LACMA is considering a palm garden

On the heels of a vote by city officials to stop planting new fan palm trees in favor of sycamores, oaks and other leafy native species, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art says it is considering adding more palms as part of the redesign of its Wilshire Boulevard campus.

In a conversation with Robert Irwin, designer of the Getty Center gardens, at a museum event Thursday night, LACMA director Michael Govan said the museum was working with Irwin on tentative plans for a palm garden for the 17 acres of parkland behind the museum.

“It’s just in process, not definite -- there’s no funding, no nothing yet,” Govan said in an interview Friday. “We’re doing research now about collecting palms; we made a few jokes about the mayor getting rid of palms. The thing is, they have so much to do with Los Angeles, they’re such visible symbols of the city. One of the reasons Robert Irwin loves the palms is how the beautiful tall trunks hold the light, the sunset and sunrise of L.A.”

Govan said the tentative plan called for adding new varieties of palm trees to complement the washingtonian and date palms already standing near the front of the museum campus. “If the palms of the city start to get replaced by oak trees, certainly they’ll then find themselves as cultural objects, and it’s almost incumbent on the museum to begin to collect them,” he said.