Mexico City’s palm trees are dead. Their remains are a warning

Saving Mexico’s native trees is not an environmental problem, it’s a business conundrum.

Brought to you by…

MXPE Deep Dives. What the front pages are missing that you’ve got to know.

“¡Frond!”

Çağla, a Turkish woman living in Mexico City, froze on hearing the stranger’s cry. She saw her life flash before her eyes as something akin to a tree fell directly in front of her with a lethal crash. A palm tree frond had barely just missed her. Almost three meters long and heavy enough to kill a passerby, Çağla wouldn’t have been the first victim of the city’s Canary Island palms.

Imported to Mexico in the 1940’s in an attempt to emulate the glitz of Beverly Hills, Canary Island palms are—readers will be shocked to read—not indigenous to Mexico. The country’s capital however, with its mild climate, has played host to a myriad of invasive species, most of them planted by folks more interested in aesthetics than environmentalism.

Little did these landscape artists know that they were planting a deathtrap for future generations. For the past decade, spiky fronds have been the cause of gruesome accidents, falling on cars, cyclists, and pedestrians walking along the palm lined roads of the city. Earlier this year, one fell onto a woman’s head and was left incrusted in her scalp.

Pity the palm trees, though, for they are mostly all dead. The first reports of dying trees came about in 2011, but deaths really took off in 2013. A fungus had infected the city’s palms and, disseminated by the wind, had spread swiftly across most of the population. All across Mexico City’s parks and avenues, more and more trees succumbed to the plague, drying up and collapsing. Fronds first, then the entire trunk, as the remains rotted out.

Ivonne Olalde Omaña, a tree biologist from Mexico’s national university (UNAM), told The Mexico Political Economist that the epidemic really took off due to the long droughts that have scoured Mexico in past years.

Then in 2022, tragedy truly struck.