pindo palm

Enter, stage right…and left…

The towering palms — the ones that made you think you really had driven too far south of town and ended up in Corpus Christi — are gone.

They came down with barely a whimper on April 29, and left four big holes.

Today, three of those holes were filled.

At the back corners on either side of the pool, I planted two beautiful, graceful, arching Pindo Palms. I’ve been wanting one since the garden bloggers toured Peckerwood Gardens together in November of 2008.

In the open space in the back bed, I also planted a purple Datura (there is a white one there now also) and a Cardoon. Tomorrow, I’ll add several Silver Ponyfoot plants to (eventually) cascade down the wall and fill the base of the bed. (They’re pretty darn tiny right now, but they’ll grow!)

I think a giant burgundy Dracena may be joining them on the end soon. And I’m sure I will think of some more things that need to be in there as well.

See, doesn’t that pretty Pindo look so much better?

I also planted a Pineapple Guava tree on the other side of the pool, having fallen in love with them on our bloggers tour to San Antonio to the Botanic Gardens. I didn’t get a photo of it, but it comes before this palm in the photo below – right where I am standing. (I didn’t take a picture of it because it looks like a giant bush-ball, and I am going to prune it up into a tree once it’s gotten over the shock of the move.)
Link

They didn’t photograph very well in the afternoon sun, but the look sooooo much better there than the other palms. Guess I can let out my breath now … everything went as planned and I’m happy with the result. Can’t ask for more than that!

Timberrrrrrrr…

This photo was taken before we bought this house. See those two short palms on the left side of the cabana — they are just over half as tall as those posts. In August, that will have been 7 years ago. There were also two other palms on the other side of the pool – all 4 of them almost the same size when we moved in.

This was shot about 2 years ago – they have crested the cabana roof on the right of the photo.

And this is from Tuesday evening. They tower above the roof. They are too tall for my husband to prune any more, and they are completely out of scale with the rest of the landscape and property. Personally, I would not have planted trees that grow that tall. But, I didn’t plant them, and while I did enjoy them for the last 7 years, I decided it was time for them to go.
And so they did!

I was shocked at how easily they came down. It took two men just one hour to fell all 4 of those huge palms. First they roped them, using a plastic-coated wire rope with what looked like a giant fishing sinker on the end. After lassoing the tree, one guy pulled and one guy sawed.

Then, “Timeberrrrrr…”


They cut up the biggest pieces and left me with dead palm parts all over my yard.

The next day, a different crew of 2 guys who work for my landscape design installation foreman came to cut up more, load those massive pieces into a trailer and to cut the stumps down flush with the ground.
I never anticipated how bare it would look without the palms. Because they towered so high, I didn’t think of them as being that prominent. But they were!
The roots fascinated me. They were huge. The biggest base diameter was about 2.5 feet across.
Today they came back with the chainsaws and picks and shovels and cut and dug and whacked away at those fibrous and very short roots on the outside edges of the trunk. It really is amazing that those tall trees stand with such a small shallow root. And we have lots of strong winds up here on this hill.
They left some big holes, some pieces of wall that need remortaring and 1 broken pipe.
Not bad, when the original plan included a bobcat destroying the walls, my grass and sprinklers in multiple places. Didn’t need the bobcat, and the roots were much easier than any of us anticipated.

(Easy for me to say, right, since I wasn’t the one out there sweating like crazy doing about the hardest work I can imagine for several days.)

After the wall is fixed and the sprinkler repaired by the end of next week, one new Pindo palm will grace the back left corner of the pool bed. The oak tree shaded one of the previous palms and as a result, it never grew evenly with its mate. (Drove me crazy) So I won’t be planting two sister palms, just one further in the corner and then something different will go on the other end to anchor that bed.

I’m not sure what I will do behind the cabana — the pindos are too wide with their arching fronds and would be in the way of the shades between those posts.

So, now I have one hole, and one completely empty new bed! Those two cabana palms took up most of that bed and I let a Datura take over the rest, never bothering to put anything else in there.

But now…

By |2016-04-14T02:42:32-05:00April 29th, 2010|Blog, palms, pindo palm, pool, Sharing Nature's Garden, trees|0 Comments

New bed in the making

Out beyond the back wrought iron fence there’s a line of ugly scrub cedars. Beyond that, several acres of floodplain land with a wet weather pond. The cedars give us some privacy, but let’s face it, these are ugy. Not unique, or interesting cedars, just ugly.

So I’ve been whittling away at them making space for a little xeric bed to give us something drought-tolerant and prettier to look at. My guys came today to dig out the rock and deliver soil.
This bed won’t get watered, and deer will wander through her regularly, so it’s my “tough” bed.
Here are the tough characters who will spruce things up in the back:

Quadricolor Agave
A Fishhook cactus
Rats – it’s dark outside and I can’t read this pot, can you? Something bronze!
Bamboo Muhly
Cycad – I think it’s Zamia Herrerae – an upright, skinny leafed one
Pride of Barbados
A Pindo Palm tree
Euphorbia
Whale’s tongue agave
Barrel cactus
Not pictured, a Texas Mountain Laurel and Gulf Coast Muhly.

I am hoping that these things will get some rain this fall to get established and then will survive (for the most part) on their own next summer. (Assuming we don’t have 68+ days over 100 again!)

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