A Daunting Task

It’s not all planting flowers and building trails when it comes to taming our jungle. In this case, we had one of our favorite huge Royal Palm trees die of Thielaviopsis trunk rot. It’s a bummer because it was sort of the statement piece of this “room” in our botanical garden. This occurs when palms suffer some sort of trauma to their soft core such as tearing off palm fronds or wounding it in some other way. You know, the sort of thing a huge hurricane could do. After Maria all the surviving palms (the ones that didn’t get knocked over completely or bent in half like a straw), seemed to slowly come back replacing their fronds one by one. Including this one. But then a yellowing came over the spire and then the upper green trunk. The rot had been slowly and quietly eating away at the palm from the inside out. We kept thinking maybe it got struck by lightning and would grow back, but it never recovered. Finally the entire crown just fell off. If there is no crown, a palm can’t survive.

We contemplated just leaving the huge concrete-pole looking tree there, but we knew it would eventually start rotting away and pose a safety threat when it finally fell on its own, so we decided to chainsaw it down. Chainsawing is dangerous and even with a lot of experience, you can’t always predict where trees will fall. This one was a pretty scary job, and made this pregnant lady waddle away as fast a possible when the tree started coming right in my direction. Check out the video.

In the end it all worked out and we planted a new mango tree in its place. And the jungle grows on.

It smushed a mulberry tree, some bananas and heliconias, but we managed to save them

It stinks from all the rot inside!