Commercial Growers Make Certain Palms Are on Hand for Palm Sunday

When Jesus made his messianic entry into Jerusalem in the days before his crucifixion, his followers cut branches from nearby palm trees and laid them in his path as they shouted: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Congregations wishing to replicate that pre-Easter scene on Palm Sunday, celebrated this year on April 4, have to rely on palm growers and UPS.

After all, worshipers from Twisp, Wash., to Millinocket, Me., or just about any other place in the United States, would have a hard time finding palms in their neighborhoods.

One of the biggest palm growers around is John H. Ginsbach of Alamo, Tex., one of a small band of people in Texas and Florida who make their living growing palm leaves.

A brochure from his company promises buyers “true desert palms, like those grown in the Holy Land . . . rushed to your church fresh from our farm in deep South Texas on refrigerated trucks.”

Ginsbach and his wife founded Palm Gardens Inc. 40 years ago in Alamo, in the southern tip of Texas, and do a thriving business with the help of their son and daughter and respective spouses. They ship palms to congregations and regional church bodies in all 50 states, Canada and U.S. military installations overseas.

Congregations buying from Palm Gardens have their choice of two types of palms, both described as “green/yellow” and “stripped and ready to hand out” in bundles of 100. The fan palms are 24 inches to 36 inches in length; slightly less expansive date palms are 11 to 18 inches long.

The more congregations buy, the less the per-branch cost. The best deal is for orders of 5,000 or more strips of the date palms, selling this year at $7.15 per 100.

Some congregations use enormous amounts of palms.

This year, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York has ordered 45 cases of palm leaves--not from Texas or Florida but from a “middle man” in Connecticut--each weighing 40 pounds and containing 1,000 leaves. That calculates to 45,000 leaves weighing just short of one ton.

For Ginsbach the decision to buy property and plant trees was part religion, part Texas pride. “We went to church here in south Texas, and our priest passed out a Florida palm to us,” recalled Ginsbach, a Roman Catholic. “We said, ‘What the heck, we’ve got our own palms here in Texas.’ ”

Ginsbach says he has planted so many in the last 40 years that he has lost count: “I wouldn’t even want to guess, a million maybe.”

He said he knows of about five competitors, primarily in Florida’s Lake Okeechobee area.

The normal harvesting season for palm branches, from trees that are at least five years old, begins about three months before Palm Sunday. Ginsbach adds about 200 pickers, mostly migrant workers from Mexico, to the crew of 20 who maintain Palm Gardens through the year.

Each year, post-harvest, the company sends the leaves via refrigerated trucks to distribution points around the country. From there, United Parcel Service transports the palms to congregations or regional church bodies.

Palm Gardens bills itself as the “world’s largest distributor of processed palms,” but Ginsbach declines to be specific about the dollar volume of his business, how many palms are shipped annually, or how many acres of palms are cultivated in Alamo.

At most, Ginsbach will say, “We just ship all we can.”

Apparently that’s enough. Even in the worst palm-growing year, 1988, when Texas was hit by a deep freeze that ruined many branches, Palm Gardens filled all its orders, he said.