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Tall palm on chopping block

The 82-foot tree is about to break the glass ceiling at Europe's largest greenhouse.

VIENNA - It has outlived two world wars and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now Vienna's imperial "Sisi Palm" - a tree named for the late Empress Elisabeth - faces the ax.

Officials said Thursday the majestic 170-year-old Chinese fan palm must be chopped down before it breaks through the glass ceiling of Europe's largest greenhouse.

The palm has more than doubled in height to 82 feet over the past 18 years alone, and is getting too tall for its enclosure in the iron-and-glass Palm House at the Schoenbrunn Palace.

Experts say the tree wouldn't survive pruning - and if left alone, its huge spined crown threatens to destroy the greenhouse, an architectural treasure.

"You can't cut back a genuine palm," said Brigitte Mang, director of Austria's federal gardens. "It would either die or break through our glass house."

Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists line up to view the tree, which was 44 years old when it was moved indoors in 1882 and named in honor of Sisi, the wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I.

The beloved palm - a seedling in 1838 - is part of an imperial tradition.

Sisi was said to admire her palm and sit beneath it whenever she found herself pining for the Mediterranean, her favorite part of Europe.

But modern botanists knew the palm would run into problems. Its fate was sealed in 1990, when workers transplanted the tree from a giant urn to a hole in the ground dug deep below the Palm House floor - meaning it could not be moved.

Austrian officials say it's the continent's largest glass greenhouse, and at 364 feet long, 92 feet wide and 82 feet high, the pavilion's green iron curves and 45,000 panes seem straight out of a Jules Verne novel.

The tree is slated to be felled Feb. 18.

If it's any consolation, palace gardeners are already cultivating a successor: a small Chinese fan palm.

[Last modified January 25, 2008, 00:36:44]