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My neighbors, Linh and Kris, tended a lovely garden at the foot of their stairwell for many years. Protected by the canopy of a grand willow oak, the fan palm grew slowly larger as the years accumulated. I often admired its graceful curves, never more than on one foggy morning just before tenants at Wilshire Village were evicted and the complex abandoned. Returning a year later, I found the peaceful spot utterly demolished, no trace of the palm, the garden, the buildings, or the lives of my neighbors once so happily nested there. Even the overarching willow oak had been damages, some of the branches amputated by the clumsy machinery of demolition.
The Fan Palm would have surely perished in the winter of 2009 / 2010 in any case, so brutal a weather reminder that Houston is actually not a tropical city. Banana Fan Palms are originally from Madagascar, now grown throughout the tropics. Ravenala is the botanical genus, more prosaically, Traveler's Palm: Arbre des voyageur (French), Waaierpalm (Dutch), Baum der Reisenden (German), Arbol del viajero (Spanish), 旅人蕉 (Chinese), Chuối rẻ quạt (Vietnamese), although I favor the more poetic Urania to the dire-sounding Ravenala, Urania (Οὐρανία) was one of the nine muses of Greek mythology (The others were: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, and Thalia), known as the muse of astrology. She was most often depicted as gazing heavenwards, wrapped in a star-embroidered cloak. In Classical times she was muse of philosophy, and after the Renaissance, muse to the Christian poets, most famously the "heavenly muse" from Milton's Paradise Lost.
The Fan Palm would have surely perished in the winter of 2009 / 2010 in any case, so brutal a weather reminder that Houston is actually not a tropical city. Banana Fan Palms are originally from Madagascar, now grown throughout the tropics. Ravenala is the botanical genus, more prosaically, Traveler's Palm: Arbre des voyageur (French), Waaierpalm (Dutch), Baum der Reisenden (German), Arbol del viajero (Spanish), 旅人蕉 (Chinese), Chuối rẻ quạt (Vietnamese), although I favor the more poetic Urania to the dire-sounding Ravenala, Urania (Οὐρανία) was one of the nine muses of Greek mythology (The others were: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, and Thalia), known as the muse of astrology. She was most often depicted as gazing heavenwards, wrapped in a star-embroidered cloak. In Classical times she was muse of philosophy, and after the Renaissance, muse to the Christian poets, most famously the "heavenly muse" from Milton's Paradise Lost.
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