The Judean date palm is a cultivar of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera).
Prized for its beauty, shade, and medicinal properties, the cultivar was thought to have become extinct sometime around AD 150. However, in 2005, a preserved 2,000-year-old seed sprouted. It was at the time the oldest known human-assisted germination of a seed (surpassed in 2012 by a 32,000-year-old arctic flower). The palm, named Methuselah (not to be confused with a bristlecone pine tree of the same name), was about 1.5 m (5 ft) tall in June 2008.As of November 2011, it is reported at 2.5m height, and transplanted from pot to earth.
Read more about Judean Date Palm: History, Germination of 2000 Year-old Seed
Famous quotes containing the words judean, date and/or palm:
“Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Judean threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“O Love, what hours were thine and mine,
In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)