LA Palm Trees

[klamedia]

Originally Posted by Damien

A balance would be nice. Some popular commercial areas should have their palms: Venice Beach, Wilshire, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood, Union Station, LAX, etc.

Personally, if the city came in and started chopping down the Palms on residential streets, I'd probably hold a rally of support to cheer the chainsaws on.

I really question if the people who like the palms ever walk in this city. If this weren't a car-centric city this wouldn't even be a question. The palm tree is pretty and that's it. It's like having a super model for a wife that can't hold a conversation, can't connect with you, can't cook, is horrible in bed and a terrible mother..

But we love dem hoes!

Originally Posted by Damien

People really need to visit other cities and observe how they operate. When you do, L.A. doesn't come out looking too good.

Replacing the palm is #153 on the list of stuff to do to make this a better city.

I have visited other cities, much more nationally than internationally, in fact I was raised in "another" city. If you can't specify what perfect little enclave you are leading us to believe exists, it just sounds like more 'woe is LA "Citywatch" rhetoric'.
No other city that I've lived in has been so self-deprecating while having so much to offer and be proud about. Where NYC's kitten sized rat problem or seemingly war-torn East Brooklyn and South Bronx neighborhoods and Chicago's astonishing amount of vacant lots that are plainly visible from both the Green and Blue Lines are seen as works in progress, *flip* a shadeless LA street that has made the cover of countless magazines, is world famous as a symbol of the "good life", been the backdrop of almost every beachside scene ever shot, are mythical (at this point) as an LA icon and you're trying to tell me that other cities do better all around simply because their streets have shade. I walk. And I walk alot! I would like more shade, yeah. So plant some fucking trees. It just seems like every other week over at SSP their is yet another LA doomsday alert. Frankly, when I'm in LA I want it to look and feel like LA. I'm all for a more pedestrian friendly city( I think many parts of it already is)but my point is where does a healthy sense of self-evaluation and needed criticism end and a continuous demoralizing attack on LA begin? And palm trees are the #153rd thing WRONG with LA, of course leading us to believe that their are yet 152 other even more pressing things WRONG with LA that we'd have to tend to first.
Damien I applaude your transit advocacy and am behind you 200%!! But I don't want this forum to become negative endless cycle of knee-jerk reactions of what some tourist poll says about LA.

[godblessbotox]

153 hu? whats 78?

[archd1]

Nothing says pretend like a palm tree
What makes palm trees so L.A.? They aren't supposed to be here.
December 3, 2006

PALM TREE, Palm tree, Palm tree. After two days of wrestling with his typewriter, those were the only words novelist John Fante's fictional hero, Arturo Bandini, could muster. In Fante's classic 1939 novel, "Ask the Dust," Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a famous writer. He sees his first palm tree through the window of his dingy Bunker Hill hotel room, and though its trunk is blackened by automobile exhaust, it reminds him of Palm Sunday and Egypt and Cleopatra. Unable to write, he fixates on the tree outside his room and types its name "over and over across the page, up and down, the same words." Writing that day was a battle, he thought, between him and the palm tree, and the palm tree won.

Nearly seven decades later, Los Angeles is finally fighting back, with a vengeance. A unanimous vengeance, that is. Two weeks ago, the City Council unanimously passed a motion to limit the planting of palms on city streets and medians. The city's Department of Public Works has declared that the palm that Bandini found so alluring is not a tree at all but a lowly species of grass. City Council President Eric Garcetti's office has proclaimed that the spindly yet exotic plants are "really bad for our city." Paula Daniels, who heads Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's initiative to plant a million trees over the next five years, thinks oaks — whose shade is better for water and air quality — should replace aging palms when they die.

Others have defended L.A.'s palms on the grounds that they are emblematic of the city and give us a much-needed sense of place. I disagree. I'm standing up for palms because they say less about who we are and more about who we want to be. We're talking aspirational vegetation. Rather than a sense of place, palm trees give us a sense of placelessness. They are a distraction, an indulgence, a whim. They are all about pretension. And, if nothing else, L.A. is among the most pretentious of cities.

I don't say this dismissively. Look up "pretense" in your thesaurus and you'll find synonyms such as "pretending," "make believe" and "fantasy" — all words that are, well, emblematic of our city.

But when I think of palm trees and pretense I don't conjure images of Hollywood or Bel Air. I think of South L.A. and mid-Wilshire, where many of the nearly 30,000 palms that were planted as part of a beautification project in advance of the 1932 Olympics still reign.

Contemporary historians have much maligned the early Anglo city fathers who tried to market L.A. to freezing Easterners as a Mediterranean paradise. But the conflict between reality and fantasy is fundamental to the L.A. experience. The single-family homes from which rioters first emerged around Florence and Normandie on April 29, 1992, tell us that much of the frustration that fueled the riots arose out of relative rather than objective deprivation. Compared to the worst neighborhoods of Chicago or New York, the epicenter for the 1992 riots looks like paradise. Yet compared to the ideal of what L.A. should be, it is hell.

But our pretense cuts both ways. A juvenile probation officer in South L.A. once dragged me outside his office and pointed to the palm trees and the jumbo jets on the horizon.

"I point them out to the kids who come in here," he told me. "I want them to know that people come to their city from all over the world to find their dreams."

As they were for Bandini, palms can be evocative of exotic places and times. They lend themselves to imagination. When planted in rows, they can collectively look regal, but individually, the fan palm in particular can look downright Dr. Seussian. I love the funny-looking palms outside my apartment window, and I've often wondered why their tufts of unkempt fronds tilt toward the winds that come from the ocean.

I should have asked Leland Lai, the president of the Palm Society of Southern California, who walked me around his garden in Topanga one morning last week. Lai showed me some of the 300 species he has planted since he started collecting palms in 1970 as a way to combat his homesickness for his native Hawaii. Not at all the eccentric you'd expect, Lai is a mild-mannered businessman who thinks the city's new stance on palm trees is excessive. He understands L.A.'s desire to create more shade by planting leafier trees, but he urges officials to try to find a balance between environmentalism and history, cost-efficiency and aesthetics.

As he walked me around the back of the house, to what appeared to be a tiny tropical rain forest, he articulated what it was that makes him love these plants. "They make you feel like you're in a far-off exotic place," he told me. "Palm trees take you away from Los Angeles."

Yes, at times, it does take you away, but it brings you back to Los Angeles as well!

[Barcelona60]

Forgive me as I know these are old topics but I am new so here goes.

I once read somewhere a while back that the 1st palms were brought in by some specific settler or Spanish Priest many moons ago.

I have always been in awe of the heights that they reach. Wonder what is the record for highest palm in LA?

This icon that is so taken for granted is also iconic of Southern Cal. I used to love walking down the streets especially near the beach and just gaze up and see them gently swaying in the breeze.

Just hate when taggers would ruin or carve into them. Anyway how tall have you seen them get???

[lawmann]

*Paula Daniels, who heads Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's initiative to plant a million trees over the next five years, thinks oaks — whose shade is better for water and air quality — should replace aging palms when they die.*

If this goes through looks like Los Angeles's new tree icon will be the oak tree.

[Fern~Fern*]

Originally Posted by Barcelona60

Forgive me as I know these are old topics but I am new so here goes.

I once read somewhere a while back that the 1st palms were brought in by some specific settler or Spanish Priest many moons ago.

I outha slap you silly for asking such a dumb question...

Originally Posted by Barcelona60

I have always been in awe of the heights that they reach. Wonder what is the record for highest palm in LA?

This icon that is so taken for granted is also iconic of Southern Cal. I used to love walking down the streets especially near the beach and just gaze up and see them gently swaying in the breeze.

Ok you really need to get laid or something!

Originally Posted by Barcelona60

Just hate when taggers would ruin or carve into them. Anyway how tall have you seen them get???

[Epicentre]

Originally Posted by Barcelona60

Wonder what is the record for highest palm in LA?

I few years ago I read (can't remember where) that the tallest palm in the world was in the arboretum.

Too funny Ferney!

[nygirl]

Lmfao

[milquetoast]

Palm trees of the type in Los Angeles are not the type you see here in Las Vegas. The type here are very thick trunked, have a huge, spread out crown and don't grow too tall, maybe 30 feet at the most. Those types here are purchased for individual homes, but mostly hotels and they do cost around 25 to 35 thousand. That is for a semi-mature specimen though. L. A. palms (I call them that because I don't see them anywhere else as much as I do there) could be farmed from seeds. You can plant them next to other types of trees and they won't interfere with the roots. They use very little water, and they are a very important image/symbol of the city. You can literally line a street with shade trees and still have palms towering also along the way. You should have both. I almost got into an accident looking at one of these palms here in Las Vegas, because they are not planted here along the streets, but mostly because it took me right back to my days there, and I couldn't turn away from it. I still remember the very last part of an NBC news report in the early eighties showing palms at Santa Anita with an orange sunset backdrop. Not possible to see with an oak. Those palms were taller than the ones at Dodger Stadium, maybe almost a hundred feet or more.

[lawmann]

Those palm trees in Vegas are called Date Palms and they are found in the northern African deserts around Egypt. They have long thick fronds that spread out to provied shade from the harsh desert sun. The perfect tree for Vegas. They can also be found all over California west of the Sierras.

[losangelino]

Originally Posted by FROM LOS ANGELES

The palm tree is LA's trademark advertiser. Replacing them is like taking Homer's D'oh! away.

There is no need to replace them. They grow here naturally. I have about twelve in my yard that just sprang up. The land behind my home is full of them as well.

It is odd that people think that this tree isn't native to California. I visited the living desert museum in Palm Springs and it said clearly that the "California" fan palm is native and was not brought here like many have claimed.

Just look around you if you don't believe me. For Christ's sake the babies are springing up on the freeways. There is no need to plant them. They grow naturally.

One other thing. Drive down Century Blvd towards LAX and you'll see new Palms being planted as we speak so this is just a bunch of hooey if you ask me.

[lawmann]

Here's information I got about the California Fan Palm "Occur naturally in desert oases in isolated areas of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of southeastern California, southwestern Arizona, and northern Baja California, Mexico, at elevations between 500 and 1,000 feet. Widely cultivated as an ornamental in Southern California".

Source http://www.desertusa.com/magnov97/no...v_fanpalm.html

Los Angeles is too far away from those areas for the palms to grow here naturally which requires a minimun elevation of 500 feet. Los Angeles's elevation is 320 feet. Just look at any picture of Los Angeles taken during the 1800's and not a California Palm in sight but in photos taken after the turn of the century some outdoor scenes may show a short or just planted Cal Palm.

[milquetoast]

I think the fan palm is a different palm than the one people from elsewhere would associate with Los Angeles. The extremely tall ones that line the boulevards. I have a picture on 'film' that I took in 1981 of a friend in a parking lot at night with a long exposure time that shows him standing next to a light pole with a four foot palm growing like a weed from the base. "Even palm trees grow like weeds here..", I said! That parking lot was located immediately south of the Century Towers.

[Milan Luka]

The Palms are so iconic to LA so can only agree to replacing ones that have died- not destroy those that are already well established.

Here's the thing but, being last in LA in November heres what I noticed when walking around Beverly Hills residential streets. Those with the palms looked fantastic/great like N Bedford, but those streets with oaks or sycamores (whatever they were) like Charleville or S Crescent just looked messy. SoCal fall colors just aint purdy.

[pittsteelers247]

Originally Posted by jacobboyer

Palm tree's make Los Angeles cool. Oaks are grown in every other city and there ugly compared to palms. Oak trees will grow pretty ugly in los angeles poor soil.

Before anyone came and developed southern california it was a grassland with native oaks and maples so oaks would grow just fine in LA

[pittsteelers247]

and also we have a line of mexican and california fan palms behind our house and when winds blow the seeds off we get well over a hundred seedlings that just sprout out of the ground and they grow with just the normal rainfall

[djm19]

Well Palms take a long time to grow.

[losangelino]

Originally Posted by lawmann

Here's information I got about the California Fan Palm "Occur naturally in desert oases in isolated areas of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of southeastern California, southwestern Arizona, and northern Baja California, Mexico, at elevations between 500 and 1,000 feet. Widely cultivated as an ornamental in Southern California".

Source http://www.desertusa.com/magnov97/no...v_fanpalm.html

Los Angeles is too far away from those areas for the palms to grow here naturally which requires a minimun elevation of 500 feet. Los Angeles's elevation is 320 feet. Just look at any picture of Los Angeles taken during the 1800's and not a California Palm in sight but in photos taken after the turn of the century some outdoor scenes may show a short or just planted Cal Palm.

You'll have to take it up with the folks at the Living Desert Museum (they actually said that the trees grew here in prehistoric times so much farther back than what you are referring to) as well as my back yard which is full of them. Trust me, when I bought my house they were not there and those there now are the exact trees in those photos.

[Fern~Fern*]

So what of Palm trees grows on concrete/freeways here in L.A.. Everytime I drive on the 405 south passing wilshire all the way to 10, you can see miniture Palm trees growing out of the left shoulder. I would understand the right shoulder but on the left over bridges is very unique. Hopefully they would not cut them down no time soon!

[milquetoast]

You'll find, if the A V gets as hot as it does here, that palms growing from the concrete or blacktop are VERY RARE