We have a beautiful Mexican fan palm growing in our backyard, right next to my little office. I love it. Except that it’s growing so fast that it might be a monster! I’d be happy if it could somehow magically stay just like it is right now, but I know that it will eventually get 80 feet tall! As you scan the treescape in our neighborhood, you clearly see some almost as tall as the redwoods. Take a look at its beauty here:

We’ve only owned this house for almost four nears now (it’s early 2021), and this was the palm tree in March of 2017, when the previous owner included this photo in the real estate listing.

By the way, see that shed? Now look back at the first photo above, and notice how I transformed it into a beautiful office. I’m a little proud of that. :) Anyway, we’ll keep it for several more years, and I’ll use our long extension ladder to trim the dead leaves (and maybe the lattice-like trunk covering), but one day it will be too tall for that, and I’ll have to cut it down. That will be a chore that would get expensive if I can’t handle it myself, so there’s a chance it will come out sooner than that. We’ll just take it year by year.

So, you want a Mexican fan palm?

Well, if you like them and you have room for their eventual height, you might be interested in this useful guide from the University of Florida about growing Mexican fan palms.

I would also add that they’re considered actual weeds by some — around here, you can find seedlings growing in sidewalk cracks once in a while or popping out of an unirrigated freeway embankment. We get a few seedlings in our garden now and then, but I’ve never seen ours produce any fruit/seeds yet, so they might be coming from more mature specimens in the neighborhood.