Prodigious Palms

Palm trees are not just a pretty picture, says Sally Cunningham, as she discovers that the flowers of the Chusan palm are actually edible

- Sally Cunningham

When I was growing up, one of the signs you were on holiday somewhere on the south coast of the UK was seeing palm trees, as they could only survive in the mild air a few miles from the Channel.

Now they’re everywhere. Until a few months ago I thought the Chusan palm, Trachyocarpus fortunei, was simply a rather striking garden feature, but I now know better, thanks to a chance meeting on a bus. Stuck in traffic on the X84 bus, I found myself chatting to a lively Chinese woman and, as it often does, the conversation turned to food. As the bus creaked forward a few yards, revealing a majestic palm in a front garden, she asked me if they were hard to grow as she missed eating the immature flowers. “Not really,” I said, “they’re very popular nowadays.”