by Mark McDermott
Sally and Noel Palm were the kind of people who thought about the long run. They considered time in much the way a tree does, a ring for each year, marking a deeper commitment to their place in the world.
They were high school sweethearts who married in the boom town years of postwar Santa Ana, and eventually found their way to Manhattan Beach, where they bought a little cottage at 1827 9th Street in 1960. It is where they intended to plant roots, and that is what they did. The Palms raised five children in a 1,400 sq. ft. cottage. Noel served 16 years as a trustee on the school board and Sally was deeply involved in the Manhattan Beach Community Church. Both were instrumental in founding the South Bay Free Clinic.
Their sense of community extended beyond just people. Sally planted trees all around the family home. The crowning tree was planted out front, nearest the street, around 1970. It was a sweet gum tree.
Sally Palm called it her “Liquid Amber” — its Latin name.
For centuries the tree had been valued for the aromatic resin hidden beneath its bark — a medicine the Cherokee burned in healing rituals, that the Maya offered to Spanish explorers as a gift, hollow reeds filled with the fragrant smoke. When Sally chose the tree and its location, she wasn’t just putting in a shade tree.
“I know my Mom thought of the tree as a friend,” Sally’s daughter Vicky Palm said.
Noel and Sally were one of the great local love stories. They celebrated 70
years of marriage in 2019, still as flirtatious as the teenagers they’d been when their adventure began, back in geometry class in 1946.
“She had her eye on me, I think,” Noel said in an interview at the time of their anniversary.
“I was the plotter,” Sally said, laughing. “He was a young innocent guy who just went along.”
Noel died in early 2021. Sally moved to assisted living in February 2022, and died in March 2024. The house was sold to a developer the following month. Sally never knew. She could keep the house and her tree intact in her memory, and she did.
But the sweet gum tree meant a lot to the rest of the neighborhood, as well. It had grown into a large, luminous, stately tree, 60 feet tall with a trunk nearly three feet in diameter. One neighbor in particular kept a watchful eye on the tree.
Gaston Moraga has lived at 1833 9th Street since 1972. His family bought the house around the time the Palms planted the sweet gum next door, and he has watched it grow ever since. He was a young boy when the tree was a sapling. He also watched Sally carefully tend her beloved Liquid Amber across decades. Even as her kids grew up and went out into the world, even as she grew older and tinier, even after Noel passed away, Gaston would see Sally out under her sweet gum tree, caring for it.
“I love that tree,” Sally told him one day.
“She had planted it, she had seen it grow, and she had always tended to it,” Moraga said. “She absolutely loved that tree. So to me, it’s almost like family. It’s like a friend.”
After Sally passed and the house was sold, Moraga decided to look after his old friend. He both memorialized the tree, and sought protection for it.
Moraga is an artist. When he learned the developer who purchased the Palm’s house wanted the tree removed, he painted it — a portrait of the Liquid Amber, made while he still could.
The developer is Thomas James Homes, operating locally through Srour & Associates. The Palm property sold in May 2024. The following month, a letter arrived from the developer informing Moraga they intended to remove the tree. Moraga did a little research into city codes to see if there were any protections for old trees. He discovered that Manhattan Beach maintained one of the strictest tree ordinances in the South Bay. In 2009, as development began to intensify locally, the city had revisited how to best protect its “urban canopy,” not only the trees in public rights of way, but those on private property.
“These regulations strive to preserve and enhance the existing healthy tree canopies on individual residential properties as well as the overall neighborhood, in order to maintain the neighborhood character, while allowing flexibility for removal of existing trees that may be inappropriate for an area or causing damage,” the ordinance reads. “The intent is to enhance the future tree canopy of the City, striving to provide the right trees in the right location.”
The sweet gum tree qualified almost exactly as the right tree in the right location for preservation.
“‘Protected tree’ shall include: any species of tree, (excluding deciduous fruit-bearing trees and Washingtonia species palms) the trunk of which is located at least partially within the required front yard or streetside yard (on corner lots) of a site, with a trunk diameter of twelve inches (12″) or greater or multiple trunks totaling twelve inches (12″) in diameter or greater at a height of four and one-half feet (4.5′) from existing grade,” the ordinance said.
Moraga and his wife went to City Hall in June 2024 to seek protected status for the Liquid Amber. His initial discussion with a planning staff member was discouraging, as he remembers it.
“When I told him that I had carefully read the city ordinance, and told him that the tree met the requirements for protection, he showed us on his monitor, what he said was the official position of the city — which was that developers have the permission to do as they want in the construction of the property, and this permission went above the ordinance I had read and studied,” Moraga said. “He also mockingly stated that there was a housing crisis, inferring who knows what.”
But Moraga didn’t give up. He was eventually directed to Johnathon Masi, an associate planner for the city, who confirmed what Moraga had originally thought — that under Manhattan Beach municipal code, the sweet gum qualified as a protected tree.
In August 2024, Moraga and his wife attended a meeting with the new owners in front of the Palm house. They were the only neighbors who showed up. According to Moraga, the developer told them the tree was coming down. Moraga pushed back — it was no ordinary tree, he said, and it was protected. The developer was unmoved, saying the tree would suffer too much stress during construction. It was around this time that Moraga painted the tree.
In September 2024, workers installed a fence around the tree’s base, with a city sign designating the area inside as off limits. They also laid mulch within the protected zone.
Moraga and his wife were ecstatic. The tree would be saved.
What followed was a slow undoing.
The Palm house was demolished in early October 2024. Through November and December 2024, workers dug a large trench across the property, pushing into the front yard and close to the protection zone. At one point, a bulldozer severed a major root that extended into Moraga’s front yard. He said the machine missed leaving the root intact by roughly four inches.
He began writing to the city. He wrote to the planning department. He wrote to code enforcement. He sent photos. He asked the city, repeatedly, to send an arborist — an independent expert who could assess the damage as it was happening.
Moraga watched with a growing sense of alarm as excavation work continued to take place seemingly well within the city’s own protection zone. He approached a construction foreman on the site to express his concerns.
“I told him, ‘Hey, you guys are really removing a lot of those roots, and it doesn’t seem like you’re protecting it very much,'” Moraga said. “And he goes, ‘Oh no, the tree’s coming down. It’s coming down.'”
“I always told the city — a lot of roots are being removed,” Moraga said. “I don’t think they ever sent an arborist.”
City staff was responsive in its correspondence. Masi told Moraga in December 2024 that the applicant was required to provide certification from a licensed arborist that tree protection measures were in place, and that he would reach out to the contractor. Code enforcement officer Emma Warner visited the site in January 2025, took photos, and forwarded them to the planning department. In February 2025, Warner told Moraga that planning was “speaking with the contractor to make sure the tree is being protected properly.”
In the spring of 2025, after a winter of deep excavation and more severed roots, the sweet gum leafed out full and green, its star-shaped leaves unfurling as they always had. Moraga was relieved. He thought perhaps the tree had survived after all.
No independent arborist was dispatched. Under the city’s tree ordinance, dispatching one was not the city’s responsibility — the code requires the applicant to provide an arborist report. The only arborist reports were commissioned by Thomas James Homes itself.
The first, by Peter Harnisch — an ISA Board Certified Master Arborist retained by the developer — came in August 2024, and identified the sweet gum as a protected tree requiring preservation. Then, in November 2025, Harnisch returned. He found that roots had been cut near the tree, but concluded at that point that the sweet gum “might not have been adversely affected.” He recommended further inspections.
He returned again on January 13, 2026. What he found was different. Further root pruning had taken place beyond what he had observed in November. Large roots of the sweet gum had been severed within approximately 30 inches of the trunk — well within the city’s own protection zone. He concluded that the tree’s stability had been jeopardized and recommended its immediate removal.
On February 20, 2026, a certified letter from Srour & Associates arrived proposing the removal of three trees — the sweet gum, a neighboring Italian Stone Pine whose roots had apparently also been damaged during construction, and a third tree on the property.
In a statement, Thomas James Homes said the company worked with its project arborist throughout construction and that following the January 2026 inspection, the arborist determined the structural stability of the trees could not be assured. “Decisions involving changes to a neighborhood’s landscape and long-standing features are never taken lightly,” the statement said.
When Moraga pressed the city on the implications of the damage — if the developer had simply decided the fine for violating tree protection was a cost of doing business — he got an answer that stunned him.
“What’s the penalty going to be?” he asked. “And the guy said, ‘$600.’ I could not believe it. Those houses go for over five and a half million.”
The penalty is confirmed in the municipal code. Community Development Director Masa Alkire, who joined the city in September 2025 and inherited this situation, explained that the developer was assessed double the standard permit fee — $600 rather than the standard $300 — plus a requirement to plant a replacement tree. In this case, the city exercised its discretion to require a larger replacement than the code minimum: a 48-inch box tree, roughly 15 to 20 feet tall at installation, rather than the standard 36-inch box.
When asked whether the city’s tree ordinance had enough teeth to deter a developer from simply absorbing the penalty and proceeding, Alkire did not disagree.
“That’s a fair enough question,” he said.
A legislative fix — stiffer penalties, or perhaps a mandatory independent arborist inspection triggered by written neighbor complaints during active construction — would require a City Council amendment to the code. Though Manhattan Beach’s tree ordinance is often considered stronger than those of many surrounding cities, several California cities go much further, with significantly higher fines, ongoing independent arborist monitoring, and clearer authority to halt work when required protections are not being followed. Santa Monica, for example, can impose fines in the tens of thousands of dollars and stop work on projects that are not complying with tree protection requirements.
Mayor David Lesser, who was on the Council when the strengthened tree ordinance was enacted, said he is open to revisiting it.
“It is troubling to learn about limitations in the Manhattan Beach Tree Ordinance,” Lesser said. “I participated in its prior amendments and am receptive to further modifications.”
On a block that Moraga estimates has lost roughly 40 percent of its trees in the last decade, the sweet gum had come to represent something larger than itself.
“There’s going to be concrete around there,” he said. “They don’t plant the same kind of beautiful trees. They just plant fast growing things that they use as hedges.”
Across the street, at 1826 9th St., a different developer made a different choice during a similar construction project a few years earlier. The grand old tree in that front yard was preserved. It is thriving.
The Palm family and the Moragas retained their own arborist, Louis Gamino, at their own expense. His verbal assessment was softer than Harnisch’s: the tree could possibly be saved, he said, but it carried risk. The family offered to contribute to whatever treatment might save it. So did Moraga and his wife.
The tree removal permit has not yet been issued. In early March, Masi said the application was still under review. Alkire indicated the city would likely resolve the matter through the penalty and tree replacement process.
“If there’s a damaged large tree,” he said, “that is a real risk factor in a residential neighborhood.”
This springtime, new leaves are emerging on the sweet gum. Moraga monitors the tree’s health daily, and can’t help but retain hope for its survival.
“It looks as if it is saying yes,” he said.
Vicky Palm lives in Seattle now, where, she notes, trees are well protected. She will not have to watch what happens to her mother’s tree. She only hopes that the loss of the tree might serve as an example and lead to stricter protections for other trees in Manhattan Beach.
What Vicky remembers is a tree her mother tended with careful attention — not just watered and pruned, but minded, in the old sense of the word. Sally planted flowers and succulents at its base. She planted milkweed there, to help Monarch butterflies. She watched it grow from a sapling into a tree that birds nested in, that squirrels played in, that shaded the sidewalk in front of the little house where she and Noel had raised their family for more than 60 years.
“This tree was a passive observer to our family growth,” Vicky said. “Our cats climbed it, the local squirrels and birds made homes in it, it provided shade to the neighborhood. It really became intertwined with our family history, especially because Mom loved it so much.”
Sally Palm knew what she was planting when she planted it. She knew its name — Liquid Amber, Liquidambar styraciflua — a name given by Linnaeus in 1753, from the Latin for fluid and the Arabic for amber, for the fragrant resin that seeps from the tree when its bark is wounded. For centuries that resin had been used to treat wounds and illness. Some traditions held that burning it could purify a space, or ease the grief of mourning.
A tree, in other words, that repairs what is broken. That may have been Sally’s instinct when she planted it. Even after Noel and Sally were gone, the Liquid Amber seemed to preside over 9th Street.
“The tree,” Vicky said, “has bravely tried to carry on.” ER
