Designing with Palms - Hardcover

Jason Dewees is the staff horticulturist at Flora Grubb Gardens and East West Trees in San Francisco. Responsible for the Tree Canopy Succession Plan for the San Francisco Botanical Garden, he serves on the Horticultural Advisory Committee for the San Francisco Botanical Garden, and on The San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers Advisory Council. 

The Power of Palms

Few people understand palms as well as Jason Dewees, horticulturist at Flora Grubb Gardens and at East West Trees, the leading wholesale source of palms in the United States. In this comprehensive guide, he shares the many ways palms can transform courtyards, gardens, and landscapes. Detailing the most important species and highlighted by striking photography, Designing with Palms imparts vital advice on making the most of these statement-making plants.

Preface
For most people, the palm hides in plain view. So charismatic, instantly recognizable, palms get lost in the glare of their own beauty.

Most of us first fall for palms when the shush of waves on the sand mixes with the overhead rustle of their fronds. Relaxed, half-naked, our skin warmed by the sun, our toes cooled by the sea, we are, for that moment of bliss, in paradise.

Next we notice the amazingly tall row of palms not far from our house. Our palm love swells and deepens in an encounter with wild California fan palms in a desert canyon echoing with birdsong. Or maybe we fall in love in that moment on screen when palms wave shadows over Kathleen Turner’s sexy villain character at the end of Body Heat, conferring an ineffable mood to the scene. Even the simple grace of a potted palm in the corner of the room can charm us into affection for this distinct plant family.

My mother adopted a neanthe bella palm (Chamaedorea elegans) around the time I went to kindergarten. Friends from my nursery school left the houseplant with her when the family moved away from San Francisco to New York. It had the classic palm-tree shape, but in miniature: a rosette of feather-shaped leaves on top of a green ringed stem no more than an inch thick, with stilt roots emerging from the base into the soil in a fertilizer-stained clay pot. I remember nubby root tips dotting the length of the stem. Every week or two, my mother hand-washed the plant with soap to treat a case of scale, the music of Stevie Wonder or Carole King filling the house. That plant must have lasted a long time in her care, for it was later on in childhood I wondered why the periodically appearing flower stalks never made fruits—or were those little kernels that dried and dropped off actually fruits? Sometimes I would peel the husky leafbases from the trunk, exposing a pale internode that would slowly green up in response to the light. Even now, I find grooming a chamaedorea palm one of the most satisfying of garden tasks. My crush for neanthe bella lives on.

I believe it was the archetype of the palm tree that drew me to that miniature at home. Palms were regular but infrequent elements of the landscape where I grew up in California, and holiday visits to my mother’s side of the family in Miami exposed me to a place where palms were abundant. Their image preceded in my mind the arrival of that houseplant. Recognizing a miniature version of the icon gave me the child’s thrill of connecting a cat to a tiger.

This first crush grew into a love of the palm family, plants, and gardens—and has since become my passion and vocation. I work as a palm specialist and horticulturist and have been able to focus on this exceptional plant family’s attributes and contributions. I share my love of palms with many in the design, planning, architectural, and gardening fields and help create landscapes that challenge conventional planting design. It is a joy and a mission. The satisfaction of working with a client to choose the right species for her garden design and her subtle, modern house on a spectacular, blustery site overlooking Point Reyes National Seashore comes from puzzle-solving, sweaty exertion, and elation at both the results and the relationship we’ve developed in working together. Along the way, I have found that the palm’s icon status is both portal and obstacle to working with palms in design.

Palms are among the earliest trees depicted by the human hand. They are stamped on Roman and Israeli coins from two millennia ago, portrayed at Egypt’s Tomb of Sennedjem from the late 1300s BC, carved in 5800-year-old petroglyphs in Saudi Arabia, and seen in rock art at Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria, from 6000 BC. The date palm of the Fertile Crescent was likely one of the earliest cultivated fruit trees, bound to the origins of Western agrarian civilization. These ancient portraits are potent, distilled images signifying the satisfaction of hunger and thirst. However enrobed in our jet-age perspective such elemental satisfactions may now be, images of palms remain ubiquitous today, still signifying respite and bounty. If any plant is an icon, it is the palm.