The World's Tallest Palm Tree is a Humble Giant
If you were a Spanish poet you might describe this tree with the alliterative phrase, palmera de cera, but its actual name is palma de cera – namely, the Wax Palm.
It’s a humble giant that grows primarily in the northeastern segment of Colombia in a valley that stands at 6,000 feet elevation. This tree breathes rarified air, for sure.
I say it’s humble because it looks a little bit like something out of a Dr. Seuss cartoon. Does it laugh at itself when it sees its image on the Internet? Hopefully so. Self-deprecating humor is good for the soul.
It’s also a giant because it is literally the tallest palm tree in the world – by a pretty good margin.
The standard height of the Wax Palm is 200 feet! Some have been known to grow as tall as 300 feet – wow.
The next tallest, a Caribbean palm, can reach heights of 180 feet. A rival palm in Indonesia comes a close third at about 160 feet.
In the US, our majestic Royal Palm “only” grows to about 80 feet, although an extraordinary one may reach 100 feet.
From the picture above you might not get a great sense of the sheer verticality of this tree because there is nothing to compare it to in its own landscape. Let’s try a comparison to man-made structures to give you some perspective on its size.
Pretty awesome, right?!
Glorious nature, raw nature, can sometimes be a sacred window into a deeper glory of our divinely-created world. It’s a kind of sheer vivacity that has even been memorialized in Scripture:
“The just shall flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar of Lebanon.” (Ps 92:13)
And just for the record, the Lebanon cedar only grows to 60 feet. Amateur.
Photo Credits: Diegotorquemada, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Comparison chart by Peter Darcy.
Make sure to see other recent Sacred Windows Vignettes.
