Tenerife forum

[bardofely]

Ever since I have lived here it has saddened me to see how gardeners feel they need to hack and brutalize most palms and also the Dragon trees. These idiots take pleasure in cutting off the living green fronds and leaves. With the palms they then may do a repeat treatment of removing the leaf stubs too. All of this leaves a butchered-looking tree that is weakened and not as it was supposed to look. This means that none of us ever get to see truly wild specimens of these trees and cannot know what they look like. Even the so-called wild palms here I note have had the dead lower fronds ripped down and sometimes left in a pile.

I wrote about this briefly in my column in the Tenerife Sun pointing out that the dead leaves which cling to the trunk would form a habitat for many forms of creatures but all this gets destroyed.

Now I realise that human beings seem to have some part of them that is destructive and enjoys killing things so I suppose this is yet another face of it but it is sad! Anyway I thought I'd do some research and find, as I suspected, that palm pruning is for people not palms, can be a danger to the plant's health and is not natural.

I have just sent an email to a Professor Gilman who was head of one site I found with pictures of pruned trees. In his opinion most of the palms I see in Tenerife are very badly pruned.

I also found this one with a rant against palm-pruning! I am not alone in my feelings about this it seems!

http://www.azcentral.com/home/garden/articles/0807irish07.html

[rob]

I couldn't agree more Bard. Many Canarians believe that pruning equals cutting things back to the bare minimum.
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[bardofely]