Phoenix canariensis - Canary Island Palms

Impressive sizes, Andy, sadly being destroyed. I had a canary palm in the back garden many years ago. Nice enough size for here and for me. However, a bad winter came - 2010 - snow fell for months. The palm died, as, it’s a chance we take here in the hopes we don’t suffer long wintry weather...

Klahanie,

It’s a shame and sad. Also, it’s very costly to remove these large dead palms. The weevil is only as far north Mission Valley...but, I’m guessing it’s on it way further north. I hope some type of control is found to reduce the migration of these palm weevils. I’ve heard some large palms are being injected with systemic.

Kate,

I’m so sorry to hear about your palm. I know this palm is extremely hardy, it’s grown everywhere in California below 3,000 ft elevation.

Some of the 100 to 150 year old palms here are 90 (28 m) plus ft tall.

It's a real shame that something like that could happen to those palm trees. Brings to mind the death of 100s of 1,000s of Elm trees here in Europe. Some beetle carried an infection from tree to tree & trees that had lived for a couple of 100 years were dead inside 2!!!

In Spain we saw a group of very, very old Elms from the balcony of our flat die in less than 2 years. Many, many villages all over Spain had century old Elm trees in their public squares & sadly saw them all die over a few years.

Here in the UK I don't know of Elms that old but I have seen trees that must have been at least a 100 years old also killed off in less than two years. Even saplings succumb to it when they are probably 10 years old or slightly younger. From what I've seen during the 20 years we have been back in the UK seedling almost never suffer, it seems to me that they have to reach a certain girth before they become infected. But as there are countless seedling germinating all the time they may, eventually, become immune to the infection.

That’s very sad such old Elm trees decimated!

Some of the old Canary palms in California are from the Mission days and are over 250 years old. It would be a shame if they would die.

I remember when Dutch Elm disease hit California back in the early 80’s? It was devastating to most of the colder areas of the US with native Elm trees. Here in California Ulmus parviflora ‘Sempervirens’ the evergreen variety is the most widely grown variety and luckily it was pretty immune to Dutch Elm disease.