Fake palm tree supplier in SoCal?

I remember a place in SoCal that sold fake palm trees, bamboo poles and woven mats. I HAD their url, but lost it when my hard drive ate my bookmarks.

Any help?

Benson's imports? Heard some bad things about them though?

Thats the one.

what bad things? hard to deal with? bad product? what?

He's a dick and even spit in a very good customers face! Heard neg stuff from a few peeps.

At Disneyland, a place called Island Trader (in Downtown Disney) had sets of three large fake palm trees with a light in the base. Very nice if you can cough up $1200.00.

ChopTop~

FYI~

You may want to make a trip to The House of Tiki in Costa Mesa. Right next to it is The Flower Galleria, which has silk plants and silk trees for sale. They're not cheap, but seem to be of really good quality.

Either way, I bet you can't leave either location without spending some money.

Also, tell Wes and/or Sandy that you are a TC Member.

well, the guy at benson imports didnt spit on me, but i did buy a cool 7" bananna tree from him that i like.he is the owners son and is really an A.H. to his employees thats for sure. little richboy syndrome.its a place to buy from once so you dont have to go back. its the dmv of tiki stuff as compared to O.E. , which is disneyland!.

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).

The best tiki bar is the one that's within stumbling distance of your bed
The Humuhumu Room

[ Edited by: Humuhumu on 2003-05-19 23:25 ]

Humuhumu wrote:
I made mine using supplies I got from Display & Costume Supply, a local shop here in Seattle.

That is way, way, way cool! Great job! I took a look at the link you provided to the Display & Costume Supply, and they happen to have palm trees available starting at $108.

Yours makes theirs look like Charlie Brown's tree: