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Palm Trees in LA: A Brief History

Writer's picture: Patricia Tudosa Patricia Tudosa

Updated: 6 days ago

Palm trees are not indigenous to Southern California. Nor is much of the vegetation now there.


The tall skinny palms that are on every Los Angeles postcard were introduced to Southern California by Spanish colonial settlers starting in 1769. These men came up through the Baja Peninsula, having at the time spent the past two centuries colonizing the rest of  Mexico. They were competing for California with several other empires; very few white men had entered California's territory before.


The land that the Spanish came to occupy is Chumash, Kumeyaay and Tongva, among others.


I studied this history while writing a novel with larger themes (love, marriage, Bush II-era politics, immigration, history, timespace, God) which may or may not see publication (if you’re an agent reading this and interested, please reach out). But in the process, I read dozens of these men’s diaries and took a trip through Baja along their route.


9000 year old cave painting in Baja California. Photo taken by author.
9000 year old cave painting in Baja California. Photo taken by author.

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These men: Catholic priests, Spanish soldiers, Spanish empire officials, and “neophytes”—Indigenous peoples converted to Catholicism. They were led by Father Junipero Serra, whose name is now common to many Southern Californian institutions.

The Spanish empire takeover formula: seed missions, put the local population to work, convert (force) them into Catholicism, grow forts, and eventually towns.

The first mission that Junipero Serra’s men planted in today’s California was San Diego. Several years later they founded San Gabriel, which eventually grew into Los Angeles.


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Let’s pause for a brief interlude.


The first “Christian” of San Gabriel was a baby born to a local Tongva woman who had been raped by a Spanish soldier. The padres wrote about this in their correspondence to one another, never actually mentioning the word “rape”. They transferred the soldier to a different mission, who had by then killed the woman’s husband during a fight to avenge the rape; they baptized and registered the infant in their annals.


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The men’s diaries contain detailed description of the natural habitat of Southern California. Having spent months traveling through the (spectacular) deserts of Baja, the most remarkable thing is that the Californian landscape reminded them of home--Spain. They had at that point been in the New World for decades, and they understandably missed Europe, but even to my own European (Romanian) ears, the landscapes in their descriptions sounded familiar: roses of Castile, oaks, alder trees, grasses, reeds.

In the missions, they went on to plant all sorts of non-native foods, from citrus and grapes to cereal grains. These grew well, but they needed large amounts of water and the reconfiguration of land, and we are now of course paying the price.


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The tall skinny iconic palms of LA are the Washingtonia robusta and you wouldn’t recognize them in their native habitat. In Baja, they congregate around waterpools and they are stocky and only moderately tall. (There is one indigenous palm in California—the Washingtonia filifiera, and it grows sparingly. And the robusta is not a tree—it is likely a grass, related to the onion and the orchid.)



Washingtonia robusta in their native habitats in Baja. Photo taken by author.
Washingtonia robusta in their native habitats in Baja. Photo taken by author.

In my book, father Serra picks up a baby Washingotnia robusta somewhere in the middle of Baja, carries it some 900 miles, and plants it next to a cross in San Diego as a symbol of his travels. In reality, the soldiers and their mules probably carried seeds through incidental contact, and the very first San Diego palm was likely the date palm (fresh dates are delicious and would have been a real source of food for them). Either way, the palms landed there with the men, and grew sparingly through the next century as the empire also grew and Yankees made their way West, eventually entering Northern California, and going to war with Mexico over the South—and as Mexico also lived its own history with the Spanish Empire.


In the 1800s, the Western world went through a World Fairs craze. The Chicago World Fair of 1893 built an entire mini-city with buildings dedicated to various colonial exploits. By then, California had been part of the US for almost 50 years, and the state received its own exhibit hall. Entrepreneurial Yankees put up a palm tree that they brought all the way from San Diego over newly laid rail line in its middle (probably a date palm). And above the hall they raised this sign describing the conquering of California from Mexico: “They sought her. They wooed her. They won her. They placed her, the brightest jewel that now gleams in the coronet of Columbia”.


That Chicago Exhibit palm created a marketing frenzy that turned Southern California suddenly into what some savvy businessman called a “subtropical” paradise. Yes, this is an entirely manufactured concept. With rail lines now crossing the continent, the idea of “subtropical” spread, and land prospectors started sniffing money. They started marketing Southern California living to rich housewives in the North East. And so Yankees started pouring in, taking over Mexican land, which had been Spanish, which had been Native.

The Washingtonia robusta were not planted widely until the early 20th century. Early Los Angeles had lots of pepper trees for shade and street décor. In fact, most people resisted the palms for decades, and they went in and out of fashion.

No one—and I mean NO ONE, knew, when they eventually did plant the palms, that they would grow as they do—endlessly tall and skinny. Their city-wide planting was in fact one of the first unified municipal actions, and it only happened in 1911. Until then, the city had grown in disparate conclaves, which explains the wild assortment of architecture that makes Los Angeles unique and stands testament to the car industry’s hold on the city. In fact, the city commission tasked with beautifying city streets probably thought they were planting date palms, not Washingtonias robusta. Through the 20th century, they surprised. In the 1950s, young men out on the town and up to no good, would be known to set them on fire.

It is the urban environment and the absence of water pools that makes the Washingtonia robusta stretch on forever.


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Many Washingtonia robustas are coming to the end of their lifespan now. The city has been discussing their fate—with increased ecological awareness, there is the understanding that they don’t belong there and they are expensive to maintain. Even without the recent fires, their fate may have been sealed, ending yet another large chapter of American mythmaking.


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If you’ve made it this far: thank you. Though I lived in Los Angeles, I only fell in love with the palm trees while stumbling down this history. It gripped me for years, and didn’t let go. I am only including a small chunk of it here.


As I am writing this, weighed with the grief of all that is going on in the world of 2025, my hope is that we actively seek and rediscover natural habitats, the things that Mother Nature intended for each place. That as Los Angeles rebuilds, people will be cognizant of what has been destroyed to make room for an illusion.


My call to action, in telling this history: Bring back native plants and Indigenous knowledge in caring for each place. It will bring healing to the Earth and all its inhabitants.


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This is a love letter to a city that I once had a very difficult relationship with.

May you heal.

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