STATE

World’s only 4-headed palm cut down in Panama City

Katie Landeck GateHouse Florida
Randy Wright saws through the third limb of a four-headed pindo palm. A small crowd gathered at Oaks by the Bay on Thursday as workers with Gulf Coast Tree Specialists removed the palm. The tree is estimated to be 80 to 100 years old. Go to newsherald.com for a related video and gallery. [PATTI BLAKE/THE NEWS HERALD]

PANAMA CITY — When the chainsaw revved to life, a small gasp ran through the crowd gathered around the world’s only known four-headed pindo palm.

This was it. The iconic St. Andrews tree really was about to be cut down.

“It’s like watching history collapse,” said John Dunn, as he watched the tree fall. “It stings.”

For the past two years, park visitors have watched the palm’s green fronds slowly fade to brown despite Panama City’s attempt to save the popular photo spot. Experts have been flown in, chemical treatments and injections tried, and maintenance made a priority, but a study sent to the city by Bartlett Tree Experts spelled it out — no matter what the city did, the tree would be dead within three years.

With that grim prognosis in mind, the city decided to remove the tree while there was a chance the wood was solid enough to be used to create commemorative plaques. So early Wednesday, Gulf Coast Tree Service dismantled the tree limb by limb, sending each “head” soaring through the air by crane before landing with a thud in a waiting truck.

“It was emotional,” said Randy Wright, who wielded the chainsaw. “I would have rather have seen it stay, but yeah, it had to go.”

When the final piece — the trunk with four stumps — was removed, Panama City resident Aida Peel, with tears in her eyes, laid a bouquet of flowers down where the tree once stood.

“My daughter, her fiancé put on her first corsage in front of it. I have friends that have proposed to other friends in front of it,” Peel said. “It has value. It’s an elder.”

Others also found it difficult to say goodbye.

The mournful notes of the bagpipe funeral march rang through Oaks by the Bay Park as the Panama City Pipes and Drum group, who long ago adopted the tree as their logo, delivered their tribute in full uniform despite the oppressive heat.

“It was kind of our farewell to our friend,” said member Scott Perry.

The four-headed palm almost lived a life of obscurity, out of sight of the public, at the Millville Wastewater Treatment Plant before it was discovered by former city Utilities Director Dave Banka.

“We call it four-toed Pete,” Banka told The Panama City News Herald in 1996 when the tree still was at the plant.

An oddity, the International Palm Society took an interest in the tree, though it members never figured out how it came to be. Contamination and genetics seem unlikely, they said previously, and the most popular theory is that the resilient tree was repeatedly run over by lawn mowers and kept growing back with more heads. Other theories include a suspicion that a former worker at the wastewater treatment in the 1950s and 1960s with a penchant for grafting might have created the tree as a hobby, and multiple people have called the city saying a relative of theirs planted it.

Either way, officials decided it was a tree that needed to be seen and moved it to Oaks by the Bay Park on a rainy day in 1997, loading it onto a flatbed truck and parading it down 11th Street with a police escort and a Gulf Power crew to make sure it didn’t get tangled in any lines.

“To see it go down the road was awe inspiring,” said Judy Stevens, who like many in the crowd was there for the beginning and the end.

“Even knowing it existed (was awe inspiring), I had no idea,” added her friend Shirley Howell. “It was this little freak of nature, and there was no better place for it than St. Andrews.”

Aged at between 80 and 100 years old — a full life span for a pindo palm — there is little doubt the tree lived a rather exciting life for a palm. For now, the area the tree used to occupy will be left as green space.

Samples of the tree are at Gulf Coast State College to determine if they are suitable for laser-etched plaques. City Public Information Officer Caitlin Lawrence said updates will be posted on the city’s social media.

Also posted on social media was a note taped to the fence post that had for so long protected the tree, with childish scrawl reading, “I will miss you but before you are gone I will collect your bark so you four are never really gone, Love Zoey.”