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DATE/ AUTHOR None	AUTHORS: Christopher Mason

H Palm Beach Bows to the Wind

S1 WHILE Hurricane Wilma was ravaging this plutocrats' playground with sustained winds of 110 miles an hour on Oct. 24, 2005, Mario Nievera, Palm Beach's leading landscape architect, was in Pennsylvania, putting on a brave face as he delivered a lecture about his work to the Philadelphia Garden Club.

S2 As Mr. Nievera showed slides of his more exquisite creations -- purple bougainvillea wrapped around coconut palms and allées of guava trees -- the plants themselves were being ripped to shreds by Wilma, which would ultimately cause $12.2 billion worth of property damage to Florida.
S3 Having struggled for more than a year to revive gardens destroyed in September 2004 by Hurricane Frances -- the most destructive storm to hit the town since 1947 -- Mr. Nievera was daunted at having to start all over again.
S4 Although he stood to profit mightily, he dreaded the added stress.

S5 In the wake of Wilma, he said in mid-January, ''there's twice as much work, on top of all our ongoing projects.''

S6 ''And there are only so many hours in the day,'' he added, particularly in Palm Beach, where a job like his requires ceaseless socializing with fretful clients.

S7 After Frances and then, just three weeks later, Jeanne, ''nobody believed we'd get another hurricane'' Mr. Nievera said.
S8 Many of his clients rushed to restore their gardens to manicured perfection in late 2004 and in 2005, only to have them ripped out again by Wilma.

S9 Mr. Nievera said most of his clients are growing more cautious about how they spend their garden budgets and asking for plants and trees that are more likely to survive another hurricane.
S10 They appear to be heeding warnings from meteorologists that the area could face more major hurricanes in coming years.
S11 Before Wilma ''the sky was the limit,'' he said, referring in particular to the sums spent on recreating his tropical but tailored designs after the 2004 hurricanes.
S12 A client who approached him for the first time after those storms commissioned a garden with $1 million worth of plants, which was installed just in time for Wilma's arrival.

S13 ''My client lost $500,000 worth of plants,'' Mr. Nievera said, adding, ''there's no such thing as hurricane insurance.''

S14 Wilma struck as Mr. Nievera was scurrying to get his clients' gardens ready for Thanksgiving, which some regard as the start of the winter season in Palm Beach.
S15 As a result of the devastation, he is still working to finish several of the projects two months into the season -- a delay that few clients would have tolerated in years past.

S16 The follies of the 2004-05 winter season have proven useful in one way, enabling Mr. Nievera to tailor his advice to clients based on his own observations of which plants can withstand extreme winds.
S17 When he advised Tom Quick, a Palm Beach resident whose fortune derives from Quick & Reilly, the former discount brokerage firm, to buy a pair of 30-foot date palms to replace a couple of coconut palms that had succumbed to Frances, it was for aesthetic reasons: they were large enough to hide a view of the house next door that had been opened up by Frances.
S18 But the date palms, which cost roughly $10,000 apiece and cost $20,000 more to transport and install by crane, proved a practical investment.

S19 ''I can't complain: they survived Wilma,'' said Mr. Quick, surveying his backyard.
S20 A large clusia tree at the back of his house was less fortunate, and is now in dire shape.
S21 ''We're planning to replace it,'' Mr. Nievera said.
S22 ''We just can't find the tree.''

S23 Despite an abundance of nurseries in South Florida, plants have been irksomely scarce.
S24 ''There are 10 times the number of people looking for plants,'' Mr. Nievera said.
S25 ''People wanted to replant their annuals, but there were none to be had.
S26 And when that happens, everyone gets really mad.''

S27 Huge price increases have also caused some ire.
S28 ''Palm trees used to cost $600,'' said Terry Allen Kramer, a perennially tanned banking heiress who is also a Nievera client.
S29 ''Now one lousy palm tree is three thousand.
S30 And these are just plain old coconut palms.
S31 Not royal palms.''

S32 Ms. Kramer was startled when she and her husband, Nick Simunek, flew to Palm Beach the day after Wilma.
S33 Her palatial estate on South Ocean Boulevard ''looked like the Sahara,'' Ms. Kramer said.
S34 ''I had four feet of sand on my oceanfront lawn, and there was a swath of trees down in the front.''
S35 This after she had spent $50,000 redoing the north and south border gardens, following Frances.

S36 The fruit trees have been replaced, but with the rise in prices Ms. Kramer is holding out until spring before deciding whether to replace the 30-foot palms she lost on the ocean side.

S37 Many people are ''waiting to see if they really want to spend that money,'' Mr. Nievera said.
S38 ''It's a real change in mentality.''

S39 Other clients, though, have asked him to stormproof their grounds, to whatever extent possible.
S40 Earle Mack, whose appointment as ambassador to Finland had just ended when Wilma struck, and his wife, Carol, had to deploy an army of assistants to clean up their estate, which overlooks the ocean and Lake Worth.

S41 ''We had 17 workers at the house for three weeks,'' Mrs. Mack said.
S42 ''There was a couple of feet of sand covering everything.
S43 There wasn't a single leaf on one shrub or tree.''

S44 The couple asked Mr. Nievera to redesign the front of the property, the worst-hit area.
S45 A defoliated stretch of Australian pine hedge that ran 100 feet along the front wall was replaced by a low-lying row of pittosporum, a hardy broadleaf evergreen shrub.

S46 By the front door Mr. Nievera created a pair of parterres edged with Purple Queen ground cover and Green Island ficus, interlaced with diamond-shaped sections of sand-colored Chattahoochee stone gravel and contrasting black lava rock.

S47 ''It's hard to get any colorful plants to grow on the ocean side of the house,'' Mr. Nievera said, ''so I chose the purple shrubs and gravel to create a sense of color.''
S48 In the center he placed six mimusop trees, which he described as ''very salt tolerant, hard to find and hurricane resistant.''

S49 The ravages of Frances and Wilma also inspired Mr. Nievera to redesign the garden of his own house, a single-story Bermuda-style ranch at the south end of Palm Beach, which he bought in 2001 for a bargain $495,000.
S50 In November he tore out an allée of storm-ravaged guava trees that used to line his front walkway and replaced them with pygmy dates, which are more resilient.

S51 He also cut down all his coconut trees, which had mostly been killed.
S52 ''I couldn't take it anymore,'' he said.
S53 And he came up with a novel solution for his ficus hedges, which took a serious beating during both hurricanes.

S54 ''Ficus are the least wind-tolerant of plants,'' Mr. Nievera said.
S55 They tend to lose their leaves and are easily uprooted.
S56 ''The tendency in Palm Beach is to maintain them very high -- 20 or 30 feet.
S57 But you can't do that, because the wind rips right through them.''

S58 After Frances punched large holes in the ficus, Mr. Nievera decided to trim the top of the hedge into an undulating wave pattern to complement the missing sections, giving it a crazy-quilt style that he refers to as his roller coaster.

S59 Meanwhile, for his clients, he has been busy designing ways to conceal an awkward but increasingly familiar addition to Palm Beach's topography: the large propane-fueled electricity generator.

S60 Both Frances and Wilma felled power lines, leaving some houses and businesses without electricity for more than a week each time.
S61 (''Palm Beach is very peculiar,'' Ms. Kramer said.
S62 ''We pay the highest property taxes, but they don't bury the electric cables.'')
S63 Without air-conditioning, toxic mold flourished in the 90-degree heat and the damp conditions that followed Frances, ruining expensive paint finishes, playing havoc with antique furniture and forcing some collectors to send paintings to the restorer.

S64 The long wait for electricity prompted several moguls to buy generators large enough to power a tropical mansion.
S65 The generators usually take up at least 100 square feet, Mr. Nievera said, and are often seven feet tall.
S66 They cost an average of $30,000, which does not include the cost of obtaining permits, digging trenches and other aspects of installation.

S67 ''It's a carbuncle in the landscape,'' Mr. Nievera said.
S68 His landscaping responsibilities now include locating the generators in accordance with local planning rules and selecting fast-growing shrubs to further conceal them.

S69 He recently obscured a giant generator behind a wall of white-flowering Confederate jasmine.

S70 ''Beauty definitely comes at a price,'' Mr. Nievera said.
S71 ''But people here can afford it.''

