air is not too cold for coconuts, the fact that the soil stays too cold for their roots (below 60F), means that they have trouble growing and will eventually decline. I’ve heard there were coconuts planted near the Salton Sea, but these have died due to apparent neglect. The Newport Beach coconut survives because it’s in sand, which doesn’t keep moisture around the roots, but it doesn’t ever grow well enough there, and people i’ve talked to who’ve seen it says it’s not very good looking. IMHO it looks pretty ratty and scraggly. Ireland is not at all likely to be able to support coconuts even if it doesn’t get severe freezes.
Tropical seeds do wash ashoreas far north as the British Isles and Ireland, but they wouldn’t ever be able to grow (if they had you’d find Irish species of these tropical plants)
The only palm native to mainland Europe is Chamaerops humilis, and grows along the coasts of Italy and Spain. Here’s a distribution map
) I wonder which is more likely: Palms survived over millions of years while the land mass moved north, and they’re not widely known as a marvel, or a sailor brought back seedlings from a voyage to the South Seas and planted them (and they’re not widely known as a marvel)?