99% Invisible - 155- Palm Reading

Episode Date: March 4, 2015

Reports of palm theft have appeared in LA, San Diego, and Texas; palm rustling also gets a mention in Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. To understand why someone would want to steal a palm tree, we need to understand their value—which has a lot to do … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On a Friday evening in the summer of 2011, Los Angeles resident Brent Green was driving home from work. He was coming from a job site and took a route he doesn't usually take to get to his neighborhood. And I might not have come this way. I mean, I'm glad I did because when I saw this, I knew that it was a problem and I got out of my car.

What did you see? That's our producer Sam Greenspan. He met with Brent in Los Angeles. I saw about 25 to 30 guys with heavy equipment, all wearing orange jumpsuits, they had backhows, they had trencher, trenching machines, I mean like large tractor material, they were like stuff that you can't just like ignore. You and I might not think there's anything weird about a bunch of guys doing work on a freeway berm, but Brent took one look and thought,

well, this all seems kind of fishy. For starters, it seemed late for a city work crew to be doing landscaping. And I said, that's odd, that's almost seven o'clock. They're not even out here at seven o'clock. So what are they doing? They gotta be up to something. The crew was manicuring some trees And I said that's odd, that's almost seven o'clock. They're not even out here at seven o'clock. So what are they doing? They got me up to something.

The crew was manicuring some trees and a fenced off piece of land next to a freeway, in what had long been a low income neighborhood. It's a patch of land that never gets landscape. The only reason the trees were there was because about 40 years ago, some birds flew over and pooped out fertilized seeds. And no one ever touched them. It's not like they're just cleaning the tree up to make it look better on the tree, we're

looking at all the rest of them, they all look like crap. And that's when Brent put it together, a work crew doing an after hours landscaping job in an area where they never do any work to Brent this meant one thing. I know with all my being that they're taking the trees. Oh, legally stealing trees. Now, the reason that Brent Green was able to to do so all of this is because he is by trade a landscape designer. And so he knew the worth of the trees that the work crew had been messing with. I've actually purchased these trees for projects and they're like 20

grand. $20,000 a tree. Brent confronted the workers and asked them what they were doing. Some of them took off running. Later a woman who lives on that street came down from her apartment and Brenaster if she knew what was going on. She said, honey, baby, they didn't just take that one. They're not taking, they took like six other ones. They took two over there, four over there. They've been here all week. I'm like, really, you know, then I called the police. This is not the first case in Palm Thaft. Palm Ruslin has been reported in Texas and San Diego,

it even gets a mention in Susan Orleans book, The Orchid Teve. And to understand why someone would want to steal a palm tree, we need to really understand their value, which has a lot to do with the space they occupy in our collective imagination. And for that, we need to talk to this guy. My name is Jared Farmer.

I am the author of Trees in Paradise, a California history. It is book, Jared Farmer traces the history of the Golden State through four kinds of trees, one of them being the Palm. The others are the Redwood, the Citrus, and the Eucalypt. Though we should get this out of the way first. A palm tree isn't really a tree.

It's actually not a tree. It's kind of like grass. It's like a super grass. It's like hundreds or thousands of these like long blades of grass in a sense like fuse together. Palm trees don't make bark or branches. If you cut them down, you won't find any rings in the trunk. All their roots grow in a compact root ball, making them easier to steal than say like

an oak tree which has an expansive underground root network. And as far as trees go, we don't plant palms for any of the normal reasons we want other trees around. It's not for the shade, it's not for climbing. You can't really climb a palm tree very well, that it casts precious little shade. Palm trees, it seems, do something else. They're evocative. They're trans well, they cast precious little shade. Palm trees, it seems, do something else. They're evocative. They're transportative.

They inspire us to dream big. It's about image, imbueding, and fashion, and design, and sometimes about architecture. Palms, especially urban palms in places like Los Angeles, are planted less for what they do than what they mean, or rather what they mean is what they do. If you trace the history of what palm trees have symbolized in the Western imagination, as Jared Farmer has, you start to get the idea that palm trees have always been about

evoking a spirit of elsewhere. Even 200 years ago, palm trees were planted in California by the Spanish as a way of signifying on the Holy Land. Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism often demands actually having fronds, and that's the reason the Spanish in California grew palm trees just to have palms for Palm Sunday. So palm trees were around by the time that California became a state in 1850, and around that same time, there was a trend in art and literature of what we now call orientalism,

a kind of fascination with the East. Sort of that fantasy of like, Arabs and better ones and Oasis and Sahara Zadda kind of thing. And so palm trees dovetailed quite nicely with those kinds of fascinations. Palm trees were also used to make people think of the tropics.

And while these three tropes are unfolding, palm trees symbolizing the holy land, the orient, the tropics, they also kind of do this thing where they all congeal and collapse into a bigger notion that we can still recognize today. Palm trees is a symbol for luxury and leisure. So by like 1900, if you went to say San Francisco to Union Square or if you went to Manhattan or to Paris or to London or you know World City in the West you would find a palm court in the hotel Even the RMS Titanic at a palm court even though palms were already going international by the dawn of the 20th century It was in California around Los Angeles especially especially, that their place in the global

imagination really took root. Oh, God. A trend emerged among homeowners of planting palm trees on either side of their front door. At first, this was only a thing that wealthy people did. But at some point, you're not rich. You just have a little starter bungalow in L.A. but like, you got palm trees too. That really did sort of signify you have achieved not just the American dream, but the California version of the American dream,

which was everything the American dream offer, but also great weather, gorgeous setting, trees that flower smell good, and look good every month of the year. And while this trend is taking off, something happens in the rich suburbs outside of LA. In towns like Redlands and Riverside, which were then super affluent, people there started planting palms not just on private property, but also along city streets.

It's about really what I would call the municipal palm, a palm that symbolizes the city itself and symbolizes good life in the city. Eventually Los Angeles proper got hip to this idea of municipal trees and during the Great Depression, the works progress administration put a lot of unemployment to work planting trees throughout the city. There are more than 2,500 species of palm tree, but as palm trees flourished in California,

there's one particular species that stood out. The Canary Island date palm, or Phoenix Canaryensis. Yeah, they're probably the most spectacular palm in the world, I want to say, in terms of the number of fronds, the width of the fronds, and it has a kind of bumpy, cross hatched trunk from when the fronds, and it has a kind of bumpy, cross hatched trunk from when the fronds detach. The Phoenix Canaryensis is so stately and majestic that it was used as the symbol of California boosterism at the turn of the century. One Phoenix was even dug up, put on a rail car, and freighted all the way to Chicago for the

1893 Colombian exposition. And every day on the trunk, California boosters would put up a piece of paper that listed the temperature at Coronado Beach at San Diego and at Lake Michigan, just for comparison. Us Californians have always been dicks about our weather. After the exposition, the palm tree was sent back to California. Obviously, it wasn't going to be left to suffer in the frigid city of Chicago. Can you imagine?

The horror! This is me being a dick about our weather. For a long time, the Phoenix Canariancy was mostly a symbol of Southern California. But eventually, especially by the 1990s, they were also in hot demand up north in the Bay area. And since the Phoenix Canariancy takes 50 to 60 years to mature, tree nurseries couldn't keep up with the demand. You just can't manufacture more 50-year-old palm trees.

So there are people called palm brokers. They go to older residential neighborhoods where people have like a little bungalow. They're like the third generation in that bungalow. They now have this, you know this 80-foot palm tree. They might have some sentimental attachment to it, but it's actually not doing much for them, and someone offers them a few hundred dollars for it, and they'll take it off their hands,

and many people take that opportunity, especially in a time of recession. The Canary Island date palm craze has died down a little, but they're still in high demand. And between the demand, the time it takes for a treatumature and the sheer heft of moving these things. The Phoenix Canarynsis is the most expensive palm tree to buy. The going price, including a truck to move it,

a crane to lift it, and a crew to plant it. It's a lot of money. 20 grand of a tree. Yes, again, $20,000 a tree. And that is why, to bring us back to our earlier story, Angelino Brent Green was so outraged when he saw that work crew in his neighborhood that summer night in 2011. They were there, Brent believes, to steal more than $100,000 worth of palm trees. Brent reported what he saw to the police, also got the local NBC affiliate on the trail.

And our investigation has found this could be an inside job. We found at least one CalTrans official could be involved in these thefts. Long story short, an employee at the California Department of Transportation had signed off on a work order, allowing a third party to go in and remove the trees. A lawsuit followed, one result of which was six Canary Island date palms getting put back on the freeway berm in Brent's neighborhood. And anyway, it might not matter too much in the grand scheme of things, because the tree scape of Los Angeles is about to have a lot fewer palm trees to steal.

A fungus called Fusarium Wilt has been rampantly killing off certain species of palm trees, including the Phoenix Canaryensis. In fact, several different landscape designers told me that they avoid using the Phoenix Canaryensis palms right now because of their susceptibility to the will. And on top of that, as of 2006, the city of Los Angeles has greatly curbed its replanting of fan palms. Those are the really tall, spindly guys with the skinny trunks. A motion approved by the City Council stated that fan palms don't provide adequate

tree cover, they don't release enough oxygen into the atmosphere, and they shed so many fronds that they are considered hazardous. All the palm trees that got planted in the teens, 20s, and 30s are all going to be dying of old age in the next few decades. And without them getting replanted, palms will largely disappear from the Los Angeles streetscape. Though of course palm trees will still get replanted in the iconic spots where people expect palm trees to be. Designated tour zones like Hollywood and sunset boulevards where they will always be because

tourists expect them to be there because that is what LA is supposed to look like. But Jared Farmer is actually not too sad to see the palms of Southern California go. Mind you, this is a guy who writes about trees for a living and is a self-proclaimed lover of palms. In a time of less water, more people, I think we have to make wiser choices about the kind of trees we use. And California will still happen incredibly diverse tree skate. But a Los Angeles without palm trees?

Not on Brent Green's watch anyway. He told me that when he was a kid, he used to draw houses with palm trees next to them, and now that he's grown up, he's fulfilled his own California-American dream. Though his house is a modest bungalow, it's made so much more stately by the ten or so palms in front of his home. And even knowing everything I know about palms that they were basically marketing tools and how they played at this phony sense of exoticism,

I have to say, it all still kinda works on me. I found myself in awe and a little jealous of Brent's California dream. And I've got palm trees now. It's also very proud of I love my palm trees. 99% invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan with Katie Mingle, Avery Troubleman and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Cindy Gilliland, Jason Dewey's, Darren Sears and Tom Driesbach.

We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, in architecture and interior's farm, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, we're all on Twitter and Instagram, Tumblr and Spotify, but I encourage you to explore the entire world of 99% invisible at 99pi.org.

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