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The regal Date Palm was first imported to the New World by Spanish missionaries, then sailed by schooner to California in the last decades of the 19th century. There, the transplanted trees were arranged into neat groves that tower close to the U.S./Mexico border.
Known as "the tree of life" in many parts of the Middle East, the palms are one of the earliest humanly cultivated plants, nurtured for thousands of years in the Fertile Crescent and in many areas along the Persian Gulf.
Elegantly poised far above the flooded desert floor, the California date palms rise in even grids, an occasional stray tree listing from symmetry. The ladders tacked to their trunks are beyond human reach; they resemble relics from a prior era, but this is an active harvest.
Sustained by controlled irrigation and harvested by invisible hands, the groves form a mirage of grafted paradise.