The date palm

📖 In short

The date palm is a blessed tree that grows in hot, dry lands, in Arabia, North Africa and the Middle East, and fills the oases of the desert. It's one of the oldest trees people have grown, for more than five thousand years.

🤩 Did you know?

Date palm leaves are between 3 and 6 meters long.
A date is between 2.5 and 5 centimeters long.
The world produces millions of tonnes of dates every year.
A date palm can live more than a hundred years.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 What a date palm looks like

A date palm has a tall straight trunk with no branches, covered in the remains of old leaves, and at the top a crown of long leaves called fronds, each several meters long.

🔍 Male and female

There are male and female date palms, and only females give dates. So the farmer takes pollen from a male palm and puts it on the flowers of a female palm; this is called hand pollination.

💡 Offshoots

Little palms called offshoots grow around a date palm, and the farmer cuts them off and plants them elsewhere, where they become new palms exactly like their mother.

🎯 Head in the fire, feet in the water

The saying goes that the date palm likes its “head in the fire and its feet in the water”, meaning it loves very hot sun and lots of water at its roots.