By Ron Hayes, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003


WEST PALM BEACH -- Lila Young does not forget her roots.

In 1984, when her beloved grandmother Jenny Ludwig Bechtel died, Young honored her memory by planting four small eugenia trees around the light pole outside her house at Sunset and Aravale roads.

The plants took root, growing into a single tree, a local landmark, 20 feet tall, which Young faithfully topiaried into hearts and abstract shapes.

Now the city is replacing the storm sewer and water main pipes along Sunset Road, so Wednesday morning Young spent about $4,000 to move the Jenny Ludwig Bechtel Memorial Eugenia Tree, light pole and all, to a second home she owns several blocks south on Washington Road.

"Hang on, Gramma!" Young hollered as the tree slowly twirled from a 90-foot crane. "This'll be the ride of your life, even though you never drove a car!"

The ride began April 11, when a crew from Boynton Landscaping dug a shallow moat around the base of the tree and pruned the roots to create a self-contained, movable base. Then they filled it in again.

For the next three months, Young doused the tree with a vitamin cocktail and watered it three days a week.

"We do that so the tree won't go into shock when it's moved," explained Joe Ellison, who's been moving trees for 44 years.

Actually, Young appeared more likely to go into shock than the tree.

"I'm happy, I'm ecstatic, I'm scared!" she exclaimed, prancing here and there with a camera as neighbors gathered.

At 9:40 a.m., Ellison and his crew wrapped an 18-foot nylon sling around the tree and the light pole while Tony Cole of Merchant Transport Inc. watched with a bemused smile from behind the controls of his 92-foot crane.

"What you think that thing's gonna weigh total?" he called. "I just need to know if it's gonna be over 9,600 pounds."

"No, no, that's mostly sugar sand," Ellison said, nodding at the root base. "When you pick it up, most of that's going to start falling off."

And so it did.

"Oh, my heart's in my feet!" Young squealed.

"Don't worry," Cole jokingly reassured her, gripping the crane controls. "This is my second week."

Slowly the tree rose from the ground, holding on for dear life to the light pole it had grown so close to over the years.

Ellison and his crew wrapped the root ball in burlap, and Cole hoisted the tree onto a 20-foot flatbed, laying it lengthwise with the top resting against a steel brace with a bag of fertilizer to cushion the upper branches.

"Oh, look," Young exclaimed, "it's like a pillow under her head."

They drove down Olive Avenue, and by 2 p.m. Grandma Bechtel's tree was ready to take root again beside its new home on Washington Road, and Lila Young was offering soft drinks and cookies to the neighbors.

And no, said crane operator Tony Cole, this was not the oddest item he's ever lifted.

"I had one other job, over on the beach," he recalled. "At this millionaire's house. He has those big old statues of naked ladies outside, and two, three times a year he hauls them back and forth to his other house up North. I wrap those ladies up in nylon slings, and they put 'em in a truck.

"That's the strangest thing I've ever hoisted."