It’s not just a palm garden, it’s an exhibit. The approximately 100 palms installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, specifically along the promenade by the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, are a more like a grouping of paintings you might see inside one of the museum buildings along Wilshire Boulevard. That was the vision executed by landscape architect Paul Comstock of ValleyCrest in Calabasas. Some palms are in the ground but most are in large wooden above ground, boxes. “We tried to create a museum collection of palm trees much like visiting a Picasso art show,” Comstock said, “not to replicate a long-range environment.” Some are there for the short term. About 40 will be rotated out those onsite now are the winter collection and around early May, the summer collection will be “hung.” One showpiece tree, a Chilean wine palm that Comstock said is an “old soul,” has come a long way and lived a long time and is in a subterranean planter box. “In 1882, some of these palm seeds were brought in from the Andes. This tree is 120 years old and is from among the first seeds ever brought into America. These have been tracked at Lotusland Nursery in Montecito,” he said. It’s called a wine palm because in its homeland people would whack off the palm’s crown, fell the tree, a jelly sap would come out and they’d distill that. “It has a mildly alcoholic content to it,” Comstock said. “Seed is rare. They whacked them all in the wild to get drunk. Some of the best ones and some of the oldest ones,” he said, are in Southern California because people collected seeds over a century ago when there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of specimens in the wild. The landscape architect is the managing partner of Comstock Studio, part of the ValleyCrest Design Group, underneath the ValleyCrest Companies banner. Also at the BCAM installation, there is an adolescent wine palm aged 25, and two young adults aged 50. The “old soul” is planted two floors below street level, erupting out of the parking garage where it sits in a sort of five-foot-deep bathtub of soil mixture, where the water level is regulated. “Only about 60 years worth” is growing above the street-level courtyard, Comstock said. Palms came to be representative of the project, for a few reasons. On a deeper level, they are representative of some of the earliest plant forms on the planet, and one of the first that humans would have made use of; to eat the fruit, drink the sap and use for shelter. That, Comstock said, ties in with the archeological, geological location the proximity to the Tar Pits and the George Page Museum with its excavations into prehistoric periods. Comstock said, “The big umbrella idea was not a parking structure that ignores this environment, but something that celebrates the place.” Basically, he said, working off of “that kind of primordial soup idea.” The architect, Renzo Piano, had an idea of a matrix, or a fabric, of palms as an over-story that would tie a bunch of the areas together. Garden designer Robert Irwin was working with that concept and then he got more and more interested in the subtleties, Comstock said. Of those subtle distinctions, palms basically have round trunks, except, Comstock said, “There is the triangle palm (neodypsis decaryi); the trunk itself is 3-sided.” He said that Irwin treated the species “in an almost a sculptural kind of way.” Some of the plants in the exhibit aren’t palms in the literal sense, but are included for their palm-like qualities such as a variety of banana plant cultivated for its colorful foliage, and American native bottle palms and sago palms which help to sustain the primordial leitmotif, being from among the oldest plant species surviving, some going back 250 million years, Comstock said. Initially, Comstock said the plan when he came on board was only for palms of three different heights. Then Comstock’s experience from plant expeditions (“I call myself a wandering tree gypsy,” he said) through 73 different countries over the last 20 years became vital in finding unique and different specimens, “They just kind of turned me loose,” said Comstock, whose stock phrase is, “I know where to get that.” The intention, he said, is to try and have a runway modeling show of the range and variety of palms, with the fan palm and the feather palm describing the two leaf shapes, and a third as a transitional species which more or less bridges the two. But initially, that was not the plan. Things changed pretty rapidly said Bart Shively, the on-site project executive for Matt Construction, the general contractor. He characterized the task as “an odd job.” “It’s a completely different palette than when it began,” Shively said. “The only way this worked, what with the design entity who would come along and shake the Etch-A-Sketch,” was because the design-build orientation of ValleyCrest, which was able to keep the “budgets almost concurrent with the changes.” It could be infuriating and taxing for those dealing with the changes, Shively said, but it’s streamlined because it’s all in-house. Comstock gave an example: “With the classic arrangement which has a separation of the owner, the designer, the landscape contractor and the general contractor it would be very difficult in the 11th hour to accommodate surprises like ‘I just drove by this tree in San Diego. I think we should put that down near the end.’ It was never on a plan. In a normal situation, first the designer would say ‘That’s going to be an extra charge to change the plan.’ Then somebody draws it up, then it’s submitted to the contractor for pricing, then we would need to make sure that’s good with the owner It could never happen.” Now, that palm is in an 84-inch box at the eastern end of the primary installation. Comstock said that the design-build aspect of ValleyCrest’s structure provided the flexibility of dealing with Irwin, the designer of the gardens at the Getty Center, which was also installed by ValleyCrest. “We have a creative entity in force. He is fluid, a living breathing artist. He’s interested in something today, but tomorrow maybe it’s something else,” Comstock said. “The flexibility in the entire process from birthing to opening day in design-build is an incredible positive element of the integration of all the aspects,” he said. “…(It) is a shining example of how a harmonious combination with the design-build aspect breaks down barriers and allows a single interaction underneath the same umbrella.” Likewise, it will be easier for Comstock to do some fine tuning. For instance, some mammoth Canary Island palms aren’t exactly vertical. “I’ll be able to tilt those before they’ve anchored themselves in,” he said, as if it is the final touch. Clearly, he’s pleased with how the project’s coming. He’s not alone. Imitating Piano’s Italian accent, Comstock quotes the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner: “The palms make my stone look so good and the stone makes the palms look good. It’s like a marriage.” But not everyone is so enthusiastic. Comstock said, “Someone came up to me and said ‘I just don’t get it.’ Well, in a lot of ways the object isn’t ‘to get it,’ to get anything in particular, but to kind of see the different characteristics that they have” which gave him the opportunity to wax eloquent about the unique design of a palm trunk, the interlocked pattern of the stub ends of fronds sheared long ago. “Ma nature is the best, can’t beat her,” Comstock said.
