Miami palm removal.

[Mr.SamuraiSword]

Apparently now Miami is going to start removing some palms to replace with shade trees.  What worries me is possibly many older palms with "ugly" trunks could be taken out as many will even be replaced with new palms.  The article mentions royals so that's troubling. Wonder what will happen?  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article249432995.html

[Collectorpalms]

  On 2/26/2021 at 3:25 PM, Mr.SamuraiSword said:

Apparently now Miami is going to start removing some palms to replace with shade trees.  What worries me is possibly many older palms with "ugly" trunks could be taken out as many will even be replaced with new palms.  The article mentions royals so that's troubling. Wonder what will happen?  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article249432995.html

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WHEN the salt from a storm surge comes inland from rising sea level, the shade trees will die and you will be left with palms. This happens in the hurricane alleys. Hurricane IKE did this to Galveston Island in 2007.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Collectorpalms

[Fusca]

Maybe Ken Johnson can relocate some of the palms to local collectors' gardens.

[Ivanos1982]

They have been saying this for years. I lived in Miami for seven years before I moved to Houston. There is a very vocal group of people who push for this issue. I used to see them at city council meetings, it made me so angry. I remember one time I was at their meetings and they proposed for a resolution that prohibited coconut palms to be planted on public streets because coconuts were killing people as they fell lol... their rhetoric was something like "save the children" it was crazy. But yes, trees are wonderful until the salt damages them. Coconuts can take it. Miami is always going to be palmy. At the house I was living in Pembroke Pines, the HOA didn't allow coconut palms to be planted on people's backyards. Apparently people were throwing the coconut shells at each other. That city has a lot of issues. My neighbor then had chickens inside the closet because the HOA didn't allow them but she used them for the eggs. Another neighbor had parrots and argued with them all the time... just Miami being Miami.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Ivanos1982

[chinandega81]

Actually, it's Miami Beach that is goign to reduce the amount of palms as part of the tree canopy makeup. Now I believe they are around half and they want to bring it down to around 25% over 10 or 20 years. Most of it will be by just planting more shade trees as opposed to removing palm trees.

 

There are several salt tolerant trees in South Florida that can handle some amount of salt. In general, across South Florida, there has been a live oak-ification of the area for this same reason. I think it looks awful...the area used to have a tropical and unique look and now it resembles any other city in the southern US. Same boring trees, predominantly Live Oaks as far as the eye can see in public and commercial plantings everywhere. They may look graceful in Savvanah or New Orleans but here they just don't look as vigorous and look sad compared to some outstanding tropicals that are better suited to the area. Granted, they are native....but I digress.

I think Miami Beach will be populated with Buttonwoods, Sea Grape and Gumbo Limbos all over the place in lieu of palms. It's a shame because South Florida recycles the same trees over and over again, refusing to showcase the vast array of trees that could grow very well here. What bothers me the most is that this move is under the guise of protecting the city from climate change: cooling the urban heat island and to reduce flooding. The shade trees can't absorb saltwater flooding (althouh they can tolerate it). Miami Beach has a nice breeze in the summer...it's cooler than elsewhere in South Florida as is. Not every place has to be a city within a forest. And if Miami Beach does, I wish it was with tropical flowering and fruiting trees to showcase it's uniqueness. 

 

 

[GottmitAlex]

I read about this today.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article249432995.html

 

[amh]

The only replacements that would make any sense are pines and cypress, but I dont think they can handle salt.

Also, I believe the Miami area has little to no soil, what trees will grow besides palms and some gymnosperms?

[palmsOrl]

Leave the damn palms.  Yes, Cocos should not be planted directly along walkways, but other than that, it's Miami, not Ocala.

-Michael

[DavidLee]

  On 2/27/2021 at 1:06 AM, chinandega81 said:

I think they should leave it along.  Tourist go there to see the more tropical scenery like the old Coconut palms not a bunch of oak trees. It is all politics and pork barrel spending. I am careful not to go into political rant. I can think of bunch of other things the money could be better utilized.

 

 

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  On 2/26/2021 at 3:25 PM, Mr.SamuraiSword said:

Apparently now Miami is going to start removing some palms to replace with shade trees.  What worries me is possibly many older palms with "ugly" trunks could be taken out as many will even be replaced with new palms.  The article mentions royals so that's troubling. Wonder what will happen?  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article249432995.html

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 I think the best thing to do is leave everything alone. They forget why tourist go there. The scenery like Coconut palms. The tropical look. That is what makes Miami. If you plant bunch of Canopy trees like oak trees you lose all of that. They are just wanting to spend money to say they did something like create jobs and feel good that might of did something to combat climate change.  I think they are just trying make the local nurseries money. I do support the local residents in Miami Beach in what they want. 

[IHB1979]

That article has a click bait headline. From another article: 

“The cutback is needed, the newspaper says, to reduce urban warming and improve air quality, and about 1,000 palm trees will be removed in the coming weeks as part of already scheduled construction projects.

But Elizabeth Wheaton, the environmental and sustainability director for Miami Beach, said there was no plan for any mass chopping down of palms, which have been a staple of postcards and travel brochures depicting Miami for generations.

Instead, the percentage reduction will be largely achieved by planting about 1,300 new shade trees instead of palms over the next two decades, which she said would make the city “more walkable and pleasant.”

“Expanding shade canopy will enhance the city’s brand and quality of life,” Wheaton wrote in an email to the Herald. “Palms will continue to be a focal point along the city’s roads, green space”

[mnorell]

Why coconuts are considered incapable of producing shade has always baffled me. The coconut groves throughout the tropical world are known for creating vast, shaded areas that have a cooling effect, as well as providing food, oil, fiber, and nourishing "palm water." Also handling huge amounts of wind and saline storm inundation with aplomb. Perhaps it would be a more noble effort if cities instead looked at trying to solve the problems of food needs on our overpopulated planet through public plantings of food-giving plants, whether palms or dicots, without such silly prejudices as one finds from these overzealous individuals and groups that come, fists pounding, to every city council and state environmental meeting with their own small-minded agendas. 

The good news is that this is probably mostly publicity-generating. Miami Beach has been at the receiving end of a lot of criticism because it has suffered greatly from King Tides over the years and as such presents a great photo-op to media outlets around the world looking for a quick story and/or click-bait every spring or fall. This unscientific move may be intended to show a "proactive" decision to counter the city's current forlorn image. Unfortunately if they proceed, not only will they have a hard time finding dicot "shade trees" that can actually stand the rigors of the climate; but they will blanche at the subsequent cost of cleaning up all those dicot trees come the next inundation. There is a reason all those palm trees got planted in the first place, I'm sure with some help from the hurricanes of the late '20s. I got a $7,000.00 bill, just to haul across the street for storm collection, the gargantuan mass of dicot trees that were destroyed at our house in the winds and inundation of Hurricane Irma on Big Pine Key. Very few trees handled it well, and that includes all slash pines (killed out 100% in our section of the island); dicots including such stalwarts as gumbo limbo (good initial appearance and then many started rotting off at the bases from salt, though most have "sort of" recovered by now and ultimately did better than many others). The thousands of local "trash-tree" Piscidia piscipula were often physically mangled since they are brittle in wind, though they survive the salt at the roots. Same for the sea-grapes. The only dicot I can think of that had a stellar response was the small native Cordia sebestena, which was gorgeous and in full bloom three weeks after being dunked in the ocean for a day and subjected to 160mph winds with tornadic activity all around. What survived unscathed? Most established, mature and also young, non-trunking coconuts, all Adonidia merrillii, Latania, Thrinax, Hyophorbe, Acoelorrhaphe, Dypsis cabadae (NOT lutescens) and many other palms. I have since let Cocos dominate, and have re-landscaped with 80+% of the other plants that survived that nightmare.

Los Angeles has a couple of examples of parallel political grandstanding that never came to anything. Mayor Tom Bradley in the '80s said L.A. would start a campaign to plant millions of trees throughout the city. Instead, the whole project faded into the distance, and the widening of streets caused endless removal of Ficus and other shade-trees from what little neutral ground was left. More recently, in 2006, Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa brought in an unschooled individual as director of Public Works and together, along with the compliant city council, they pushed the following as documented in an L.A. Times article at the time:

“City Council members voted this week to halt the placement of fan palms on parkways, median strips and other city-owned property where nearly 75,000 of them now grow.
Instead, the city will plant only sycamores, oaks and other leafy native species that will contribute shade, collect rainwater and release oxygen across the Los Angeles Basin. 
The fan palm may be an emblematic part of Los Angeles, but its skimpy canopy is cheating city dwellers of the benefit of real trees since palms ‘are technically a type of grass and not trees,’ as a unanimously approved council resolution put it.”

Official "resolutions" contrary to scientific fact abound in government; and such false statements can be found 'round and 'round being made by these dilettante 'experts' bringing ridiculous prejudices into the policies that shape our cities. Luckily, neither of the above ever came to fruition. L.A. is just as it was all those years ago, except that their untrained landscape crews have managed to decimate the population of Phoenix canariensis throughout the city by using unsterilized pruning equipment.  The factor in all of it is that everything costs money, and cities never have any of it. Not even to buy the bleach to sanitize the chain-saws moving from palm to palm.

Lesson: take a deep breath, and realize that it is 90% publicity, 10% reality. Let's hope, anyway!