SOME IMPORTANT DATES IN HISTORY

HERE'S AN OASIS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN, not far from the point where Loop 202 reaches its eastern apogee and starts orbiting back to Phoenix. Edged by hardscrabble vacant lots more barren than the barest of desert, and parking lots dusted by swirling sand, this oasis on a scruffy section of the Arizona State University Polytechnic campus in Mesa is a landmark in the world of American date farming.

At first, you might wonder whether the stand of palms established itself at the site of a remnant desert spring. But then you notice that the trees are arranged in rows. This is ASU's Date Palm Germplasm, one of the top two living repositories of rare date palms in the United States. More than 50 kinds of dates - with names such as Barhi, Halawi, Zahidi and Bentamoda, recalling these palms' ancient Middle Eastern and North African origins grow at the germplasm, a genetic bank to preserve varieties that might otherwise be lost forever. Among them is the Maresco, a locally sourced date of unknown parentage.

"There are a lot of things here that, if they disappeared from this collection, you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the country," says Scott Frische, curator of horticulture at the Phoenix Zoo. He also tends his own 2-acre date palm grove on the lower eastern slopes of the White Tank Mountains, west of Phoenix. "I'm a Saturday farmer," he says. Frische is here with Deborah Thirkhill, germplasm manager and arboretum program coordinator at ASU, and Elaine Joyal, an ethnobotanist collaborating with them on a book about dates in the Salt and Gila river valleys.

While date palms can reach 80 feet, the germplasm's trees are more squat than stately, with fronds longer than the trunks are tall. These younger trees were planted when the germplasm moved after the 2002 sale of its previous ASU location. The university's collection, which includes Medjool date palms along historic Palm Walk, is the country's largest public date garden. After the importation of date shoots to the Phoenix area in 1890, Tempe became an early center for the industry and home to a pair of research stations. And for years, graduating classes have planted date palms on campus as a gift to the university.

Considering that the botanical name for date palms is Phoenix dactylifera, it's only appropriate that the Salt River Valley has a long history of date production, connecting the region to an agricultural tradition that goes back 6,000 years or more. Not that dates have ever been a simple fruit to grow.

For one thing, there are both male and female date palms, and with two sexes come the kinds of complications you might expect. Only females produce fruit, which means it makes no sense to raise a bunch of males especially because one male produces enough pollen for 40 to 50 female palms. But bees often deliver that pollen to the hive, not to female palms. Wind can distribute pollen, but for commercial cultivation, you can't leave the process to chance. So, male flower stems are removed from the palms, then dried and shaken to extract the pollen as a fine powder. After that, the females are pollinated by hand with tools that include condiment bottles, modified leaf blowers and cannons. It can take four tries, because palm flowers don't all bloom at the same time.

Frische reaches up with a pole saw to sever the flower stalk from a male tree. He's had a fascination with dates since the day in 1962 when his father, an engineer originally from New York, noticed a short newspaper article advising homeowners that they could grow date palms of their own. Frische still has the clip.

The family lived north of Phoenix, so it was more than an hour's drive to a little farm in Mesa where a farmer sold palms. Frische remembers seeing a line of date palms, some of which had sprouted offshoots from their trunks.

Rather than grow palms as seedlings, it's easier and faster to replant the offshoots, which are clones of the parent. “The farmer had built a little wooden box around the base of the offshoots, so he could backfill soil against them,” Frische recalls. “It was almost an intuitive thing for me, and I sort of instantly understood he hoped to root those offshoots so he could cut them and have more palms. And that struck me as something that was very, very important.” Frische's father wanted a Medjool, but the farmer wouldn't sell him one, instead suggesting a Khadrawy, an appealing Iraqi variety known for its caramel-like flavor. The farmer later sent a worker to the Frische property to dig a hole, then arrived in another few days with the shoot and some sand for fill. “It was quite a fascinating procedure to me as a little kid,” Frische says.

In a few years, the Khadrawy produced fruit, even though the tree was so small that the pendants of fruit touched the ground. Each year, the harvest got better as the tree grew tall enough that Frische's father started using a step stool or small ladder to reach the fruit.

Frische now has 59 producing palms in 30 varieties, along with a nursery where he raises trees for offshoots. His fascination endures, even if it's tempered by the realities of date farming. He says it's constant work to clean them, preen them, and cut and care for shoots, which are susceptible to rapid dehydration once removed from the mother tree. “They're a nightmare to maintain,” he says. “The nature of the date palm is to become a multi-headed beast. And a hostile one, at that.” LONG SCOTTSDALE ROAD, in an old ranch building with a shaded porch and bright yellow door, is Sphinx Date Co. Palm & Pantry, which traces its origins to a store that opened in 1951 at the Sphinx Date Ranch in Phoenix's Arcadia neighborhood. Now owned and operated by the mother-daughter team of Sharyn and Rebecca Seitz, the pantry, which specializes in locally sourced foods (including date salsa), is a link to an era when such stands as the Shalimar Date Gardens and Hi-Jolly Dates were popular destinations in and around Scottsdale. It's also where you can find the most legendary of Phoenix dates: the Black Sphinx.

The Black Sphinx has multiple competing origin stories, but one is contained in a PDF that Frische calls the “Hilgeman document,” a history of Arizona date growing researched in the 1970s by Robert H. Hilgeman of the University of Arizona Citrus Branch Experiment Station in Tempe. According to the document, in 1919, Robert Metzler, a partner in the Phoenix Date Co., discovered an unusual seedling in a Phoenix yard, then replanted it at the company's gardens, along with 10 offshoots. The palms ended up producing an especially delicate and delicious date: small, rich and creamy, but also prone to rapid spoilage. Tapping into the exotic allure of dates, and perhaps caught up in the mania for all things Egypt following the 1922 discovery of King Tut's tomb, the company's owner, Frank Brophy, dubbed this mysterious variety the Black Sphinx, then renamed his operation the Sphinx Date Co.

Valley of the Sun date farming peaked at about 400 acres in the 1940s, when the fruit became a popular sugar and candy substitute because of rationing during World War II. As postwar Phoenix boomed, local date production steeply declined. A major rainstorm in the early 1950s damaged a large portion of the date crop, and the demand for housing led date farmers to conclude that it was more profitable to grow subdivisions than Sukkary dates. Yet the Sphinx Date Ranch survived, albeit in a hybrid form. Around 1953, real estate classifieds began to tout Mountgrove, a new “nature-blessed” neighborhood along Lafayette Boulevard south of Camelback Road “in a setting of date palm trees and citrus.” A two-bedroom ranch home with a shake shingle roof, mahogany cabinetry and a fireplace would set you back $12,700. As that price point would suggest, much has changed since then. But Black Sphinx date palms, all directly descended from that lone seedling discovered a century ago, still grow, casting long shadows across gardens and creating a skyline of soaring trunks and rustling fronds above Mountgrove.

“It's kind of a special place; I have an emotional attachthe variety. “Once they try them,” he says, “their response is, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea that dates could be like this. How is it possible?’”

Occasionally, he bumps up against skeptics, such as at a Whole Foods where a new produce manager initially rebuffed Durette’s Black Sphinx pitch. “Then, one of the produce department workers came over,” Durette recalls. “He said to the manager, ‘You don’t understand what’s going on here. These dates are just amazing. People come in the store a month before they’re harvested and start asking, “Are those dates coming soon? Have you ordered them? When are you going to get them?” These are the Cadillac of dates.’ So, the manager looks at me and says, ‘Well, OK, then!’” In A 1921 ARTICLE TITLED In the Heart of American Dateland, writer Guy Elliott Mitchell quoted what he described as an old Arabian proverb: “The date tree must have its head in the fire and its feet in the water.” In most respects, the deserts of Arizona are ideal for date growing. But conditions are hardly uniform. While date palms crave water, their fruit is highly vulnerable to storms, because ripening coincides with the summer monsoon. “We get some really wicked monsoon [storms] here in Phoenix,” Durette notes, “and the stalks, which weigh 20 pounds each, can break with one good gust of wind.

And there goes 20 pounds of dates.” By contrast, Yuma, which has emerged as the state’s center for Medjool date production, doesn’t get such intense or frequent monsoon storms. “Yuma more closely approximates the climate of the classic date-growing regions of North Africa and the Middle East,” Durette says. “Dates do not like monsoons. They appreciate the water, but if you can imagine them growing along the Nile, they would have plenty of water but less humidity. When we get monsoons, they can be detrimental to the crop if it rains and the fruit doesn’t dry out. That doesn’t happen in Yuma. Yuma gets virtually no monsoons.” Yuma’s date heritage goes back nearly 160 years, to when seeds imported from the Middle East were planted after the Civil War. While production in Phoenix survives thanks to small operations and hobbyists, commercial date farming in Yuma has expanded rapidly since the 1990s, says Glenn C. Wright, associate professor and extension tree fruit specialist at UA’s Yuma Agricultural Center. Wright has spent 29 years in the area and watched as date production spread across the Colorado River and into Arizona from California’s Bard Valley, where Medjools first were grown extensively in the United States. The Bard Valley was already filled with vegetable farms, so date growers began looking toward Yuma, including a Sandy upland mesa where land was available. Some doubted the mesa's potential, but it proved to be excellent for dates. Combined, the Bard Valley and Yuma now have about 7,500 acres in Medjool production, including a 3,000-acre farm that Wright believes might be the world's largest. And grower-owned Datepak ranks among the biggest packing houses anywhere.

There also are independent growers. On the other side of Telegraph Pass, out among the Mohawk Valley's ocotillos, mesquites and paloverdes, Naked Dates began farming in 2007 and grows 3,000 Medjool palms in long rows that seem to stretch to the Gila Mountains. “A few people realized the potential of the Medjool because it's larger than all other dates,” Wright says. “You know as well as I do that Americans eat with their eyes as well as their mouths. Anything bigger has got to be better.” Like Frische and Durette, Wright emphasizes how labor-intensive date farming can be. After harvest and before pollination, the palms' lance-like thorns, some 6 inches long, must be lopped off. Once the fruit grows, about 70 percent is removed so that the remaining dates can grow larger. Farm workers fit the bunch with a ring to spread apart the remaining dates, promoting air movement and minimizing fermentation during ripening. Workers place bags around the bunches to thwart birds, keep rain off and prevent ripe dates from falling to the ground. Then, because the individual dates don't all ripen at the same time, workers might need three attempts to pick the entire crop.

“So, I don't know, that's 11 or 12 times you might have to go up and down the tree,” Wright says. “And when the tree is 30 or 40 feet tall and takes so much hand labor, that makes everything quite expensive. Much more expensive than citrus. Which is why, if you look at a pound of dates, they cost so much. But the good thing about growing dates is they're virtually pest-free. We have no diseases of consequence or pests of consequence.” For some Arizonans, dates are less about labor costs and profits than about cultural resonance. Because so much work is involved, Thirkhill, the ASU germplasm curator, organizes volunteers to help out as the palms go through their annual cycle. The program is especially popular with the university's many students from the Middle East — who, she says, are not shy about making suggestions: “They'll say, 'No, we do that differently back home.” After living and working for nearly 30 years in Europe, mostly in the decidedly unfriendly date climate of Scandinavia, Mazin Alsweedi, a native of Baghdad, moved to Arizona about six years ago. He grew up with dates in Iraq: His grandfather operated a small commercial operation that raised Barhi dates southeast of Baghdad in Nasiriyah, where Alsweedi sometimes spent four months a year and helped out at the farm.

While dates remain a novelty in the United States, Alsweedi says they're central to Iraqi culture, with palm trees depicted on coins and bank notes. Long before refrigeration, dates were a staple of the Iraqi diet, in combination with milk, yogurt and bread. Alsweedi likens their prominence to rice in China or chiles in Mexico. “Dates are a must,” he says. “Each and every Middle Eastern house must have dates. It's essential that they are on the table. We grow up with this fruit, and we love it. The dates must be there.” Alsweedi has established a farm in Laveen, in Phoenix's southwest corner, with 350 date palms. He describes the palm as “a beautiful tree, such a generous tree” and explains the many ways date palms are used throughout their life cycle: The offshoots let you expand your farm quickly and can be sold to raise money. The fruit is eaten directly or as part of recipes, or pressed into honey. Pruned palm fronds are used for fires or fertilizer, or as a weaving material. Then, at the end of the date palm's long life, the trunk is chopped into sections and turned into logs for homebuilding.

“There is some magic in this tree,” Alsweedi says. “I don't know what it is. If I go and walk between the palms, it just makes me feel good.”