Demand for Palms Soars
Palm trees are sprouting up all over these days.
From landscaping of luxury homes in Los Angeles to Las Vegas casinos to Disneyland, palms are the thing. And buyers are spending up to $35,000 each.
“They’re quite the rage,” said Phil Bergman, president of the San Diego-based International Palm Society. “You see them in new plantings and new homes everywhere.”
The renewed popularity of palms is just another sign of a strong economy, according to Mark Cayer, owner of Rincon Gardens palm nursery in Ventura.
Palms are expensive, and few homeowners, hoteliers and developers bought them during the recession. With the economy now booming, people are clamoring for the tropical trees.
“There was so much pent-up energy for so long, 10 years of recession. Now it is letting loose,” Cayer said. “Demand is extremely heavy. We can’t and don’t try to meet all the demand.”
Palms tend to grow slowly, and the large, mature ones that developers like are increasingly expensive and hard to find. Owners of new Las Vegas casinos, whose demand for them seems endless, are squeezing the market.
“Santa Barbara and Ventura are competing with the casinos in Las Vegas, and we know who’s got more money,” Bergman said.
Oxnard civil engineer Lou Balderrama heard the Las Vegas story from nursery owners while struggling to find 16 Canary Island date palms, Oxnard’s unofficial tree, for the Ventura Freeway/Rose Avenue interchange. It took three weeks of phone calls before he found eight of the trees in Sacramento and eight more in Riverside.
“They are very bold, very nice-looking palm trees, and because of that they are very popular and hard to find,” Balderrama said.
Oxnard paid $3,800 for each of the 18-foot Canary Island palms, a bargain for specimens that size. Officials decided to fill out the interchange with 100 much smaller queen palms, which cost a mere $500 each.
But demand for the costly trees remains great. Valley Crest Tree Co. in San Fernando sold about $150,000 a year in palms five years ago, said Vice President Tadd Russikoff. Now palms bring in close to $1 million a year.
“It seems like we sell as many as we get in at a time,” Russikoff said.
Valley Crest’s customers include Disneyland as well as the Bellagio, MGM Grand and Flamingo hotels and casinos in Las Vegas. But a homeowner actually holds the record for paying the highest price for a palm: $35,000 for a spectacular, multi-trunk Phoenix reclinata, Russikoff said.
Not everyone loves the look, however. Ventura resident Helen Bogue protested five years ago when the city spent $40,000 to fill downtown with queen palms. The only palms she likes are on postcards.
“I think you might as well decorate with telephone poles with plastic fronds on top. It would be cheaper, and you wouldn’t have to risk getting hit on the head with the dead ones,” said Bogue, a retired social services worker who once got a scare when a frond bounced off her car’s windshield.
Daryl Wagar, Ventura’s parks supervisor for trees, also has problems with palms because they don’t provide shade, muffle sound or improve air quality, he said. He concedes that there are times when they give the right look to a landscape, such as the yard of a Spanish-style home, but maintains that you’ve got to pick the right one.
“I like small palms, when they’re in scale,” he said. “But I don’t like looking out a window at a Washingtonia, where I just see trunk.”
Palms have grown on Oxnard’s Balderrama. He wasn’t particularly passionate about them before he worked so hard to get the Canary Island palms for the interchange. He initially balked at their price and suggested cheaper trees.
But now Balderrama is quite fond of fronds.
“People have told me, ‘I don’t like palms,’ and I get defensive,” he said.
People such as Don Tollefson, a board member for the Southern California Chapter of the International Palm Society, don’t need convincing. To them, palms are the stuff of dreams.
“I think palms give a look of paradise, of ambience, of easy living, of a nice, warm climate,” he said, “all the things we would like to have but don’t.”
