This website provides a garden plan and documentation for an eight-year-old palm garden in San Francisco. In a standard 25 by 75 foot lot, the garden includes 28 palms, many of them rare, including 14 species from the Americas and Asia Pacific. These pages might appeal to those interested in urban gardens, palm trees, and tropical design in cool climates.
Working within a small footprint, the garden extends from a private rear garden to a public front sidewalk garden along a largely pedestrian city alley. Palms are planted along the house and in sidewalk planter boxes. Also notable are the cultivation within two narrow interior light wells of a rare palm tree that is shade-tolerant, fast-growing and frequently flowering. This Mexican palm is an understory tree from mountain forests.
The palms grown here share temperatures with San Francisco that are temperate to cool year-round, with no frost below -3 Celsius degrees (27 degrees Fahrenheit). By choosing palms suited for San Francisco’s unusual Pacific peninsula conditions, the result is a wide variety of palms, shapes, flowers, colors, heights, growth rates, and benefits, including views of palm trees from every window of the house.
This online garden site includes a garden plan, globe view of the geographic origin of all 14 species, before and after photo page, profiles of all 28 specimens including 2008 measurements and grower’s notes, a species list, and horticultural credits.
