242 LUTHER BURBANK 



The pollen-bearing trees will of course bear 

 no fruit, and while there must be here and there 

 one of these in the palm grove — one staminate to 

 about twenty-five pistillate trees — it would be 

 an obvious waste of space to give over half 

 the ground to sterile trees. Yet there is no 

 way of determining whether an individual tree 

 is a male or a female until it comes to the age 

 of blossoming; and the palm is a tree of 

 slow growth that matures only after many 

 years. 



But trees grown from suckers will be of the 

 same sex as the parent trees; hence the double 

 utility of propagating by this method. 



Palms foe Ornament 



From the standpoint of the present chapter, 

 however, the fruit-bearing qualities of the palms 

 are not so much in question as their ornamental 

 character. Considered merely as ornamental 

 trees, there are members of the genus Phoenix, 

 to which the date palm belongs, that are more 

 attractive than this famous fruit bearer. And in 

 general the character of the form and foliage of 

 a date palm is carried with sufficient certainty 

 from parent to offspring by the seed to make it 

 perfectly feasible to raise palms from the seed 

 ^or ornamental purposes. 



