Palm Sunday, palm every day

Trees have long history of cultural and religious significance

By RUTH MARVIN WEBSTER - Staff Writer | Thursday, March 13, 2008 5:12 PM PDT ∞

A hammock stretched between two King palms bending in the trade winds. Pristine white sandy beaches framed by coconut palms, their trunks arching toward the surf. Cerulean resort swimming pools shaded by towering Queen palms and golf courses lined with date palms.

These days the vision of a palm tree conjures a tropical paradise and luxury of resort living.

"When I was growing up, I just liked the look of palms," said Burl Gregory, who transformed 40 acres of dead avocado groves into a palm farm in Pauma Valley. He has been growing palms commercially for about 25 years and cultivates 15-20 different varieties of palm trees planted directly into the ground. "My heart has always been in palms. I have been in insurance, real estate development and other entrepenieul businesses but I have always had a passion for this."

Gregory is not alone in his love for this family of flowering plants known as monocots. Dating back at least 80 million years, the palm has played a vital role in human history.

Throughout the centuries and in cultures around the world, palm trees have held a deeper symbolic meaning --- often religious, sometimes even mythical.

In the small island of Igbo in southeast Nigeria, the people have a special reverence for palms. A palm frond tied around a trunk warns others not to climb the tree for fear of a hazard lurking nearby. And tied in a village square, it bars certain people from entering the square. Fresh palm fronds also placed near a dead body warn others away.

In fact, Sunday Ezeja, a writer for the Nigerian Tribune, said that in some areas of Igboland, a fresh palm frond placed somewhere always signifies something. "The palm frond plays a vital role in the process of conveying sacred meanings in Igboland," Ezeja writes.

Considered the tree of life in Assyrian art, the palm tree whose leaves never fall symbolizes life and eternity for the Akan people of Ghana. For the ancient Egyptian sun god Ra, the date palm crown was sacred. And for the Romans, the palms was used as a symbol of victory. It was also a very early symbol of Christianity, as palm branches often accompanied images of early martyrs as a symbol of their victory over earthly temptations and misery. In fact, palms are mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible and at least 22 times in the Quran alone.

This Sunday, palm fronds will be furnished to Christian churches all over the world for their celebration of Jesus' return to Jerusalem. Here in the United States, it is estimated that more than 300 million palm fronds are harvested each year for domestic use, most of them for Palm Sunday.

According to the Episcopal Church, although the harvest of palm products is an important source of supplemental income for many indigenous families and communities in Guatemala and Mexico, the over-harvesting of palms can also threaten those communities' livelihood as well as the forests. The church has thus said it encourages those who harvest the palms to do so in an ecologically and socially sustainable way by starting to pay for the quality of the fronds rather than simply the quantity of them.

While Gregory said his palm farms in Pauma Valley and Orange County furnish fronds for Palm Sunday, his biggest religious market is local synagogues which buy palm fronts for Sukkot. During the Jewish autumn festival, palm fronds ---- together with myrtle and willow ---- are waved in four directions to symbolize the gathering of clouds for rain. Gregory said he and his workers collect fronds usually from Canary palms. But it is important to harvest the fronds delicately, he said, as the trunks can easily be harmed, making the trees more difficult to sell later for landscaping.

From a practical standpoint, palms provide concentrated energy food such as dates and coconuts as well as providing shade and shelter, particularly in hot, barren climates. Gregory said he has begun geminating palm seeds in his greenhouses at his Pauma Valley farm as well as his Hawaiian farm on the Big Island for use as biodiesel fuel.

"They are going to think I've lost my mind, but African palm seed oil is the highest-yielding seed for biodiesel," he explained, adding that corn yields 30 gallons per acre while palm seeds produce three times as fast and yield 380 gallons per acre.

But the lion's share of Gregory's palm income is from the sale of entire, mature palm varieties for landscaping. He said he found that even in Hawaii, there still is a shortage of palm growers providing large trees for resorts and housing developments. And with prices ranging from $35 to $400 per trunk foot depending on the species, many of his palms are quite expensive. They are all grown from seed.

"The downside of palms is that you have to be prepared for 10 years to make zero and work hard everyday," he said, adding, "and you've got to be prepared to pay humongous water bills."

With roughly 2,600 different species, palms are one of the most well-known and cultivated of all plant families with two-thirds of palms growing in tropical forests. Perhaps that is why farmers warned Burl Gregory they wouldn't grow in Pauma Valley.

"Everyone said I was crazy to start this palm tree farm here," said Gregory of his 40 acres in Pauma Valley. "But they acclimate ... and since they're taken from the area where they were grown have less disease."

Contact staff writer Ruth Marvin Webster at (760) 740-3527 or rwebster@nctimes.com. Comment at nctimes.com.