However, like the coconut palm, the date is a tree of many other uses. Verily, this is a tree of life. A date palm may bear fruit for a century or two and become 100 feet tall with a straight stout trunk very shaggy because of the stubs of old leaf stems. Every year, at the top, it puts on 10 or more feather-like fronds, each from 12 to 20 feet long and having several hundred leaflets. The old ones gradually die and hang downwards for several years unless removed.
Rainfall spoils the fruit.
The male and female flowers are borne on separate trees. Mature females have from 6 to 20 clusters of yellow flowers with perhaps 10,000 blossoms in each. If properly pollinated, a cluster produces from 20 to 40 pounds of dates. Pollinated by winds being too uncertain, it is customary to have one male tree for 100 females in a plantation and, as practiced by the Arabs for untold centuries, pollinate them by hand. A branchlet of male flowers is tied onto each female cluster.