Scary: Palm Tree Experts Visit Paradise Palms

I spent most of last Saturday at the botanical gardens, hosting a group from the Palm Beach County chapter of the International Palm Tree Society.

For the first time since we started the project ten years ago, the park was fully developed, or at least it looked fully developed. It looked fantastic! I was happy about that. But I was anxious about what our guests would think of it. These weren’t casual visitors out for a bucolic weekend stroll. They were palm tree aficionados. One mislabeled palm tree could provoke who knows how much scoffing!

Paul Craft, a world-renowned expert on palm trees and the man chiefly responsible for making our garden what it is, led the tour for half of the group, about 25 people that I imagined were the hard-core botanists. (I tagged along with them.) And Keith Buttry, who will be Paul’s replacement as Chief Design and Development Director when he retires, led the tour for the other half.

Paul with Eric Katz, one of the palm enthusiasts on his part of the tour 

The complete tour of the grounds, which our usual visitors typically complete in 60 to 90 minutes, took more than three hours with these people. It felt like they wanted to stop at every single one of our 550+ species. And they had lots of questions and comments, half of them too technical for me to even understand.

Afterwards, everyone assembled in the picnic and game area for lunch. The mood was upbeat, the conversation convivial, and I was soon surrounded by guests that had figured out I was the person whose project this was.

First-timers to the gardens were flabbergasted to discover that such a beautiful and substantial palm tree garden was in the middle of West Delray Beach. Others, who had been here before, congratulated me on the progress we’d made since the last time they had visited.

I decided to spend the night in the cottage on the grounds so I could take a walk the next morning to see the gardens in the early light. It was sort of amazing.