Fairbanks man 'plants' palm trees

Evidently nobody told Ricky Blevins you can't have palm trees in Fairbanks, in the winter no less. But that's precisely what Blevins did, and it's helped brighten many a Fairbanksan's day this cold, dreary winter.

The 48-year-old Blevins is the guy who "planted" the two palm trees that sit on the bank of the Chena River near University Avenue. They are visible as you drive over the University Avenue bridge, sticking out like a pair of sore thumbs in Blevins' big, snow-covered yard next to Noyes Slough.

Of course, with bright, yellow LED lights running up the trunks of the trees and green lights wrapped around the leaves on top, they are hard to miss.

"We've had total strangers pull into the driveway to take pictures," Blevins said. "We've got people coming in on snowmachines driving around in circles trying to figure out what they are."

In the summer, Blevins watched boaters stop, get out of their boats, walk up to the trees and rap on them with their knuckles to see if they were real.

The trees aren't real, of course, but they look so life-like it's hard to tell from a distance. Blevins, a sheet metal worker at Holiday-Parks, Inc., built the palm trees in June as a wedding present for his bride, Kelley.

"We were supposed to get married in Arizona but that fell through, so I brought a little bit of the lake-front property back with me," Ricky explained.

The trees, made of sheet metal, served as a backdrop for their solstice wedding, complete with a sandy beach that Blevins trucked in.

"I was only going to leave them up a couple weeks but everybody convinced me to leave them up a little longer," Blevins said. "When it got dark I decided to light them up.

"I've heard a lot of different comments," he said. "I've had people offer to buy them."

The trees are 16 feet tall and each one has five big, green leaves trees bolted to the top. There were six leaves, but he removed a leaf from each tree when he put the lights on in November because he didn't have enough lights to cover six leaves.

The trees are built in three five-foot sections that bolt together. The trees can be disassembled into three sections that nest together.

"I originally made these to ship to our house in Arizona," Blevins said. "After the wedding, I was going to ship them down and plant them in our yard in Arizona."

But the trees were so popular Blevins decided to leave them where they are. He added the lights in November.

It took Blevins, a lifelong Fairbanksan, about a week to build the trees. He used pictures on the Internet and studied palm trees in the yard of his wife's home in Arizona to help guide him. He used elbows to create the distinctive bend in the trunk of the trees.

"Being an Alaskan, I don't have a lot of experience with palm trees," Blevins said. "I was going for a generic palm tree. This is my image of a palm tree.

"Everybody tells me I should put coconuts on them," he said with a laugh.

His 25-year-old daughter, Courtney, painted the trunks and leaves.

"I took her to the store to buy spray paint and said we need brown and green," Blevins said. "She started grabbing all these different greens and browns and blacks and tans. I was getting nervous."

When he got home, Blevins laid the trees out on sawhorses and let her go to work.

"I said, 'I can't watch,'" he said.

The trees "turned out great," Blevins said. "She used like six different shades of green and four different shades of brown with some black and tan mixed in."

Blevins dug holes to plant the trees in the ground, and so far he hasn't had any problem with passing moose trying to reach up and eat the leaves.

The palm trees have provided a psychological boost for both Rick and Kelley during the long, cold, dark winter.

"I told him in the summer we should hang a hammock in between them," Kelley said.