Back in Vogue : Landscapers Fan Out for Palm Trees
As door-to-door sales pitches go, this one was a little odd.
There was no demand for money; there was not even any merchandise for sale. What the man at the front door wanted to know was if anybody would mind if he uprooted and hauled off the giant palm tree in the front yard.
The palm shot up toward the sky like a giant totem pole, dwarfing the one-story house. Its sticky, inedible little fruit showered the lawn. And a clump of ugly brown fronds dangled from the crown, defying the reach of a long pole saw and attracting rats.
But this homeowner’s nuisance was a good find for the door-to-door salesman. He is a palm tree scout for Valley Crest Tree Co. in Sepulveda.
Dramatic Comeback
With palms making a dramatic comeback these days among landscape designers, more than half a dozen companies have sprouted up throughout the Southland, deploying teams of palm scouts to track down choice trees for transplanting to swanky new commercial developments.
As trees go, palms are quite portable. Tens of thousands have been dug up from the yards of homeowners and moved by giant flatbed trucks, 10-ton cranes or even helicopters to new developments. They have been relocated all over the Southland and even trucked to Northern California and New York City or loaded on jets and flown to Saudi Arabia and Europe.
Palm scouts spend their days cruising the streets, their brows furrowed, eyes scanning the horizon for choice specimens. Persuading people to part with their palms is usually no problem, they say. Sometimes scouts will pay the homeowner a couple hundred dollars for the tree--or trade it for other plants or landscaping materials.
In this way, the bane of the homeowner has become a great boon for the developer.
“Palms are definitely the rage,” said Stuart Sperber, president of Valley Crest. “And nobody wants a seedling. They want instant impact. They want big ones--30-, 40-, 60-footers. We get most of ours from people’s front yards.”
3,000 Transplanted Annually
He said his company, which has been in business for more than 20 years, transplants about 3,000 palms annually and keeps about 1,000 in stock.
Prices, excluding transportation, start at about $750 for a 30-foot Washingtonia robusta, a tall, spindly, mop-toppped specimen known as the Mexican fan palm that is common throughout Los Angeles. The more delicate and popular Coco plumosa , known also as the queen palm, runs about $3,000, Sperber said.
The most expensive tree in the company’s stock--a rare, 100-year-old Phoenix reclinada boasting 19 trunks and standing 50 feet high and 30 feet wide--is priced at $85,000. It was dug out of the front yard of a home in Glendale several years ago.
“They grow no bigger or better than that in their native South Africa,” Sperber said. “This is our Rembrandt.”
But for now, the prize palm is housed in an unflattering wooden box. It sits awkwardly among a jumble of nursery plants, awaiting a new home and a showpiece setting.
Landscape designer Barbara Brinkerhoff, a palm enthusiast, said she thinks she may have finally found a place for the palm in a luxury hotel planned near Laguna Niguel.
Palms provide great design opportunities, landscapers say.
Planted in striking geometric patterns, they boldly define large spaces and roadways. In clusters, gently swaying, they create an atmosphere of intimacy and romance. Even their shadows cast interesting designs.
With Mediterranean architecture in vogue, developers are placing orders for palms by the thousands.
“I’ve never seen the demand so great as now,” said C. Douglas Coomes, who runs The Palm Co. of Encinitas. During the last three years, he said he has uprooted about 10,000 Mexican fan palms from yards of San Diego County homeowners and sold them to a large palm supplier in Indio who has “an unlimited demand and will take everything we can dig.”
Coomes, who employs 18 people and recently planted 400,000 seedlings for future harvest, said he has canvassed all of San Diego County for palms.
“I’ve covered every alley and street,” he said, adding that he gets 80% of the palms he asks for. Most of the time, homeowners are glad to simply trade their palms for more manageable trees.
“In this climate, the palms just explode. . . . Some of them grow nine feet a year, and they get to be way out of scale with the house,” Coomes said. “They put out 40 to 50 fronds a year, and if you don’t keep them trimmed--and sometimes even if you do--rats will find a home up there.”
Relocated to Golf Courses
Most of the palms that his company has uprooted from San Diego were relocated on new golf courses in the Palm Springs area, he said.
“They’re doubling the development out there,” he explained. “There are 25 new golf courses going in and one of them alone has imported 7,000 Washingtonia robusta. “
In Orange County, too, the palm craze is in full swing.
The Irvine Co., whose master plan for growth once banned the use of palms, has done an about-face and is planting palms at a feverish pace.
A recent $4-million landscaping renewal of the Newport Center, where the company is located, calls for 800 mature palms. A row of London plane trees ringing the entry road has been ripped out and replaced with Mexican fan palms “creating a dramatic new image almost overnight,” architect Robert Elliot said.
And in four or five other major developments in Orange County, the Irvine Co. has planted hundreds of palms in scattered oases.
Not to be outdone, Los Angeles has also proclaimed its love for the palm. In its honor, the Olympics Arts Festival mounted an art exhibit in 1984 declaring the palm tree to be “the most ubiquitous and representative symbol of the city of Los Angeles, mentally and physically.”
Nobody knows exactly how many there are, but Bob Kennedy, city street tree superintendent, estimated that there are close to 100,000 lining city streets and shading city parks.
Many more, of course, are growing on private property. These are the ones targeted by palm tree scouts because municipalities generally will not permit removal of their trees.
Private developers have showered downtown Los Angeles with palms during the past few years.
To grace the new downtown Sheraton Grande, landscapers imported more than 100 Washingtonia filifera , commonly known as California fan palms, from the Cathedral City area. At the Wells Fargo bank building, two dozen massive Phoenix canariensis, or Canary Island date palms, weighing about eight tons each, were lifted by crane to an upstairs open-air plaza. Storage and moving costs alone ran about $500,000, according to architect David Martin.
Interest in the Past
Martin believes the resurgence of the palm is a natural outgrowth of the interest these days in the past.
Planners, he said, are likewise concerned that their designs fit in with existing neighborhoods. The palm tree provides a natural linkage, connecting the old with the new.
“The palm is a very traditional plant material for Los Angeles,” Martin pointed out. “It shows up in lots of places. It’s very democratic. You find palms in the barrio, in Beverly Hills and South-Central Los Angeles.”
Actually, palms are not indigenous to Los Angeles, although they have clearly flourished and seem to have become as native as the settlers who sank their roots here.
The spindly Mexican fan palm, a famous trademark of the Los Angeles skyline, is native to northwestern Mexico. It was probably first introduced here by Spanish missionaries in the late 1700s and planted extensively a century later by land promoters. The plantings of E. J. Baldwin on his Rancho Santa Anita during the late 1800s survive today on what are the grounds of the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum. One of the palms--which measured 121 feet when last checked a decade ago--is considered to be possibly the tallest palm in the continental United States.
The most systematic planting of palms by the City of Los Angeles took place the year before the 1932 Olympics. According to a newspaper report at the time:
“One of the main objectives of this street tree-planting program is to show thousands of Olympic Games visitors who will assemble here during the summer of 1932 that local citizens value civic beauty. . . . Palms are proposed for planting in most business sections because of their advantages in not obstructing vision.”
Landscape architect Emmet L. Wimple has studied the city’s infatuation with the palm and reports that the popularity of the tree seems to have run in 20-year cycles. He noted that for two decades following the 1932 Olympics, there was little interest in the palm.
Then, during the 1950s, he said, the palm was rediscovered with a vengeance. Landscapers tried bizarre things like strapping palms to the blank facades on high-rise buildings and punching holes in building overhangs to allow a palm’s leafy head to poke through.
Backlash in ‘60s, ‘70s
The enthusiasm was followed by a backlash during the ‘60s and ‘70s, Wimple said, when designers scorned the palm as too glitzy and overdone.
“Now, in the ‘80s, a revival is at hand,” Wimple declared.
The interest once again coincided with the Olympic Games that were held here in 1984. As a pre-Olympic boost, the gateway to Los Angeles International Airport was spruced up with hundreds of palms. And palms were also planted in downtown’s historic Pershing Square area.
In a reaffirmation of the city’s love for the palm, Olympics Arts Festival Director Robert J. Fitzpatrick kicked off an exhibit championing the tree by declaring:
“This witty and wonderful exhibit reaffirms Los Angeles’ love affair with its favorite tree--the palm.”
“If God had not created the palm tree, it would have been necessary for Los Angeles to invent it,” declared Michael Kurcfeld in a preface to the exhibit.
“Between the sprawling reality and the fantastic myth of L.A., the palm assumes a role less as botanical specimen than as made-to-order public relations icon. It has become indispensable in the charade, embroidered over a century, that Southern California has played as the world’s last shot at Paradise on Earth. In all its narcissism and come-hither guile, L.A. has become Oz--a land that can scarcely exist without illusion. And the palm is its enduring totem.”
