Free “Palm Tree Walk” at San Francisco Botanical Garden

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The San Francisco Botanical Garden’s cool, mild climate allows visitors to see plants that are hardly known outside of habitat, including palm trees that require cool, foggy weather to thrive. On this tour you’ll see palms from the misty slopes of the Andes, the craggy peaks of Thailand and Yunnan, and the storm-wracked shores of New Zealand.

Did you know that the world’s tallest palm species grows in the San Francisco Botanical Garden? Or that the world’s northernmost and southernmost native palms (43 degrees north and 44 degrees south latitude—equivalent to Toronto, Canada) are growing in the Garden? The SFBG even has the palm that grows at the highest altitude recorded for the family, 11,400 feet above sea level. One Himalayan species in the collection, a rattan palm, is a vine that climbs high into trees using its fierce spines.

Learn from Jason Dewees, a longtime volunteer with the Botanical Garden and propagator of many individual specimens now growing in the Garden, about the Garden’s exceptional and beautiful collection. Many of our palms are rare or unknown in public collections, and some of our specimens are the first to have bloomed in a North American garden.

The Botanical Garden’s Arecaeae (Palm Family) Collection has achieved Plant Collections Network Accreditation. The Bay Area’s mild Mediterranean climate with coastal fog is the ideal environment for growing high-elevation palm species outdoors. These conditions enable successful cultivation of rare, heat-intolerant species from cloud forest habitats in the Andes and Temperate Asia, a significant contribution to ex-situ conservation initiatives.

About Jason Dewees:

Jason Dewees is the author of Designing with Palms (Timber Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 American Horticultural Society Book Award. A volunteer with the San Francisco Botanical Garden since 1994, he is the staff horticulturist at Flora Grubb Gardens (www.FloraGrubb.com) in San Francisco and Grubb & Nadler in Fallbrook, California. He works as a horticultural advisor to clients ranging from landscape architects and home gardeners, to the San Francisco Botanical Garden and Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, and is a member of the Conservatory’s Advisory Council. Find him on Instagram at @Designwithpalms.

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