Trimming a palm tree

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It's the first week of June and now is a very good time to trim your palm trees. Their flowering is finished and you can go ahead and trim all of that mess away. What I do is to trim back very hard, leaving only a few leaves. Believe me, they will grow back! Take a look at the spear leaf in the middle. If it's thick and growing strong, your tree is doing great. If there's a white powdery residue, that is also a sign of robust health.

I only have miniatures palms here at The Tropical Paradise. The ones in the picture, dwarf date palms (Phoenix roebellini) have been here for over fifteen years. I crouched down to take the photo so you could see the leaves against the sky, but the trunks are only about six feet tall. If I had planted full-sized palm trees here when I bought this house, all I would would be seeing would be telephone poles. In another fifteen years, these dwarf date palms could get as tall as twelve feet, but never the 80 to 100 feet of full-sized palms. If you suspect that you have full-sized palm trees growing in your backyard, dig them up now and get rid of them while you still can. And then go get yourself some miniatures.

Anyway, cutting back a palm tree very dramatically is called *candlesticking* - and for aesthetic purposes, many trimmers refuse to do it. But it does no harm to the tree itself. In fact, cutting it back to a *candlestick*, and especially trimming all the flowers off, gives the tree a nice break from the heavy burden it has been carrying. And it will come back strong and beautiful.

Now get out there and trim!

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