Made in the shade

Here for the summer, palm trees add tropical flair to Copley Square

It was the kind of glorious day that people in this part of the nation spend nine months of the year looking forward to. Under a benevolent sun, people lounged in shorts and flip-flops, the ice-cream man did a steady trade, and palm trees swayed gently in the breeze.

Yes, palm trees. Call it wishful thinking, or a declaration about the joys of summer in a city where the season seems a flicker on the calendar.

Whatever the case, the row of 6-foot sapling palms, imported from Florida or California, stood out as a tropical flourish in the decidedly high latitude cityscape of Copley Square - even if the fronds were turning a little brown.

"A touch of Florida in downtown Boston," said Harry Castleman, a lawyer who sat on a bench gazing at the palms while eating a sandwich before catching a train home to Canton on a recent evening.

The city planted palm trees in Copley Square for the first time this summer because Jim Sheehan, general superintendent of maintenance for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, "just wanted to change it up."

Sheehan thought the ficuses that had previously served as the centerpieces for Copley Square's Dartmouth Street flower beds had grown tired. "I guess somebody noticed," he said.

The city's horticulture division has tended various tropical plants, including palm trees, for generations. But this is the first time in recent memory that palm trees have appeared in city beds outside the Public Garden, where the plantings have always been colorful and often exotic.

In the quiet of the Public Garden, palm trees circle the statue of George Washington and rise from beds of rich-hued, evocatively named plants and flowers, like Paraguay nightshade and - in a new addition this year - Red Abyssinian banana trees. But in Copley Square, the palms have caught some by surprise.

"I was like, huh?" said Tom Brogan, who passes Copley Square regularly as a photo manager for several CVS stores in the city. "I didn't know palm trees could grow here."

Brogan, who lives in Lowell, said he has become fond of the palms as a seasonal lift. "You sit there and you think 'vacation,' " he said. "You know that fall's coming, the leaves are changing - but then you see the palm trees."

Brian Muello, a Boston teacher, was surprised, too - but not in a good way. "They're out of place," Muello said. "This isn't Hawaii or Florida." Muello said he thought the stately architecture of the library, Trinity Church, and the Copley Plaza deserved classic New England shade trees, like maples or oaks.

"If I was the mayor, I wouldn't do it," he said, pausing on a Back Bay bike ride.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino recently has prodded city gardeners for more frequent and colorful plantings around Boston, boosting the budget of a city division that had "the guts cut out" of it after the tax-limiting measure known as Proposition 2 1/2 took effect in 1982, said Sheehan, who started as a city gardener in 1979.

Today, the horticulture division plants more than 45,000 6-inch pots - each containing three to five small plantings - in garden beds a foot apart, tends more than 230 large bell pots on median strips and at street corners across the city, and tries to lend color and vibrancy to public places for as many months as possible.

That means planting in cycles - the Public Garden has early, mid-, and late-season tulips - and changing things before they turn brown. Thursday, for example, workers changed many of the hanging plants near Faneuil Hall. "We switched out 22 lousy looking petunias and put in geraniums that will give a nice showing through October," Sheehan said.

The palm trees will remain for another month or so, disappearing from Copley Square before the frost, said Tom Williams, Boston's superintendent of horticulture.

Then they'll go to Franklin Park, to a complex of 13 connected greenhouses, the oldest of which date to the 19th century. There, city workers grow from seed most of the new flowers and plants used annually in Boston's public spaces and also tend the best of existing plants not hearty enough to make it through the winter, serving especially as a Public Garden incubator.

The greenhouse crew has ample experience with the palms surrounding the George Washington statue, a species of adonidia merrillii known commonly as Christmas palm. The Copley Square palms, a wild card selection from the city's tropical vendor, after Sheehan described what he wanted, are less familiar. The invoice called them phoenix roebelenii, a type of date palm that survives year-round only in the warmest parts of the United States.

Tomorrow is Labor Day. Soon the sun will set early behind the Boston Public Library, and the leaves on the St. James Street maples will change color and fall.

Before long, city gardeners will dig up the palms and pack them in fresh pots, to while away the months under glass at Franklin Park, enveloped in 70-degree warmth. Winter will come, and just one tropical tree will remain in Copley Square - stylized, neon green, and glowing in the sign for the Palm Restaurant.

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.