The Palms of Saud

You may have heard Ottorino Respighi’s magnificent The Pines of Rome.  Somehow the title of this post doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.  But it’s the best we can do out here in the desert…

One of the multiple mosques on camp.

Before coming out here I had very few opportunities to see a palm tree, let alone be near one.  They simply don’t exist in my usual habitat.  But, since my arrival in the kingdom, I have had that opportunity in abundance!

School grounds

I have learned that palms are actually not trees at all.  They are plants – really big ones.  Because they are merely a plant, if you were to cut one down, you would find that they do not have annual tree rings.  Cool huh?

Sometimes they are short – nothing but the big bushy top sticking up out of the ground.  Other times they are very tall.  Just outside my window at the hotel was one that must have 100 feet tall (or more)!  And it grew straight up, with no branches or leaves till the top 15 feet or so!  (Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture of it before I left the hotel.)

That's my building in the background.

Apparently there are around 2,600 varieties of palms all around the globe.  Most of them are somewhere around the equator.  I never realized that coconuts come from palms.  So do dates – they grow in great big bunches right under the canopy.

They put bags around the dates to collect them.  (This isn't my picture.)

Here in the camp they are frequently used in the landscaping.  We tend to have two main varieties.  (I don’t know what they are called.)  One of them is the date kind.  

The palm is a significant part of Saudi culture.  It is prominent on their coat of arms.  Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

"The swords represent the two kingdoms of Nejd and Hijaz, which were united under Ibn Saud in 1926.  The palm tree represents the Kingdom's assets, which are defined as its people, heritage, history, and resources - natural and non-natural.  Thus, the palm is shown to be guarded by the two swords, which represent the force to be used in defense of the nation."

But the thing that I find most remarkable is the bark.  On the one hand, within camp we have a fairly smooth bark, which looks like this:

But we also have a whole lot of this:

I walk past this to get to my building.

Apparently the locals can scurry up these really quickly.  Pretty cool.

And that’s all I have to say about that.  Tune in next time and I’ll take you to visit the Dhahran Mall…

Thanks for reading!