Phoenix canariensis Canary Island date palm

Majestic Canary Island date palms, still not at full height, in the Old Union courtyard. Sairus Patel, 25 Sep 2018

Palm Drive is lined almost exclusively with Canary Island date palms. Sairus Patel, 5 Jul 2025

More than any other tree, the Canary Island date palm shapes the first impression of Stanford for students and visitors alike. Stately specimens line the ceremonial approach of Palm Drive, leafy colonnades prefiguring – and as iconic as – those of sandstone in the Quad, sighted at the end of the avenue. Others around campus are set as singular accents or in pairs flanking entryways.

Stout of trunk and with a superbly symmetrical crown – immense and dense, elegant tapering fronds arching gracefully up and over – this species, and Stanford’s palms in general, have so captured the campus imagination that students invariably exclaim “Palm!” when asked which tree they most associate with the University. Stanford is not likely to trade the coast redwood, El Palo Alto, on its official seal for a fronded silhouette anytime soon, but in the popular mind, the palm reigns.

The leaves of Phoenix are pinnate (feather-like), unlike the palmate (fan-shaped) fronds of Washingtonia. (Yes, Latin palma means palm – tree and frond – as well as the presumably similarly shaped palm of the hand. Which came first?) Fierce spines adorn the short stalk at the base. Dead fronds, when pruned, leave a distinctive flattened diamond pattern on the trunk, arranged not symmetrically but according to a Fibonacci sequence pair: eight columns descending to the left and 13 running more steeply to the right, just as the arrangement of scales on a pine cone. Leaf bases just below the crown are usually retained longer and shaped, most classically, into a “pineapple,” sometimes an almost cylindrical, elongated one. These longer leaf-base stubs form a mini ecosystem; their accumulated pockets of compost often germinate coast live oak, Atlas cedar (in its wispy blue stage), blackberry, nightshade, and Shamel ash. Holes for acorn woodpecker families, along with caches for their acorns, are often present. Looking up into a palm tree to spot what’s there is a field trip in its own right.

Female trees will produce colorful orange stalks with clusters of dates that have very thin flesh and are unpalatable. The pits may be disseminated by birds and rodents; seedlings spring up in the Arboretum, especially around drainage systems, and around campus. If left alone, their crowns develop to near full size while still possessing little trunk, allowing close study of the leaves.

P. canariensis was grown from seed by University gardener Thomas Douglas in 1889. Canary Island date palms had just started to be made available in California about 14 years earlier, at a San Francisco nursery. (It is a myth that the California mission padres introduced the tree to California.) Specimens from the original or early Inner Quad plantings still stand today (marked on the Inner Quad tree map) and may be compared to several other palm species now growing there.

Palm Drive c. 1906–1918. Canary Island date palms alternated with Caifornia fan palms. Berton Crandall. SC1071 Box 33 (SDR vz111bq0516). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

When the University opened in 1891, Palm Drive was still known as University Avenue. It was bordered by native oaks and pines, eucalypts, and various other trees and shrubs, some predating the road’s cutting in 1889, others planted afterward under the direction of Frederick Law Olmsted and his associates. It was David Starr Jordan, the University’s first president, who suggested the palm theme in 1893. Palms were not yet a distinct cultural emblem of California, of course, but signified instead a broader sense of the exotic.

Leland Stanford approved of Jordan’s proposal, no doubt immediately sensing how it would amplify the processional drama of the University’s monumental approach. The Canary Island date palms alternated with the California fan palm along the avenue proper. Smaller windmill palms lined the Oval and – alternating with cabbage trees, Cordyline australis – the street that fronted the Quad. This frondy theme was disliked by early botanists. For the first eight or ten years, sections of a dozen or so palms at a time had to be replaced due to gopher damage. Still, they proved to be popular, and in the 1920s landscape designer John McLaren, then consulting on campus plantings, caused an uproar when he proposed replacing them with native oaks. Around that time, the fan palms started to be removed from sections of the avenue; they had not been faring as well as the date palms due to the nearby eucalypts, botany professor LeRoy Abrams reportedly said.

The two palms on the left, on Palm Drive, are thought to be hybrids of P. canariensis and possibly P. rupicola. There are ten such palms on Palm Drive. The two palms on the right are P. canariensis. Sairus Patel, 25 Sep 2018

Today, only Phoenix line the grand approach, but careful observers will note that ten are outliers. Their slender trunks, sparser canopies, and the considerably longer stalks on their flower clusters reveal their distinct parentage. They are thought to be hybrids of P. canariensis and P. rupicola, the cliff date palm from the eastern Himalayas.

Palm Drive currently comprises around 166 palms, though removals have left intermittent gaps – sometimes for years – until they are filled by transplants, some even at full size. As the drive approaches the Oval, it splits to encircle it. Immediately thereafter, however, the palms diverge, peeling off onto footpaths that bisect the wooded groves on either side. These paths lead the palms outward in a kind of pincer movement, emerging onto Lomita and Lasuen Streets and culminating at Jane Stanford Way. Early semi-aerial photographs clearly reveal these continuations, then also with fan palms interleaved, as deliberate elements of the palmy approach. Hidden from motorists today among groves of oaks, and often overlooked, these extensions harbor some of our tallest and most majestic Canary Island date palms. If these outlying segments are included – as they ought to be in any true accounting of the arboreal Palm Drive – the total rises to 194 palms, even if several now stand outside the bounds of the street’s official name.

Name derivation: Phoenix – See P. dactylifera entry; canariensis – of the Canary Islands.