Culture City Informer

we’ve got beautiful beaches and palms swaying in the wind, then this can’t be rain pooling in my shoes—it must be sweat?! And I’m loving it?!

Much of our city’s delightfully delusional landscaping is the work of the Pacific Northwest Palm and Exotic Plant Society— friends of the fronds, if you will. Inspired by a few forward-thinking gardeners of the 1960s, who independently brought some choice windmill palms into Lower Mainland landscapes, the Palm Society was founded to spread the word even further about the beauty of palms. (An easier task, to be fair, than, say, what the Skunk Cabbage Society might have faced.)

Despite their reputation as sun-seekers, windmill palms— which are native to China—actually fit just fine into our Canadian climate. (It’s not B.C.’s first palm-rodeo, in fact: 40 million years ago, our own CanCon palm trees were growing around the base of Burnaby Mountain.)

With compact root systems and a tolerance for a variety of growing conditions, windmill palms are as chill as you would imagine a palm tree would be if it were to come to life, Frosty the Snowman-style, to teach us some important lessons about friendship and also probably rollerblading. Good vibes only, brah.

Why Does Vancouver Have Palm Trees?

Unless you’re performing a medical procedure on me, I’m a big proponent of faking it ’til you make it. Which is why I for one support the presence of palm trees here in Vancouver, a city that is famously not Hawaii.

by Stacey

Some might say it’s cruel to taunt soggy Vancouverites in the throes of SAD with reminders that they do not live in a tropical paradise, but I say a tropical paradise is a state of mind! If

And so, in 1990, the Palm Society spearheaded a public planting project at Beach and Jervis, led by president Rudi Pinkowski, an amazing champion for palm tree rights who grew up in a perpetual winter behind the Iron Curtain and has been aggressively advocating for fun-inthe-sun ever since. Sixteen trees were sponsored by his equally passionate fellow Palm Society members, and Vancouver Park Board staff did the planting—