Tropical Tree Sales Growing

Palm trees are sprouting up all over these days.

From landscaping luxury homes in Camarillo’s Spanish Hills to sprucing up the lot at AutoNation in Oxnard, palm trees are the thing. And buyers are spending up to $35,000 for each.

“They’re quite the rage,” said Phil Bergman, president of the International Palm Society. “You see them in new plantings and new homes everywhere.”

The renewed popularity of palms is an indication of a strong economy, according to Mark Cayer, owner of Rincon Gardens palm nursery in Ventura. He says it’s a financial sign of the times.

Palms are expensive, and there were few big homes, hotels and other developments that used such costly landscaping during the recession, he said. 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.”

Oxnard, which officially adopted the tropical look in its city plan 11 years ago, recently planted a mix of 126 palms at the new Ventura Freeway and Rose Avenue interchange.

Ventura just moved several towering palms to the new Victoria Avenue interchange and decided to plant 10 more of them at the new Johnson Drive exit.

“It’s back in style,” said Daryl Wagar, Ventura’s parks supervisor for trees. “We’re kind of rolling back into tropicals.”

Palms tend to grow slowly, and the large, mature ones that developers like to use are increasingly expensive and hard to find. Owners of new Las Vegas casinos, who have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for palms, 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 and Rose Avenue interchange. It took three weeks of phone calls before he found eight 18-foot Canary palms 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 each, a bargain for Canary palms that size. Officials decided to fill out the interchange with 100 much smaller queen palms, which cost a mere $500 each.

That is small change compared to the cost of some palms. One homeowner paid $35,000 for a Phoenix reclinata at Valley Crest Tree in San Fernando, company Vice President Tadd Russikoff said. His customers also include Disneyland as well as the Bellagio, MGM Grand and Flamingo hotels and casinos in Las Vegas.

Richard Baron, one of the owners of Baron Bros. Nursery in Camarillo, said his palms range from $20 to $20,000, the price for an old multi-trunked Phoenix reclinata or chamaerops humili.

Add the cost of moving and replanting a big, old palm and the bill can climb higher. Baron said a friend of his paid $14,000 to move a 100-year-old, 55-foot-tall Chilean wine palm from Ventura and replant it in his Malibu yard.

You’ve got to love palms to fork out that kind of money.

For Ventura resident Helen Bogue, it’s not worth it. She 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.

Wagar, Ventura’s tree man, also has problems with palms because they don’t provide shade, abate sound or improve air quality. There are times when they give the right look to a landscape, such as the yard of a Spanish-style home, but you must pick the right one, he said.

“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 palms for Rose Avenue. He initially balked at their price and suggested they find 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 like Don Tollefson, a Malibu board member of 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--all the things we would like to have but don’t,” Tollefson said.

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’ I think palms give a look of paradise, of ambience, of easy living, of a nice, warm climate--all the things we would like to have but don’t.’

Don Tollefson, board member of the Southern California chapter

of the International Palm Society