Thatch

Natural roofing for free

My drawing of a sabal (aka cabbage) palm frond in colored pencil.

            We moved into our present house in 1989.  The wooded back half of the yard had been completely neglected for 10 years, and had become an impenetrable tangle of wisteria vines, fallen branches from tall pines, broken trees and thickets of manioc, all stitched together with what we soon dubbed the "dreaded purple vine" that sprang from huge underground tubers.  The vegetation was so thick and tangled that there were game trails, and neighborhood kids had made tunnels through it, and played their wilderness games there. The war against these invaders amounted to an exhumation, for as the vines and weedy invaders fell to my machete, mattock and herbicide, a beautifully laid out orchard of camellia bushes and oak leaf hydrangeas, trees and bushes appeared, bulbs pushed up flowers we had never seen before and trees crushed by hurricane-snapped limbs were relieved of their burdens. As I removed debris, stumps of pines that had been toppled or snapped by Hurricane Kate in 1985 were revealed, their rot already advanced in 1990.

            There also came into view a shaded space in the back corner among the basket oak, loblolly pines, silver bells, and camellias that seemed just perfect for a palm-thatched hide-away (called a palapa in Mexico), and enthusiastic fool that I am, I set out to build one.  I cut and peeled nice straight pine poles from the forest with which I built a frame of rafters with bamboo cross pieces.  I then talked the head of the grounds crew at Florida State University into dumping the annual trimmings of sabal palm fronds in my driveway instead of taking them the 15 miles to the county dump. So a few days later, I came home to a mountain of palm fronds taller than myself.

A pile of sabal palm fronds ready to be attached to the cross-pieces.

            Thatching with palm fronds may be a widespread skill in the tropics, but in Tallahassee the skill is rare as frog hair, so it took a good deal of trial and error to figure out the best way to join frond to cross-bar. Each frond is strongly curved and three-dimensional, rather than planar, so it must be split into two more or less planar halves.  This is easily done by simply pulling the very tips of the frond apart, proceeding down the stem until two halves result.  A Mexican or Guatemalan thatcher may not need anything but these half-fronds, but at my level of confidence, I used wire to secure strips torn from fronds and wrapped around the bamboo crosspieces. No matter, it was my secret. Each row of fronds overlapped the row below, thus shedding water like shingles, thanks to water usually not running uphill (although in some Tallahassee storms, it may seem to).  At first, the roof looked a bit shaggy, but with time, it all settled down pretty nicely, and most importantly, there was not a sign of a leak, even in heavy rain. 

Most thatching had to be done from inside the “attic”, and the highest rows required a ladder to reach. The thatch is almost complete in this view.

Views of the thatch from outside and inside the “attic”.

            For years, Erika and her friends played their childhood games in the palapa. Occasionally, Erika and I slept in the palapa's "attic" to awake to the first bird calls in the half-light of morning.  It was our private wild place.  A ceiling fan on the "ground floor" made the heat bearable and drove the mosquitoes away.  I built a picnic table and benches, and bricked in a barbecue pit nearby so we could dine in this tiny fragment of nature in the city.

            But nothing lasts forever.  Thatch decays, termites eat picnic tables, barbecue pits get buried under leaf litter, and children grow up and move away.  But all except the last can be replaced, and this is what I began a dozen or so years ago.  Sabal palms are common around Tallahassee, many in places where nobody watches or cares.  I would park my car, saw off the lower fronds, trim and split them and stuff them into my car until there was no room except for the driver.  Removing the old thatch made a big pile for my compost.

I wanted not only to renew the space that had given us great enjoyment but also to improve it, so this time around, I laid a floor of pavers over the dirt, screened the entire space against the annoying, day-biting Asian tiger mosquito, replaced rotten rafters with freshly stolen and peeled pine poles, and installed a level plywood ceiling/attic floor painted sky blue. LED lights and a new ceiling fan completed the electrical conveniences, and just for the drama of it, I strung “fairy lights” over the trail leading from the back lawn to the palapa. Vicki got two sofas and a small table along with a set of dishes to be kept in the palapa. As an added attraction, I rebuilt the fire place/barbecue so that the fire was now at waist height and I no longer had to kneel on the ground to scorch a fish or burn a steak. The woodpile at the back fence not only furnished fuel for the fire, but also served as a home for the box turtle that showed its face a couple of times a year.

The box turtle that lived under the wood pile next to the palapa.

Left: the little patch of woods with the palapa. Right: the interior showing the sofa, paved floor, mosquito screening and LED lights.

Whenever I reclined on the sofas, or we had our evening cocktails in the palapa, wrens, cardinals, titmice and chickadees twittered and flitted in the woods around us. Once again, it was our little secret piece of nature in the city. But as before, nothing lasts forever. The life of palm thatch is shorter than my own—- it rots or gets pulverized by insects so that about five years ago, the thatch was in sad need of replacement. Realizing that this need would recur indefinitely, and that in my late eighties I would be sneaking around town stealing palm fronds and climbing rickety ladders to bind them to rafters, I made the sensible choice to cover the existing thatch of the palapa with a giant, heavyweight tarp. I don’t think anyone has noticed because the tarp is brown and an exact fit with only the lowest palm fringes visible.

Now when I enjoy the palapa no thoughts of rethatching spoil my peace of mind. Sometimes, fighting the ravages of time is not wise— sometimes you just have to give in to necessity. Sometimes a big brown tarp is the right answer.