Reports of palm theft have appeared in LA, San Diego, and Texas; palm rustling also gets a mention in Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief.
To understand why someone would want to steal a palm tree, we need to understand their value—which has a lot to do with the space they occupy in our collective imagination. We don’t plant palms for any of the normal reasons we want other trees around. They produce little shade, are difficult to climb, and don’t, for the most part, produce edible fruit.
Palm trees, it seems, do something else. They’re evocative. They’re transportative. They inspire us to dream big.