Plant · P-514

Date Palm

Phoenix dactylifera

Date Palm is a desert palm grown above all for its fruit - eaten fresh, cooked or dried, or worked into bread and confectionery - along with edible male flowers, pollen, and a sap drunk fresh, fermented into toddy or distilled into arrack. It needs a long, hot, dry season to ripen a crop; rain or humidity while the fruit is ripening spoils it, which is why the crop belongs to desert oases rather than wet subtropics. It is dioecious, so pollination is usually done by hand, and a mature palm can carry 50 to 70 kg of dates a year.