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Updated: May 9, 2025
Up to this time you have thought, perhaps, there was only one, and that was the palm-tree itself. Maybe you have heard of more, such as the sago-palm, the cocoa-nut palm, the date-palm, or the cabbage-palm; and you fancied there might be others perhaps as many as a dozen!
Under the arch is the open fireplace where the big coffee-pots and water-kettles simmer all day on a charcoal fire. The old man looks quite cheerful seated on his uncomfortable stool made of date-sticks. You will read later about our old friend the date-palm and how the tree is used for nearly every purpose.
Giving an account of their country, they say, "Fezzan is a country of poor people; it always was so: we have only the date-palm. This is our riches. If the sea came up to Fezzan, then we would ship dates for Tripoli; but as it is, they are too heavy they don't pay the expense of carrying to Tripoli. We have besides, a little corn, but not cattle enough to draw water to increase this cultivation.
Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley, and the squeaking of Strickland's saddle. So we went up from the date-palm to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the snows, and we snuffed it.
This space was entirely devoted to flowers: on each side was a grove of orange trees, and in the lower garden were the fig, India-rubber and date-palm, the golden date of Africa. Of trees there were the camphor tree, coffee, Portuguese laurel, "tree of Paradise," crape-myrtle, guava, lime, orange, citron, pomegranate, sago-palm and many others whose home is in the tropics.
But the date-palm disappears in these mountains, whilst the olive increases, crowning the lower groups of Atlas, or spreading in large fields in the valleys. Patches of wheat and barley are also cultivated on the mountain sides. Arab stone-built villages are seen scattered through the rising groups and valleys. I am told these gardens belong to people in Tripoli.
The soil all round Sorrento is very nearly as light and dry and sandy as this, and vineyards and olive orchards and cocooneries are part of the agricultural wealth there. Our neighbour Mr. C has successfully cultivated the date-palm in his garden on the edge of the sea, at St.
The ancients knew the difference between the male and the female date-palm, and fertilised them artificially by shaking the pollen of the male tree over the flowers of the female. The fertilisation took place in spring.
The soft and fibrous date-palm furnishes one of the worst kinds of wood in the world; the poplar, though more useful, is not much less brittle and light. From materials like these no system of carpentry could be developed that should allow great spaces to be covered and great heights to be reached.
Large quantities of corn, dates not only in great numbers, but of such beauty, freshness, size, and flavor, as no Greek had ever seen or tasted, insomuch that fruit like what was imported into Greece, was disregarded and left for the slaves wine and vinegar, both also made from the date-palm; these are the luxuries which Xenophon is eloquent in describing, after his recent period of scanty fare and anxious apprehension; not without also noticing the headaches which such new and luscious food, in unlimited quantity, brought upon himself and others.
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