Palm trees have long been an icon of California and associated with Hollywood and movies. But most people aren’t aware of their origin and how they are maintained.

One palm expert, Donald R. Hodel, told The Epoch Times how California adopted palm trees as an iconic landscape. He is an emeritus environmental and landscape horticulture advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Los Angeles County and specialized in researching palms, trees, and landscape management for over 35 years.

According to Hodel, California has only one native palm tree, the California fan palm. Its natural habitat is in the desert areas like Coachella and Borrego Springs, so it does not fare well when planted along the coastal areas. All other palm tree varieties have been brought into California over the past 200 years.

“The first people to bring in palms were the Spanish missionaries when they were establishing the chain of missions in California, and they brought date palms from Mexico,” said Hodel.

“The palms don’t produce good quality edible dates because it’s too cool and humid. So the palms are mostly brought for religious purposes, using the leaves for Palm Sunday, or they were brought for ornamental reasons, because they’re nice plants to look at.”

When California began to develop more quickly after the Gold Rush in the late 19th century, more palms were brought into California to create an exotic and tropical-looking landscape.

“Palms are so good at conveying that motif ... and they were planted to encourage people to come from the eastern United States, to move to California. Because ... many big companies were developing land, and they wanted people to come and live and farm the land,” Hodel said.

In the 1930s when Los Angeles was preparing to host the Olympics, many palm trees were planted along city streets, and many are still doing well at nearly a century old.

There are challenges to maintaining the iconic landscape. The main issue is leaf and fruit litter. Workers sometimes need to climb up 100 feet to a tree’s canopy and prune the leaves or remove the dead ones, which Hodel says can be very dangerous. The dead, interlocking leaves form a skirt around the palm, making it difficult for workers to cut.

“That entire skirt can become loosened and slide down the trunk onto the top of the worker’s head. And because the worker typically has spikes on his shoes that are locked into the trunk, he doesn’t slide down. He’s stationary, and that’s hundreds of pounds of weight on top of his head, which bends his head down onto his chest and basically suffocates him,” he explained.

He said it’s hard to rescue the trapped individual because there aren’t any other branches around to anchor on, so rescuers will have to rely on an adjacent tree.

Hodel has been doing applied research and educational programs for the landscape industry, teaching the public that workers should never start at the bottom to maintain these palms, but at the top and work their way down.

Another challenge is dealing with the pests and diseases that threaten some palm trees. A large, black beetle called the South American palm weevil, native to Central America and Mexico, moved north and into San Diego about 10 years ago, said Hodel.

“It really prefers the Canary Island date palm, because that species is a large, massive palm, has a lot of leaves which means it has a lot of hiding places for the female to deposit eggs and for the larvae to hatch from the eggs and burrow into the apical meristem, which is the heart of the palm, and then it kills the palm that way,” he said.

Hodel says the beetle has killed thousands of Canary Island palms already, and he expects the infestation to migrate further north into Orange and Los Angeles counties in the near future. A few other species of palms are also attacked.

He also said he’s aware of remarks often made about palm trees, claiming they aren’t well adapted to Southern California, but said they are false.

“Most of the common palm species we have here are well adapted, and one’s even a Mediterranean climate palm species, the Mediterranean fan,” explained Hodel. “[Some say] that they don’t provide shade or other amenities, like sycamores or oak trees do, and they’re partially correct about that. ... Because the canopy is so small, you would have to plant many more palms to achieve the same amount of shade.”

To those who argue that palms use too much water, Hodel says that they have other amenities that make them desirable.

“The other things palms have going for them [are] the ability to transplant relatively inexpensively large mature specimens, and they provide that dramatic, exotic, tropical motif, like no other plants can. Palms will always be planted. We are not approaching the end of palms.”

Palm trees are also homes for birds and mammals who use the fibers to build nests and fruits for food.