What’s In A Name?

Our new found interest in Palm Desert real estate got me thinking about the name Palm Desert. Apparently it was named that after someone planted date palms there, no doubt thinking the climate would be suitable. Well, no date palm industry resulted from these initial plantings, although interestingly enough the only date palms cultivated commercially in the US are grown in Indio, California fairly near to Palm Desert in the Coachella Valley. It is also worth noting that there are fewer and fewer date palms there now. The real estate is just too valuable to leave them to a bunch of date trees. In spite of all the empty, dry areas elsewhere in the US, date palm cultivation has just not taken off. A little bit of research showed me something quite astonishing, which is that date palms are grown mainly in the troubled regions of the world: Iraq, Iran, Cyprus, Palestine, Israel, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia. Is this because people in dry, desert area are combative? Is it because date palms are easy to grow and that is why people opt to grow them where there are no agricultural resources to draw on? Is it because they grow practically wild in these areas? I couldn’t say, but the whole story makes a bit of a mockery of the name Palm Desert. Anyway it’s pretty and the whole Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Palm Everything Else idea has been good for the area. People come from as far away as Australia and Canada to retire there. Surely the name has something to do with it, a promise of an endless Monte Carlo promenade through life right until the end.

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