Buying advice7 min read
How to buy a palm without wasting sixty thousand rupees
The trunk is the only thing you are actually paying for, and it is the thing most people do not look at.
By Muhammad Sami
A twelve-foot Canary Island date palm costs about the same as a small motorcycle. People spend more time inspecting the motorcycle.
Palms are sold on height, which is the least reliable thing about them. Here is what to look at instead, whether you are buying from us or from anyone else.
Look at the trunk, not the height
Height can be added quickly with feed and water; trunk girth cannot. A palm with a thin trunk and a tall crown has been pushed hard in a nursery and will look wrong for years — the proportions never quite recover.
Compare girth to height. On a well-grown Canary Island date palm you want a trunk you cannot get your arms around by the time it is eight feet. On a washingtonia, which is naturally slim, look instead for even spacing of the old frond scars.
Check the spear
The spear is the unopened new frond at the centre of the crown. Take hold of it gently and pull. It should not move.
If it slides out, the growing point has rotted and the palm is already dead — it just does not know it yet, and it will keep looking fine for two or three months. This is the single most useful thing you can check, and it takes five seconds.
Ask how long it has been in that pot
A palm dug from a field last week has lost most of its feeding roots and will take two seasons to recover. One that has been growing in its container for a year has a complete root system and establishes almost immediately.
Field-dug is not automatically bad — it is how most large palms are produced, and it is cheaper. But you should know which you are buying, and you should pay less for field-dug.
Do not buy on a photograph alone
For anything over four feet, insist on a photograph of the actual tree with something in frame for scale, and insist on it before it is loaded rather than after.
We send these as standard on every specimen order and you can decline the tree. Any supplier who will not do this is telling you something.
Work out the delivered cost before you commit
A palm is cheap and the freight is not. A six-foot palm to Karachi by railway goods costs a meaningful fraction of the tree itself, and the price per tree falls sharply with quantity — one palm is expensive, ten is not.
Always ask for the delivered price, not the nursery price. And if you are planting an avenue, order the whole run at once.
