Gerardo Aponte, a ground maintenance worker for the town of Lantana, stops traffic on Ocean Avenue as a donated ponytail palm is moved from Hypoluxo Island to the Lantana Public Library. Kurtis Boggs/The Coastal Star
By Mary Thurwachter
A week after a large ponytail palm tree was uprooted and moved from Hypoluxo Island to the Lantana Library, Kathy Dunn went to take a look.
“It looks like it’s always been there,” said Dunn. “It brought a smile to my face.”
She and her husband, Pat Dunn, who are about to begin construction on their new home on Hypoluxo Island, donated the 70-year-old tree to the town of Lantana.
It’s not that the couple didn’t like the palm, with its ribbon-like leaves unfolding like a fountain and curling downward like a ponytail. The palm had to go because of the long, thin configuration of the property and the town’s new zoning requirements for new homes. The 1956 house that had occupied the property was torn down last year after having been vacant for five years.
Simply cutting down the ponytail palm, about 22 feet tall, was not an option for the Dunns, who currently live in a Boca Raton condo.
“It’s an astounding palm,” she said. “We wanted it to go where somebody would love it as it had been loved in the past.”
So when the old house was demolished last fall, the couple called in tree experts, including Lantana’s arborist Mike Greenstein, to plot a future for the decades-old palm.
Town Manager Mike Bornstein said the library was chosen since its landscape needed a signature feature.
“It has been said the tree looks as if it were drawn by Dr. Seuss, which makes it great in front of the library,” Bornstein said. “The library is going through landscape beautification with irrigation, trees, fencing, plantings and energy efficiency upgrades. The tree just happened to fit into that effort.”
The town spent $2,600 from money set aside for library beautification.
“It’s a champion tree (the largest specimen of that species) as defined by our code,” Bornstein said. “The tree should survive nicely since it is indigenous to an arid climate and has a hearty root system.”
Moving day (Feb. 1) proved to be quite a show, Dunn said. The tree movers arrived at 9 a.m. and it took until 11:30 a.m. before the palm was loaded.
Because of the way the tree was positioned on the truck, the driver had to drive backward from the site on North Atlantic Drive and over the Ocean Avenue bridge to the library at 205 W. Ocean Ave.
Workers had to use long sticks to lift the power lines on Atlantic so the truck and tree could pass, Dunn said.
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