Whitehead Street Key West Part Nine

Beautiful date palm on an estate along Whitehead Street in Key West

If you like beautiful landscaping and exotic plants a walk along Whitehead Street in Key West, Florida is is like walking through a dream. On the south end of Whitehead are yards with beautiful date palms like the one in this picture. One place has unique silver/blue colored silver Bismarck palms from the island of Madagascar off the African coast. Then there is the giant kapok tree in front of the Monroe County Court House and along the northern portion of Whitehead Street is the Banyan Resort Condominium property with the huge and exotic banyan tree then at the northern end of Whitehead at Mel Fisher's Museum is a really unique ficus, probably a strangler fig tree with a rectangular root system that must be 10' X 12' or more and in that strange rectangular shape. Then scattered along the way are brightly colored royal poinciana and orchid trees.

Pineapple entrance ornaments to a residence along south Whitehead Street

Pineapple is a fruit often included architecture, however, its usage in architecture didn't began the late 1600s and early 1700s when merchants began importing pineapple to the colonies from Jamaica.

Pineapples were a sweet fruit that was served as a delicacy to guests, and became a sign of hospitality that stands to this day.

Throughout the Caribbean, the pineapple symbolized hospitality, and the Spaniards soon learned they were welcome if a pineapple was placed by the entrance to a village. This symbolism spread to Europe, then to Colonial North America, where it became the custom to carve the shape of a pineapple into the columns at the entrance to plantations and estates.