5-10-5: Jason Dewees, Plantsman, Resident Plant Guru of Flora Grubb Gardens and Author of Designing with Palms,
Interview by Eric Hsu and Jason Dewees Photographs by Caitlin Atkinson
Jason Dewees with the photographer Caitlin Atkinson
The plant world always have their champions for specific plants or plant groups, and Jason Dewees who currently works at Flora Grubb Gardens identifying, sourcing, and growing plants for its business, is no exception in his devotion toward palms. Ever since his book Designing with Palms (Timber Press) was published in 2018, he has won plaudits for its informative and creative approach with palms. The book is beautifully illustrated with lush photographs from Bay-area based photographer Caitlin Atkinson who specializes in gardens, interiors and still life. Those of us who garden in northern climates can only read enviously, although we can still grow some palms in pots! Jason’s enthusiasm for palms and their uses in planting design will only inspire his readers. I encourage you to add Designing with Palms to your gardening library!
What was your first or early memory with plants or the natural world?
As a child I lived in North Beach, the old Italian quarter of San Francisco, with my parents in a 1938 flat with a small garden in the back, maybe 25 by 30 feet. It had what I now know to be a classic set of mid-century San Francisco plants: hybrid fuchsias, camellias, herbs, Echeveria x imbricata, all arranged in a rectangular horseshoe bed around a tiny central lawn.
Now, picture the buds of hybrid fuchsias as little hanging balloons with seams where, upon flowering, the sepals will split apart and flex up to reveal the petals. I had so much fun popping those air-filled buds! I remember worrying that I was hurting the future flower yet finding the pop so satisfying that I couldn’t resist.
How did you first become interested in palms?
The first airplane trip I remember was to Miami, where my mother grew up, to visit my grandparents. I was five years old and my grandparents were in the process of planting the acre garden around their new house with Florida natives, fruit trees, ferns, elephant ears, and palms. My grandfather used to cart me around in the wheelbarrow and show me the banana patch, the mango tree, his plot of winter tomatoes, and his favorite palm, the royal palm (Roystonea regia).
That year my nursery-school friend Nathanael’s family moved from San Francisco to New York, leaving my mother with a small neanthe bella palm, Chamaedorea elegans, in a terracotta pot. It had some mealybugs, which my mother lovingly treated over what was probably a few months, and it lived with us for many years. I fixed on this mini palm tree. It had a little green trunk with rings and tiny stilt roots, a crown of feather leaves, and little flower stalks that regularly emerged from the crown. I loved peeling off the papery dead leafbases and tried to plant what I thought were the seeds (they were spent flowerbuds).
When a kid sees a house cat as cousin to the tiger, it strikes a thrill. I think the same occurred with me when I saw that little houseplant as cousin to the royal palms in Florida.
The next point of development in my palm interest was third grade, when my best elementary school teacher, Ms. Ruth Omatsu, taught us science in a very hands-on way--I grew thyme from seed!--and I started to learn scientific names of California native plants, like Sequoia sempervirens, the coast redwood, and Ulva californica, an intertidal alga we collected from San Francisco Bay. I think I got my first Pacific Coast Tree Finder that year and started identifying native trees whenever we went to the country.
That winter break my family went to Miami again. When I came back to San Francisco I doodled palm trees all the time and stared out the window of our classroom at four tall Mexican fan palms (Washingtonia robusta) growing out of the courtyard of a motel next to the school. Not only did I learn Washingtonia, I also learned Phoenix canariensis, the name of the other common California palm tree, the Canary Island date palm, and savored the sight of the specimens scattered around San Francisco.
Finally, in high school, while studying biology and California natural history, my interest in natives burgeoning, I became obsessed with palms and spent spring break in Florida. At that point my grandmother gave me her copy of the classic Palms of the World, by James McCurrach, a 1960 tome that illustrated most of the cultivated palm species of the time and served as the key to unlocking the world of palms for me. By the time I went off to college in New England I had joined the International Palm Society as their youngest member.
Brahea clara (with Butia odorata at ground level) in the Celebration Garden Meadow at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
For us northerners, palms always conjure those faraway tropical isles with turquoise waters and white sandy beaches. In a way, palms have become image victims of being subtropical and tropical symbols. How do you gradually address this longstanding iconography in your book?
The book is driven by my missionary zeal to give palms the attention they’re due, and to encourage landscape designers in palm-friendly climates to make successful use of these charismatic plants. We photographed more than 70 sites from Hawai`i and California to South Carolina and Florida over two years in pursuit of the best-designed gardens with palms.
In the first pages I conjure the romance that palms create for people from northern cultures. That’s why so many people love palms. And the beautifully designed book seduces readers, not least with my colleague Caitlin Atkinson’s gorgeous photography.
Yet the iconic nature of the palm tree tends to distract people from looking closely at palms and considering their tremendous variety (from trees, to shrubs, understory plants, vines, grass mimics, and even mangroves) and their aesthetic and sensory contributions. So, in the first chapters I give an introduction to the palm family--palms’ basic architecture, growth habits, distribution in habitats around the world, planting, care, and maintenance, and even the botanical records they hold! (Did you know records for the largest seed--18 kg / 40 lbs--and the largest leaf--25 m / 82 ft--in the plant kingdom are both held by palms?)
Rhapis excelsa against a backdrop of blue bamboo in Paul Humann's garden near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The book intertwines the symbolic power of palms with the richness of their design contributions. I show readers the many discrete thematic and aesthetic functions palms can play in landscape design and then take people through more than a dozen of the finest American landscapes with palms, illuminating the sensory pleasure they spark and plain-old utility they add. A portfolio of cold-hardy and common tropical palm species finishes off the book, and in it I give practical information about individual species’ growing requirements as well as ideas for how each can be used in making gardens.
A grove of Rhopalostylis sapida, the nikau, in the New Zealand Garden at the San Francisco Botanical Garden.
My favorite palm iconography was the dancing palms in the Super Mario Bros 3’s Desert Land. Their stems wiggled in melodic rhythm with the Egyptian-inspired beats. Do you have one you would like to reveal?
There’s something about the leaning trunks of coconut palms that captured my attention as a child. I loved how strong and flexible they looked. It seemed a miracle their fruitfulness amid the salt spray. Their recline and swaying fronds guaranteed warm sea and sky to a kid from foggy San Francisco.
Sabal palmetto in a landscape designed by Raymond Jungles for Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road complex in Miami Beach.
Our gardens and landscapes would be bereft of palms, yet the omission of a book on planting design with these remarkable monocots for years seems strange until your book’s publication. Rarely are palms given center stage in subtropical and tropical gardening books, but more as a companion chapter. Why do you suppose that reference books on palms have dominated?
We palm fanatics tend to get fixated on palms, often collecting them in our gardens, and sometimes we lose sight of the spatial context in which we’re growing them. The marvelous contemporary reference books like the Encyclopedia of Cultivated Palms can be daunting to non-specialists. Generalists oriented to garden design often have the palm tree icon in mind when considering them and thus don’t have the wherewithal to inquire after the wider array of palms, both tree types and the many other forms.
One of the book’s attractive appeal is that it includes not only the palm-centric regions of southern California, Florida and Hawaii, but also less obvious Carolinas. Have you observed any differences in design approaches with palms in the Carolinas from those of the more palm-centric states?
Visiting South Carolina delighted me because garden design is taken seriously there while palms are accepted in a casual way; the state tree is the palmetto, after all, and four species of palms are indigenous there. Carolinian gardeners and designers allow palms to play well with other plants, give them background roles as well as the spotlight. Palms are grown in formal city gardens and park-like country gardens; in native-plant restoration areas; and as shrubs, trees, dividers, hedges, canopy. Still, winters can get quite cold there, and the number of viable species is quite limited compared to here in coastal California. Carolinians make wonderful use of their palms and many lessons of the book came from them.
Ceroxylon quindiuense in the Andean Cloud Forest collection at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Planted in 1983, these two individuals were this year the first of this dioecious species, the tallest palm in the world, to bloom in North America---and one is pistillate (female) and the other, staminate (male)!
Another interesting angle that the book provides is high altitude palms, which require cool temperatures, not hot temperatures, in near- or frost-free climates. These palms either originate from the Andes (for example, Parajubaea cocoides) or Himalayas (Arenga micrantha). How did your attention shift towards these palms especially when they are slow growing and are represented only in specialist collections?
Parajubaea cocoides (at center and lower-left) and Parajubaea sunkha (right) in the Andean Cloud Forest garden at the San Francisco Botanical Garden.
These are the palms that really set San Francisco apart from other major palm-growing areas of the United States, and it behooves local garden designers to use more of them in place of the commonly grown species in California. Along with other communities in the Bay Area and on the Central and Northern California, we can grow these montane tropical palms to perfection. Some, like the parajubaeas, are among the fastest-growing species in our area, while, as you note, others are a long-term investment, like an oak. I helped Ryan Guillou, the curator of the San Francisco Botanical Garden, site fifty seedling Ceroxylon quindiuense, the Andean wax palm, in their newly redesigned Celebration Garden. In three decades, these white trunked beauties will add a majesty no other plant could do in no other part of the United States.
The Chinese windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) has become the standard by which other hardy palms are judged. It’s hard to resist this palm for it is adaptable in areas with hot and humid summers as much as cool summers (thriving palms can be seen as north as Scotland and as south as the French Riviera, and here in steamy Southeast US and cool Pacific Northwest). For a gardener wanting a palm that is different from the Chinese windmill palm, but easily cultivated in those climates, what palms would you recommend?
The very hardiest palm is a relative of the Chinese windmill palm, Rhapidophyllum hystrix, and it’s native to the Southeast US. Established plants have survived temperatures below zero Fahrenheit. It’s a true shrub palm, reaching no more than 15-feet high, with multiple growing points producing a mound of elegant, shiny fan-shaped foliage for sunny spots in colder climates and shadier spots to the south.
Rhapidophyllum hystrix (background) with Trachycarpus fortunei in Mary Alice and Bear Woodrum's garden, North Augusta, South Carolina.
Another very hardy tree palm is Trachycarpus takil, from the high foothills of the Himalayas, whose neighbors in habitat are firs, birches, and rhododendrons. It might not be best for the hottest places, but should be trialed more because it’s a more robust and elegant alternative to the Chinese windmill palm. For those hot and humid areas Sabal palmetto, native as far north as Cape Fear on the North Carolina coast, is a good gamble, as are some of the proven hybrids and selections of Sabal like S. x brazoriensis from Texas.
Trachycarpus takil in the San Francisco Botanical Garden's Asian Discovery Garden, designed by Planet Horticulture.
And for those palm-starved cold climate gardeners tired of the usual Chamaedorea elegans or Howea forsteriana collecting dust inside, are any other palms that make good houseplants?
Goodness, so many palms are good houseplants! Commonly grown in Europe is Syagrus weddelliana, a graceful mini palm tree. Widely available in the US is Rhapis excelsa, and, more recently, Rhapis multifida. The shiny Chinese fan palm Livistona chinensis is used as a houseplant in the eastern US, but not here on the West Coast. Experimentation pays off: One of my own favorite houseplants is Chuniophoenix nana, an unusual small clustering fan palm from southern China.
Your position as a horticulturist and grower at Flora Grubb Gardens allows you to observe trends for plants in the Bay Area landscapes. What observations have come through your experiences with customers?
Houseplants! People living in apartments, especially, are going cuckoo for houseplants of all kinds: hanging baskets, cactus in terracotta, palms, and newer ficus offerings like Ficus benghalensis ‘Audrey’. (Yes, fiddle-leaf figs are still popular, but people are branching out.)
In the landscape, succulents remain popular, but now instead of flipping the switch to all-succulents or to the desert look, people are using succulents in context with other dry-growing plants like natives, grasses, acacias, and, especially, protea-family plants like grevilleas and leucadendrons. People have really gotten excited about using palms in these designs, as well--especially drought-tolerant species.
Chamaerops humilis var. argentea, the silver Mediterranean fan palm, at Tongva Park, by James Corner Field Operations in consultation with John Greenlee.
How would you counter the belief that the shallow, fibrous root systems of palms may be competitive with those of other plants in layered gardens? The photographs in your book obviously demonstrate that this issue is not serious enough to deter garden designers and landscape architects from mixing them.
Some larger, drought-tolerant palms can be hard to garden under, but for the most part it’s a feature of palms that their fibrous roots allow gardens to combine them well with other plants. Palms’ roots tend to wander around seeking space around other things, which is why so many do well in pots. Another huge benefit is those roots pose fewer problems for masonry or piping than woody trees and even vines and shrubs, enabling designers to place palms close to buildings and in limited planting spaces.
Brahea clara amidst aloes and cactus in the Huntington's Desert Garden.
In the Bay Area, including East Bay, where microclimates only limit plant choices, what are your favorite companion plants to use with palms in your projects?
We found two exquisite uses of palms in meadow and savanna styles--at Tongva Park in Santa Monica, and the Huntington Botanical Gardens, near Pasadena, California. And, in the Everglades, we saw an epic natural palmetto savanna the took our breath away with hundreds of thousands of palms over the sawgrass. The combination of the fine, soft textures of grasses with the structured, yet still discernibly monocot-linear foliage of low palms in a meadow is very pleasing, as is the studding of the ground plane in a savanna by multiple palm trees, especially grown at varied heights.
Everglades: On the fringes of the Everglades, the Naples Botanical Garden is situated within a restored habitat preserve full of palmettos (Sabal palmetto), Fakahatchee grass, saw palmettos (Serenoa repens), and slash pines, here framed by native royal palms (Roystonea regia).
If you were permitted only one geographical region to study palms, what places would you restrict yourself to satiate your palm loving heart? Why?
Colombia, because of the enormous range of habitats in which palms grow there, and of course the sheer diversity of species--and because the palm botanists we met there on the International Palm Society Biennial Tour in 2018 were among the most brilliant and warm people I’ve encountered.
If you were reincarnated as a palm in your next life, what palm would you like be?
I think a Howea forsteriana, the kentia palm, lives a pretty sweet life out there in habitat on Australia’s tiny Lord Howe Island, where the mild subtropical climate is comfortable, not too hot, and fosters three other endemic palm species to be friends with: Howea belmoreana, the curly palm, Hedyscepe canterburyana, the big mountain palm, and Lepidorrhachis mooreana, the little mountain palm, a fog-lover dwelling in a half square kilometer habitat at the summit of the island’s 875 m / 2870 ft Mount Gower. Plus, kentia palms overlook the beach and the turquoise waters of the world’s southernmost coral reef.
How would you encourage all those young people currently hooked on houseplants consider diving into palms?
Try unusual palms as houseplants. Collect seeds in the neighborhood or buy seeds online and sprout them at home and grow them up! And keep in mind that many palm species are quite small and fit confined spaces both indoors and outside: Not every palm is a towering tree.
Thank you Jason!
