Palm Trees Prep for Winter Garden Debut By Ronald Drenger The World Financial Center’s Winter Garden, badly damaged on Sept. 11, is scheduled to reopen for the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Workers are busy repairing the skylight, installing new marble floors, restoring the grand staircase, and constructing a new east facade. And down in Florida, 16 towering palm trees are being painstakingly prepared for their role in the rebirth of the beloved atrium. Their arrival in New York, scheduled for late August, will complete a nearly year-long process of replacing the Winter Garden’s previous crop of trees, which were either felled in the attack or died without climate control and proper watering.   The new trees have been acclimating since January at a Florida nursery, to prevent the arboreal version of culture shock. Moving to New York City, after all, requires some lifestyle adjustments. "We have to reduce the amount of light, water and fertilizer that they need to survive, by about 75 percent," said Rich Kern, president of Southeast Growers in Wellington, Fla., who is overseeing the trees’ urbanization. "Their metabolism will be so slowed down when they go inside the building. If there’s too much fertilizer in the root ball when you ship them, they’ll die." It took Kern almost three months to select the 38-foot-tall Washingtonia robusta palms from a field of thousands at Micco Tree Farm in Micco, Fla. The trees had to be the same height and have the same trunk diameter of 21- to 22 inches—to meet the specifications of John Mini, a Bronx indoor landscaper who also worked with Brookfield Properties, the World Financial Center’s owner, to bring in the Winter Garden’s last palm grove. "I probably looked at 500 trees and tagged about 20 of them for John to look at," Kern said. After photos of the nominees were sent to New York, Mini and one of the Winter Garden’s architects visited Florida to inspect them for blemishes or imperfect matches. "They approved some of them, but not all, and I went back to Micco about six more times to do the final tags," Kern recalled. "It’s a very unusual project because of the size of the trees and because we had much more stringent specifications and a more rigorous approval process than what we usually work with." Brian Whisenant, the field manager at Micco Tree Farm, helped pick and groom the trees. "Once they’re selected, we trim them with loppers and slick them down with a cane knife," he said. "You shave the hair on the trunk so it’s slick." The giant palms and their six-foot-diameter root balls were carefully dug up in January and trucked to Southeast Growers, where a 50-foot-tall shade house had been built to accommodate them. There the trees stand now, in 60-inch, 400-gallon pots, dieting and awaiting their road trip to the Big Apple. For the journey, the palm fronds will be pulled up and wrapped, making the trees look like giant paint brushes as they lie at an angle inside refrigerated trucks. The Winter Garden’s previous two batches of palms traveled even farther than these Florida natives. The originals, installed for the atrium’s 1988 opening, were found in Borrego Springs, Calif. When those faltered in 1997, replacements came from a tree farm in Litchfield Park, Ariz. They offered their shade until Sept. 11. "I’m proud to work on this project," said Kern, who grew up in Massapequa, Long Island. "I really wanted to be part of it."