Palm trees are an essential part of any Mediterranean garden or landscape but high tech has arrived for their maintenance.
In the old days a man in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with a big blade on the end of a stick used to climb the trunks of the palm trees and trim off the old leaves. This worked well but, progress is progress, and now a special little crawler machine was spotted in use in Cartagena at the fine stand of palms near the old town hall.
This machine creeps onto the grass on rubber tracks and then spreads out its legs like an octopus to anchor itself firmly, raising the tracks off the ground. Then the palm tree experts climb into the cage and pull a few leavers to be raised up into the depths of the leaves where they do their essential work, wearing full safety equipment.
No shorts, no t-shirts.
Sharon remembers: “When I was growing up in Africa, the palm men used to come round every now and then ask if you needed your palms cutting. They only wore shorts and no shoes and they had a thing like a hula hoop made of rope. They would sling it around the trunk and climb up the tree with the hoop around their waist. When they got to the top, they leaned back into the hoop and sawed off the dead palm branches.”
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©Phillip Bruce 2009.
In the old days a man in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with a big blade on the end of a stick used to climb the trunks of the palm trees and trim off the old leaves. This worked well but, progress is progress, and now a special little crawler machine was spotted in use in Cartagena at the fine stand of palms near the old town hall.
This machine creeps onto the grass on rubber tracks and then spreads out its legs like an octopus to anchor itself firmly, raising the tracks off the ground. Then the palm tree experts climb into the cage and pull a few leavers to be raised up into the depths of the leaves where they do their essential work, wearing full safety equipment.
No shorts, no t-shirts.
Sharon remembers: “When I was growing up in Africa, the palm men used to come round every now and then ask if you needed your palms cutting. They only wore shorts and no shoes and they had a thing like a hula hoop made of rope. They would sling it around the trunk and climb up the tree with the hoop around their waist. When they got to the top, they leaned back into the hoop and sawed off the dead palm branches.”
***
©Phillip Bruce 2009.
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