Oil Palm Flowers...

Last Autumn I found some palm trees fruiting in a little square between Kendal's and Spinningfields in Manchester. We did have a warm summer so I supposed that was entirely possible.

I didn't even know what kind of palm they were. It turned out that they are Palm Oil Palms, the kind that have been planted all over the tropical rain forests to harvest the oil for various purposes. Yet here they were thriving in cold, grey, cloudy Manchester, closer to the Arctic Circle than to the Equator.

I wondered how they would do in the Winter but we had about 10 minutes of snow and hardly any frost in Manchester so they have come out unscathed. At the moment they are covered with their dusty, yellow flowers but it remains to be seen if the fruity again...