The tree that lost its head

You could feel the impact through the soles of your feet. A huge, dull wump! from the general direction of the village square, as though a playful daddy elephant had jumped off the chapel roof.

People tumbled out of their houses to see what had happened. It didn't take long to track it down. One of the two stately palm trees in the plaza, the square, had lost its head. The trunk remained as proud and stately as ever, but its leafy crown lay upside down on the ground, with just a stub of trunk pointing forlornly towards the sky.

The crown of a mature Canary palm is very, very heavy and you really wouldn't want to be walking underneath when it fell. Fortunately, this one was considerate enough to do it early in the morning, when there was little risk of anyone getting hurt.

However, heads falling off palm trees are not a normal feature of the Gomeran way of life. Palms wave gently in the wind all over the island and remain reliably whole and complete, except for the occasional time-expired leaf falling to the ground, which is part of the natural order of things and has never killed anyone. But an entire head falling off - no, this is something entirely different. This is Mother Nature with a problem.

We gathered around the fallen head in a strangely subdued throng. It was like looking at a slaughtered giant, struck down by a devastating blow. Paco, our Down's syndrome neighbour who is always first on the scene, scampered around the plaza warning everyone that the head might fall off the other palm tree too. With a bit of luck, his expression was saying. We edged away, looking up at the second palm.

'It's diseased,' confirmed Saturnina, shaking her head sadly. 'They're both diseased. Nothing you can do about it.' Saturnina sees doom everywhere but unfortunately she's often right. 'This could spread,' she prophesied. 'It's carried by insects. Who's going to stop them? We could lose every palm tree on La Gomera.'

Oh but surely... no, that couldn't be allowed! That was unthinkable. Losing the island's Canary palms would be catastrophic, they're an essential feature of the landscape. They are protected by law - you can't just fell a palm, you need special permission and a very good reason. Such as a terminal disease, of course.

Eusebio was poking around the fallen head with a pocket knife. (The older men here still carry pocket knives - you never know when you might need to peel an orange or whittle a toothpick.) He pointed to a palm frond that had snapped off, exposing its base: 'See the holes? Tunnels made by the gusanos, the maggots.' Like woodworm, then, but even more deadly. Killing a palm tree is an impressive feat for a maggot not much bigger than a grain of Basmati rice. Eventually the maggots turn into beetles which fly off to the next palm tree, the next victim.

So a diseased palm has to be disposed of correctly if Saturnina's doomsday scenario is to be avoided. Someone had already telephoned the Ayuntamiento, the town council, to tell them that one of our palm trees had lost its head. Not long afterwards a couple of men arrived in a pickup truck, equipped with heavy boots, work gloves and a serious chainsaw.

The square had mostly emptied by then, people having drifted away to start their working day, thereby missing the splendid finale of this drama.

Clearing away the fallen head took a while because the two workmen first had to cut off every frond. Then came the felling of the headless tree, which went commendably smoothly. Cut a wedge from one side - carefully judged to set the direction of fall - then cut across from the opposite side, push the trunk and over it goes!

Perhaps they were slightly too pleased with the success of this first operation, perhaps slightly too keen to get the second one done and the mess cleared away. So they just did a repeat run of the first felling. Cut a wedge from one side - carefully judged etc - cut across from the other side, give it a push and over it goes! Over it went, just like the first one. However, the key difference was that this palm still had its head, so it was considerably taller. And strung across the plaza was an electric cable feeding the street lamp in the corner.

Flanders and Swan wrote a song about this kind of thing: '...then he nailed right through a cable, and out went all the lights! Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do...' It's funny in a guilty kind of way, as long as you're not involved and don't have to pay for it. I watched one of the council guys on his mobile phone, gesticulating as people illogically do on their mobile phones, miming the falling of a tree, the snagging of a cable, the crumpling of a lamp post, the dangling of a now-defunct floodlight...

But there's a happy ending. Nobody was hurt except for a touch of wounded pride, and we got a brand new floodlight for the plaza with a high-efficiency bulb and a modern design that reduces light spillage into the night sky. You can still see the Milky Way on a clear night.

And the island still has its beautiful Canary palms populating the hills and the valleys, despite Saturnina's doleful prophecy. Doom came only to the evil maggots, as is right and proper in a happy ending.

Notes for the serious student
There are many potential threats to a palm tree but one of the worst is a beetle smaller than a coffee bean. Officially called diocalandra frumenti but commonly known as the picudo negro, black weevil, it was spotted not long ago climbing around in some of the palm trees in the main town, San Sebastián.

It's easy enough to detect this creature at the beetle stage of its life cycle, but by then it might already have done a lot of damage. The beetles lay tiny eggs among the leaves, the eggs hatch into little maggots and the maggots tunnel their way through the leaf stems, feeding on the plant tissue. In two months or so they're big and fat enough to turn into pupas, from which they emerge a couple of weeks later as new beetles.

Meanwhile the palm leaves are now full of tunnels which disrupt the natural flow of nutrients, and also leave them open to opportunistic infections by other intruders such as fungi.

It's not a pretty story. If the tree is too damaged it has to be felled and burned, but generally it can be saved by spraying to kill the beetles and larvae. The important thing then is to treat all the trees in the vicinity too, to catch any beetles that have already moved house.

Trouble of this kind is always someone else's fault. In this case the beetles were transported by unknown agencies from somewhere in Polynesia, where they habitually dined on coconut palms. We love to receive foreign visitors here in the Canaries, but only on condition they don't eat our palm trees.