Post #68620 by Humuhumu on Fri, Jan 9, 2004 5:42 PM

I had a conversation with TikiHula on New Year's Eve about how I made the palm trees in the Humuhumu Room, and I remembered this old post I made in May. I thought it might be worthwhile to re-post it here for those who might have missed it.

I made mine using supplies I got from Display & Costume Supply, a local shop here in Seattle. They don't have the parts on their website, but you can probably find them locally or on the internet, or you could call Display & Supply here in Seattle.

Here's a pic of one of the trees:

The trunk is a yucca pole, which was about 10' long. I drove three of these home in my Miata! I've hauled all kinds of lumber in that sweet little car -- it's about the only large thing I can buy without calling a friend. Anyway...

I lopped the tops off of the poles with a saw. For the base, I used a small rectangle of plywood (about 1'x1'), and secured a plumbing flange and about 6" long piece of ~1" diameter pipe to the center of it so the pipe stuck straight up in the air. I drilled a hole in the bottom of the yucca pole to accomodate the pipe (okay, Bong, this is where you start in with your comments...). To keep the pole upright, I wrapped the base of the pole with a 10 lb. exercise ankle weight I had sitting around that I wasn't using.

At the top of the pole, I drilled a hole to accomodate half the length of a .5" diameter dowel which had been cut to about 10". I spiked a big ol' hunk of extra-extra firm florists foam onto the dowel. I shaved off the edges of the foam so it wasn't too obviously square, and then I insterted preserved areca palm leaves. These were really cool, as they were real leaves, rather than the cheapo plastic kind the fake trees always seem to have. They were pretty pricey, and probably a serious fire hazard, but I think they made all the difference. They were also huge and kept bonking people in the head, but I loved them.

I filled in around the florists foam with smaller spikey greens and moss, and then I wrapped the connection between the foam and the pole with palm fiber, and then I added the fake coconuts.

I don't remember exactly how much the three trees ended up costing me, but I'm pretty sure it was under $100/tree, and it only took me an afternoon to do all three of them (and that included figuring out how to do it).