The Pollination of the Date Palm

ONE OF THE OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTICS of the date palm, Phoenix dactylifera Linn., is its dioecious nature, the pollenbearing and fruit-bearing, or male and female, flowers being borne on separate trees. Among wild palms reproducing from seed, the two sexes are produced in approximately equal numbers, and this abundance of males furnishes a large supply of pollen which, carried by the wind, suffices to pollinate at least enough of the female blossoms to perpetuate the species. An understanding of this fact was of importance to the first systematic cultivators of the date palm, for by hand-pollination, instead of wind-pollination, they could dispense with all males except three or four for each hundred females, and thus economize on space and labor, while ensuring a better crop. On the other hand, the separation of the sexes appealed to the religiously-tinged imagination of the primitive mind, and was doubtless one of the factors leading to the veneration with which the palm was regarded by the early dwellers in the Tigris-Euphrates region. While, therefore, the artificial pollination of the palm has an interest to the student from several points of view, it has often been misunderstood by Occidentals,1 to whom date-growing is foreign. European dictionaries give but a confused idea of

Astronomy · Biology · Botany · Palm · Physics · Pollen · Pollination · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Botanical Research and Chemistry · Date Palm Research Studies

• Date Palm and Date Palm Inflorescences in the Late Uruk Period ( C. 3300 b.c.)

  Open Access•Marcin Z Paszke•Iraq•2019

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