Skip to main content

A palm

Support Provided By
p.jpg

I pass by a slowly dilapidating office building on my walk to and from the office at city hall. It's a mean little box crowding the sidewalk, separated from the concrete by two or three feet of abandoned landscaping. Except I occasionally pass a man and a woman poking with shovels and a hoe at the weeds and ivy. They aren't gardening. They're keeping the landscape at bay.I've passed by so often and for so long without looking that I've forgotten, too, what had been planted there deliberately. Until I noticed that four small palms, their corrugated, tapering trunks ending in characteristic green fans, had volunteered. It's likely that the palms had propagated from the grounds of the neighboring building. But I don't know.

The whorl of fronds springing from a fan palm's heart leave a pattern. It's expressed in the Fibonacci sequence of the remnant petioles, rough and spiky, that plate the trunk after the fan-shaped fronds have withered or been cut. The trunks of these volunteer palms express a universal abstraction. Numbers are rooted in nature's spirals.

The man and the woman returned a few days ago, and the next time I passed, each of the palms - the tallest about 5 feet - was lopped off, crownless. Sawn cleanly, I suppose, with a power tool midway down. Cut that way, the palms presented their cores as specimens for inspection. Inner spirals were there, too, coiled as tightly as watch springs.

I don't know what the distracted gardeners thought. The decapitation of the palms reduced them to posts, took away their presence as vegetation, but it didn't kill them. In a day, an inch of pale blade rose from the cores of the palms. Within a week, more curved segments spiraled up from the cut. The segments turned a sickly, greenish white, added more height, bent outward, steadied into bright tropical green, and unfolded as fans one by one.

These palms are, I guess, weeds of a sort, to be cut down as thoughtlessly as the thistles and wild oats that have crowded out most of the ivy in the landscaping. And I do not take the persistence of the palms, despite so much careless handing, as any message. Nature doesn't offer me hope.

The self-planted palms were always themselves; subjected to nature and us, but never mere things. They were beautiful before. They were beautiful while they lingered headless. They are beautiful still.

The image on this page was taken by flickr user Steve Jurvetson. It is used under a Creative Commons License.

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.