The date palm is usually dioecious, that is, having the male and female flowers on separate plants and hence single specimens seldom bear fruit in our gardens. But by the following from the Gardeners' Chronicle, it appears the tree can sometimes change its sexual characteristics:

" We learn from Prof. Henriques, of Coimbra, that in the garden of that University a date palm, which previously has annually produced male flowers only, has this year developed a female inflorescence also, the fruits upon which are now ripening. There is, of course, nothing unusual in the fact of a normally dioecious plant becoming monoecious, or even hermaphrodite (structurally), but this case of the date palm is the more interesting as the existence of two sexes in plants was originally ascertained by the observation of the fact that the Arabs impregnated the female flowers of the date palm by taking a branch with the male flowers and shaking the pollen upon the stigmas".

Some quarter of a century ago, when Messrs. Longworth, Prince, of Long Island, Dr. Warder, of Cincinnati, and others, were engaging the horticultural magazines in controversy on the immutability of sex in strawberry blossoms, such a statement would have been regarded as incredible.