October 12, 2010
Palm Trees in Ireland?
Today’s post was written by the magazine’s staff writer, Abigail Tucker:
On a recent trip to the Emerald Isle, I expected all kinds of verdant foliage, like the ancient yew tree my family saw growing outside the walls of a ruined castle. I was not, however, prepared for the Irish palm trees. We observed suspiciously tropical-looking specimens around every corner—at bed and breakfasts, in abbey gardens, or just springing up on the side of the road.
Cabbage palms have become a common sight in some parts of Ireland (courtesy of flickr user EadaoinFlynn)
A quick email to Colin Kelleher at Dublin’s National Botanic Gardens yielded an explanation: the species is Cordyline australis, a.k.a. the cabbage palm. “However, it is neither a palm nor a tree,” Kelleher writes. (Nor is it a cabbage, I might add.) A New Zealand native, the plant was popularized in Irish gardens as early as the late 1800s. By the 1970s—and almost certainly before that, Kelleher says—the palm imposter had gone rogue, spreading into the wild and lending parts of coastal Ireland a distinctly beachy aura.
The cabbage palms are able to thrive in Ireland because of warm ocean currents. Ireland is at about the same latitude as Newfoundland, but its winters are much milder. Last winter, though, Ireland experienced the unusual weather patterns reported in other parts of the world. “We had severe snow and frosts, with temperatures going down to -10 degrees centigrade,” Kelleher writes. “In fact, because of the extreme winter conditions last year many Cordyline palms were damaged or died.”
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Well, if it’s neither a palm nor a tree, does that mean it’s a shrub? Anyway, it does look like a palm tree and it does seem out of place in Ireland. Certainly adds to the mystique of the Emerald Isle!
[...] share with you that things were tense. After all, despite the Gulf Stream current that keeps the western Irish coast unusually warm, this was still January, and we were dressed in our winter coats and gloves, and this was a small [...]
The folklore in my family history is that a great grand uncle was responsible for some palm trees being re-located to Ireland. He owned a sailing ship and took many people from Ireland to the Oakland, California in the 1800′s during the famine. It would be interesting to figure out if the species of palm at the southern end of Ireland can be traced back to any Palm which are found along the route to Oakland. I read an article which speculated that the Irish palm are the same palm found in Africa – when the continents were formed, Ireland was split off from Africa; hence the Irish palm are native plants. That maybe true for the palm in the Burren. But I thought I read that the palm in the southern part of Ireland are a different species which would lend credence to my family story and they may have come from South American.