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Home›Natural Surroundings›Why Don’t Palm Trees Blow Down in the Wind?

Why Don’t Palm Trees Blow Down in the Wind?

By Andrea Aker
July 16, 2010
12358
9

Excerpt from Valley 101: A Slightly Skewed Guide to Living in Arizona, a collection of Clay Thompson’s columns for The Arizona Republic. (Originally published August 8, 2001.)

Q: Why don’t palm trees blow down in strong wind as often as other trees do?

A: I thought this was going to be an easy one, and I was prepared to pad it out with a lot of cheap jokes about my masters.

Instead, it got kind of complicated, so I had to cut out the jokes, which is just as well because I would have had to explain them to my masters anyway.

This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots.

Palm TreesKim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, went to some pains to explain the differences to me. He is a very patient man.

Basically, monocots, which include grasses, orchids, irises and other stuff, have embryos that sprout straight up in a single shoot, instead of up and out with branches, as dicots do.

A palm grows straight up, gaining its height on overlapping leaf bases. Hence, it doesn’t have branches to catch the wind. A big, branchy Norfolk Island pine, on the other hand, would just as soon blow over as look at you.

If you took a cross section of a palm tree, you would find a number of brownish spots instead of the growth rings like you’d find in a dicot.

These are bundles of vascular strands that carry nutrients up and down the tree. It’s like a thick steel cablewoven from a lot of smaller steel wires. This is starting to make my brain hurt.

Anyway, each strand in these vascular bundles is connected to the root system. Dicots have woody roots, and in most dicots, 80 percent of the root system is within the top two feet of soil.

Anyone who has ever tried to dig up a palm can tell you it has fibrous roots that not only fan out to great distances but also go down deep. Like to somewhere down around the tectonic plates. So all this combines to give a palm tree a very solid base in the ground and a very supple trunk that will bend in the wind without breaking.

Excerpt from Valley 101: A Slightly Skewed Guide to Living in Arizona, a collection of Clay Thompson’s columns for The Arizona Republic. (Originally published August 8, 2001.)

 

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9 comments

  1. Crystal DeVelis 17 July, 2014 at 08:08 Reply

    They might not blow over, but their tops sometimes break off.

    • Scott 10 September, 2014 at 23:35 Reply

      Actually when I was in Okinawa I watched a 10 foot long palm tree go sailing by. It was root ball first, horizontal to the deck and 10 feet up roughly. It proceed to impact into the chow hall stairwell. We were in a nasty typhoon. I’m sure this is a very rare event though.

      • Patti 22 December, 2017 at 14:58 Reply

        I lived on Okinawa 1963 to 1968. I loved it

  2. david suter 30 January, 2015 at 12:25 Reply

    we have a fully grown phoenix palm on our front lawn in the middle of the trunk its surface is broken. initially on one side but now right around the trunk. i know these fibrous root systems are strong but this is a huge concern for us as the tree is very close to the house. not sure if its diseased or if its snapped its outer cables flexing in the wind. any info appreciated

    • Dolly 22 January, 2017 at 00:50 Reply

      We have similar concerns for our two palm trees in front- I am wondering if you got an answer to your query!
      Thanks
      Dolly

  3. Marsha 10 September, 2017 at 08:27 Reply

    We have 18 palms of various sizes and types We found out it’s best not to bring palms grown in California to the desert in Yuma AZ

  4. Esther 5 October, 2017 at 06:41 Reply

    Thanks for this very interesting information. Does the palm tree have roots deep in the ground that connect with the roots of other palm trees… and doesn’t this help to keep it from being broken during the storm?

  5. Lessons from a palm tree | Dschondog's Blog 15 December, 2017 at 05:44 Reply

    […] This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots. Kim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, describes a monocot. “Monocots have embryos that sprout straight up in a single shoot, instead of up and out with branches, as dicots do.” […]

  6. TT 4 September, 2018 at 07:51 Reply

    Our biggest 6-7 meter palm snapped in a recent typhoon (Japan). I’d been watching from a 2nd floor window – freaked and amazed – as it swung & spiralled ever closer to the glass, but never expected it to snap. An hr. later, I found the trunk had pile driven one of the laundry shed’s posts into the foundation a good foot or more. The horizontal lay of the great trunk and head not only obliterated everything under it, but also morphed the surroundings, making the lowered ceiling hallucinatory. Anyway – not all palmtrees survive typhoons/hurricanes – maybe not uprooting, but snapping – YES

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