Mexican Fan Palm Trees – Washingtonia Robusta

A different palm to the one we grow for fruit

Washingtonia robusta, the Mexican fan palm, isn’t the palm this site is built around, but it’s worth knowing the difference if you deal with palms at all. It’s a fan palm — the fronds spread out from a central point like a hand, not the feathery, pinnate fronds a date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) grows. Robusta is grown almost entirely for its silhouette: a very thin, very tall trunk, often 15 to 25 metres, topped with a dense crown that’s usually trimmed into a “hula skirt” shape or shaved bare depending on the landscaper.

Date palms, by contrast, stay shorter — typically 15 to 23 metres at full maturity, but with a much thicker trunk and a crown built for fruiting rather than looking dramatic from the street. If you’re trying to tell them apart from a distance, trunk thickness and frond shape are the two fastest tells.

Why growers plant robusta at all

It’s fast. Robusta is one of the quickest-growing palms available, which is why it shows up so often lining boulevards and resort driveways — a nursery can sell a tree that already looks mature within a few years, where a date palm grove takes considerably longer to reach fruiting age. It also tolerates poor, compacted urban soil and short droughts better than most ornamentals, which is exactly the environment a street median offers and a fruiting orchard tries to avoid.

The tradeoff is that robusta gives you nothing to harvest. It produces small black fruit that birds eat, but none of the flesh, sugar content or texture that makes a date worth growing commercially. It’s landscaping, not agriculture.

Where a working date grove differs

A grove grown for fruit is planted on spacing that leaves room for equipment between rows, irrigated on a schedule tied to fruit development rather than just survival, and pruned to keep fronds clear of the developing bunches rather than shaped for appearance. The variety matters commercially in a way it never does for an ornamental fan palm — Mazafati, Rotab, and the other cultivars grown here are chosen for taste, moisture content and shelf life, not how the tree looks from the road.

If you’re landscaping a property and want height fast, robusta does the job. If you want a palm that eventually produces something you can eat or sell, it’s a different tree, a different timeline, and a different set of decisions from the start.