… I saw a palm tree that stood out from my local urban landscape. It was easily 100 feet tall, and REALLY rose well above the line of buildings and other urban trees.

I thought to myself, “now that is one weird tree.”

And I grew up in Los Angeles, where row upon row of palm-lined streets really are commonplace. This is Windsor Blvd–just another LA street.

Then it occurred to me: WHY is it like that? Why are they so ridiculously tall and skinny?

We’ve discussed palm trees before in SRS (back in May, 2015 when we asked “Victorians and palms. A thing?“). Back then we decided that yes, it was a thing for Victorian era landscapers to plunk palm trees down everywhere. As we found “Victorians were mad about palms.”

But as interesting as that is, it doesn’t answer our Challenge today:

1. Why are palm trees SO tall?


It doesn’t seem to make sense.

Or does it?

Can you figure out why this tree has managed to do so well over the years? And why does it have such a strange aspect ratio??

Once you find out, let us know, and tell us HOW you figured it out!

Search on!


P.S. You’ll note that I did this post in a LARGE font. Do you like it? Hate it? (I did it because I noticed that the posts are hard to read on mobile devices. So this is a small experiment to see what might work better. Your opinion?)