The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has evaluated a petition to add the sphinx date palm to the federal list of threatened and endangered species and determined that it is not eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act (Act). The sphinx date palm is a cultivar – a plant that has been created, or selected for intentionally, via horticulture and maintained through cultivation. Cultivars are not listable entities as defined in the Act.
In July 2011, the Mountgrove Property Owners Association requested that the Service list the sphinx date palm under the Act.
The sphinx date palm was described in the late 1910s or early 1920s from a grove in Phoenix’s Arcadia area where it had been propagated from a seedling around 1917. The sphinx cultivar is thought to be a chance hybrid between Hayani palm variety and another heirloom (a plant cultivated for multiple human generations), both native to Southwest Asia. The sphinx date palm is known only from cultivation and cannot reproduce from seeds. Propagation is accomplished by removing offshoots (lateral shoot from the main stem of the plant) from mature palms. The 115-foot trees are renowned for their fruit quality.
The Mountgrove neighborhood in the Arcadia area of central Phoenix was built in the subdivided sphinx date palm grove in the early 1950s. Today, about 450 mature trees remain in the grove – the only known stand of sphinx date palm. There are a few additional individual palms in the Phoenix Metro and Yuma areas and two sphinx date palms are reported to exist in California.