On Ornamental Palms

This is an excerpted transcript from the fourth episode of Are.na Radio, an audio experiment with Montez Press Radio where four people share their Are.na channels, describe what’s been collected, and reveal the threads of thought therein.

I grew up in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center. One prominent backdrop of my childhood was the Winter Garden, a semi-public space in the ground floor of what was then known as the World Financial Center (now technically “Brookfield Place”), a corporate building complex adjacent to the World Trade Center. The complex is nestled up to the Hudson River. The corporate office towers are connected by a large glass atrium that looks out onto the river. The exterior and upstairs are ringed by stores; in my childhood, those were mostly novelty shops and fast-casual restaurants, but now Brookfield Place is a semi-luxury shopping destination. A grand marble staircase — the kind that you might sit or picnic on — fills the back half of the atrium, and at the bottom of the stairs, there’s a big seating area. My memory of this space is vivid: green metal perforated benches below lines of towering palm trees. Palm trees. In Manhattan. Lots of my childhood memories take place here: scrapes and bruises from running up the marble steps, teenage loitering. But most of all, I recall the palms. As a kid, they were mystical, Seussical, otherworldly. I recall putting my hand up to the smooth ridged trunk of the trees, staring up at the fanned crowns, so unlike the northern trees I knew. My “ornamental palms” channel emerged from my memory of these palms.

A 1985 article in the New York Times recounts the prehistory of the palms I remember from my childhood. They are Washingtona robusta palms. Before they came to Battery Park City, they were brought to the Mojave Desert, surrounded by telephone poles and covered in tightly woven plastic tarp. Their survivability, their suitability for the northern climate, was being tested. This species of palm was chosen for its acclimation to a dry climate, as the Winter Garden would not provide the moist, tropical, greenhouse setting of other palms living in the north. As the landscaping company working on the Winter Garden noted, this species had never been successfully transplanted anywhere. This would be the first. But the trees would undergo a shock. The article quotes the landscaper Leonard Parker: “For millions of years, these trees have been living under brilliant light, 15,000 footcandles. We have to make them live indoors. Everything else can be handled except that light.”

Why do we transport species? Particularly tropical ones, to northern climates? To probe this question, I started to collect some histories about the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London. One block is a YouTube video from the Kew Gardens recounting the history of the Palm House — its architectural significance as an early glass and steel structure, its 20th-century renovation, and in an act of self-reflection, a discussion of the colonialist imperatives of the British Empire that led to the collection of palms in the first place. It was a grand display of Britain’s reach over the tropics, a display of exoticism made available at home in England.

I named this channel “ornamental palms.” I suppose the “ornamental” relates to their being used as a form of decoration, rather than for some other purpose, like producing fruit or shade. These are nonproductive palms, plucked from their context. Another block on this channel is a photograph of documentation from Nam June Paik’s installation “TV Garden,” originally staged in 1974. The photo in my channel is from a 2000 restaging at the Guggenheim Museum. The photo shows just part of the installation — several tv screens surrounded by a lush garden of potted plants, palm fronds obscuring the television glow. Like the palms of my youth, and the Kew Gardens palms, Nam June Paik’s potted palms feel both distinctly out of place in the museum setting nestled against the screen, and at the same time, so lush and inviting.

In this channel, I connect to Aarati Akkapeddi’s Are.na channel “Narrative Flora,” a collection of images of flower arrangements, leaf organization charts, and other botanical interventions. “Narrative Flora” has a block that links to the Wikipedia page “The Language of Flowers,” about cryptic messages transmitted through flower arranging.

I started this channel without really having any idea of what to do with my thoughts about palms. It stemmed from a memory, and my particular affinity for this species of trees. I smile whenever I see them. I guess I was trying to build a narrative around these trees, trying to put language onto the plants.

The most recent block I added is a photograph I took recently. I was walking down the block where I work, and I saw a truck for a landscaping company called John Mini Distinctive Landscapes. The truck was shrink wrapped with an all around photograph of Brookfield Place — the World Financial Center — the palms of my youth. I hadn’t visited my “ornamental palms” channel in a while. I snapped the picture as I was walking by, and then added the photo to the channel. I haven’t visited my palms in a while either. Maybe after this, I will head to Battery Park City, and sit under the Washingtona robustas.