How and why to care for Mexican fan palms

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I don't have any Mexican fan palms here at the tropical paradise for two reasons, personally I prefer the look of a date palm (which is why I have sago palms, because they look like miniature date palms), and the other reason is, you guessed it, I simply don't have the room. Fan palms and date palms just get too big for my suburban lot, and would just look like telephone poles in my backyard. By the way, I do have fan palms, but they're med palms, which are smaller.

Anyway, Mexican fan palms grow like weeds anywhere from Phoenix to Modesto. And I'm not just trying to be poetic here, you actually see them sprouting up in the cracks of sidewalks, in empty lots, and they grow just fine. Sometimes too good!

But before you start turning up your nose at these plants, which have been very common in cultivation for many decades, I'd like to remind you that they're the famous very tall palm trees in Beverly Hills. Yep, those are Mexican fan palms. Washingtonia robusta. And if you're wondering why they didn't plant California fan palms, there are a couple of good reasons. Firstly, they really are more elegant than the California fan palms, and they grow much faster. And that means that your property will have mature palm trees around it much faster, and they will be much cheaper.


If you're not absolutely sure what you're looking at is a med palm or a Mexican fan palm, look for the curly strands. Mexican fan palms have them, meds don't. The pic just above this paragraph is of one that self-seeded next to a friend's house here in Phoenix. The photo is from four years ago, so I gotta go visit and take a look, I'm sure by now it looks like a real palm tree, unless he got rid of it.

The pic at the top of this post gives you some idea how resilient these plans are. They survive a lot of neglect, and if they grow out of a pot, all you gotta do is put them in a slightly bigger pot, with plenty of potting soil, and they'll be fine. By the way, if you're wondering if you can transplant a Mexican fan palm that you see growing randomly in your yard, sorry, no, you can't. They send down a very long tap root, and if that gets broken (and it will), the plant will die. No such worries in a pot, though!

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