Trish's Palm Frond Tikis are made by hand from cool stuff that pretty much falls from the sky. Well, more often Trish has to go up and get it but it's all fully sustainable. Trish's tikis come mainly from Queen Palms that grow happliy all over the place in Southern California. The fronds Trisha uses are actually the broad wooden bases of palm branches where they attach to the trunk. Over time, the lower branches are shed by the tree to make room for new, green branches above. Trish rescues these fronds, otherwise destined for the landfill or wood chipper, and transforms them into riotous, whimsical, in-your-face works of tiki art.
Patricia "Trish" Peterson grew-up on the beach in Southern California before moving to England for a bit. Then it was back to the beach for many years before she decided it might be fun to hack a small, hard-scrabble ranch out of the rocks and sand of California's High Desert. Trish put her artistic talents on hold for many years while she raised two kids, finished college (night school - riding her bike 8 miles each way because she didn't have a car), managed a newspaper staff, and ran the medical office of her late, orthopedic surgeon husband. Somewhere along the line, after a lifetime of dodging falling palm fronds, it occurred to Trish that these irksome missles harbor an inner beauty that can be set free if only one is willing to work with the naturally occurring clefts, swells, swirls, sweeping lines, and fibers of the little beggars. Thus the beach gal turned rancher reinvented herself yet again, this time emerging as Tiki Trish - mad painter of tiki fronds. Oh, and she's also a karaoke jock - or host or whatever. So you can see why we urge you score one of these one-of-a-kind tikis while you can. We heard recently that Trish (ever so barely into her 70's) is now thinking about applying for astronaut training.
