Lake Elsinore’s date palms hacked

It happens every year a day or so before Palm Sunday, Lake Elsinore resident Tim Fleming said.

Someone surreptitiously arrives at a secluded Country Club Heights side street lined with Canary Island date palms and hacks away at a few of the squat ones to harvest fresh frond shoots.

Last week, however, Fleming noticed even more trees on Palm Drive had been assaulted by the hackers the day before Palm Sunday.

“This year, I went up there and they had done eight of them,” Fleming said. “That’s a little more serious than two or three. ... They snuck in at night time. They know it’s illegal.

“That really kind of galled me. They butchered them. They used a machete to cut into the inside of the palms and just left everything else. It’s going to take five to seven years for those to grow out.”

Fleming is a community activist who has been on a mission for years to preserve the city’s legacy of palm trees. He said he called the Lake Elsinore police station and talked to an officer about the incident, but was told that without sighting someone in the act, the case would be hard to solve.

He also called City Hall and, although authorities might not be able to catch the culprits, City Manager Grant Yates has put together a plan to deal with the issue in the future.

Next year, he said, city maintenance crews responsible for trimming trees in the public right of way will collect palm fronds before Palm Sunday. They will be made available at the city’s public works yard for pick up by the public. He said area churches will be notified that the fronds will be available.

“We’re just going to fix the issue going forward and make it easy, so we don’t have these issues in future years,” Yates said.

Dozens of Canary Island date palms can be found in Country Club Heights, a community consisting mostly of estates occupying peaks and hillsides overlooking the northern shore of the city’s namesake lake.

The palms date back to the late 1920s and 1930s when Country Club Heights was envisioned as a development for the rich and famous. The resort fizzled, but several hilltop homes remain, including the exotically designed mansion dubbed Aimee’s Castle for its original owner and occupant, early-20th century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

And then there are the palm trees that were planted to beautify the fledgling resort, according to Fleming, who was involved in the effort to establish a city ordinance protecting the trees from destruction.

Although many of the palms in Country Club Heights are towering, the ones targeted for their young fronds on Palm Drive are shorter plants that are easier to reach.

They clearly evidence signs that someone cut through the spiky palms on the outside so the newly sprouting fronds in the center of the trees could be sliced and removed.

According to Fleming, hacking at the trees and removing the fronds is damaging.

“For years they’ve looked terrible,” he said of the targeted trees. “These have been here for 70 to 80 years. It’s a shame to have somebody come along just because they want some fronds for Palm Sunday ... and go in there and whack away at them.”

He regards the acts of damaging trees in the public right of way as vandalism and the removal of the fronds as theft.

Although he has no direct evidence that churchgoers are taking the fronds for Palm Sunday observances, the fact that the episodes occur annually before the day seems more than coincidence, Fleming said.

“You’ve heard about the Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not steal,” he said. “The whole thing is very ironic and I’ve had many years to think about it.”