Palm Trees of Canada

image via FGnation

Palm trees. For as long as Earth has been inhabited, they have been associated with tropical paradise. When you see a palm tree, warm weather abounds, t-shirts are optional, and a beach or retirement home is never far away. So it's obvious that you won't find any palms much farther north than Alabama and South Carolina right?

Wrong.

See if you can tell which of these photos are in Canada, and which are Florida:

images via City-Data, Victoria, HubPages 

Just kidding, they're all Canada.

Canada, the land of ice hockey, ice fishing, and Westeros-level winters, has plenty of palm trees in British Columbia, which is essentially Canadian-California. Due to the Pacific Ocean and some well placed mountains, the southwestern coast of Canada has winter low temperatures that are less like the rest of Canada, and more like Florida.

The town of Tofino, British Columbia, is becoming renown for it's surfing, warm climate, and exotic palms. It's population regularly swells to ten times it's norm due to the influx of tourists it attracts as the surf capital of Canada.

image via Tofino

It's basically California without all the douchy clothing lines.

Vancouver, host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, is also known as the Hollywood of the north, and has a beachfront lined with palm trees. And on the off chance that it happens to snow, it doesn't kill the trees. It instead makes them look even cooler.

image via Skyscrapers

And I mean that in two ways.

The types of palm trees grown in this small section of Canada are more "cold-hardy" than most, and can withstand the very brief drops in temperature that they might experience in their otherwise warmer winters. But only brief drops.

It's for this reason that the tropical plants can grow here and not in places farther south such as Chicago where the winters are far more prolonged and colder, although that hasn't stopped Chicago from transplanting them there in the summers.

image via Pinterest

If you want to keep them, maybe try moving to Canada?

So just remember that when Donald Trump becomes president and you move to Canada, there are still warm tropical options for yourself.  Even in the cold north.

image via PalmTalk

Oh, and they can also grow in Alaska too.