New look for the Pygmy Date Palm

I am not a visual person although that is not the central point of this post. We non-visual people therefore have difficulty in accurately portraying what we want if we do not have a relatively close photo/sketch to follow. Ergo, when we had the pool and hot tub put in, the covered terrace extended, extra hardscape added around the pool, put in river rock to stretch from the edge of the hardscape to the fence, had some tropical and citrus trees planted, and other plants done in containers, we used our regular landscaping guy. Now, he is a good guy, does good work and we’ve used him for years. However, he is not a landscape designer and so in discussion, he did exactly what we asked him to. Recently, I said, “Enough, the yard is out of control and not what I actually wanted.” My husband always experiences trepidation when I get the idea to re-do things (and not without reason). He was particularly concerned with the potential fate of the traveler (fan) palms that I thought might need to be removed.

Okay, so I called in a longtime Redland landscaper who first assured me that she could tame the traveler palms, then she promised a sketch that she felt would match what I was looking for. Actually, by the time she and her hardworking crew had finished, what we had was closer to an eighty-percent solution, but definitely a great improvement. Now, the reality of this area is that the same conditions that produce beautiful tropical plants also means “super weeds” and fairly constant maintenance to keep things in a trimmed state. That, in turn, means either hiring someone to keep after it or doing it yourself. Since we now have most of the plantings looking the way we want them, our next task is to determine if we can keep them up ourselves or if we need to talk to our regular landscape guy about adding that service to what he regularly does. The jury is still out on that one. We’re giving a shot at managing it ourselves and will see if it goes better this time.

I’ll use the above photo as an example. It’s a 3-cone (head) pygmy date palm. If allowed to, as we did with the original planting, the fronds will descend downward until you have essentially a palm “tent” that reaches to the ground. That’s an okay look, but the designer suggested exactly the opposite and to cut it back severely, create an “island” around it with mulch, blooming ground cover plants and attach bromeliads. The ground cover and bromeliads require essentially no maintenance and in order to keep the current design all we really have to do is whack the fronds early when they grow beyond the look we want. One would think that I can pull this off and I will keep you posted as to the outcome.