Sitting in front of the Green Iguana in Ybor City, Joe Adams looks up from weaving a piece of palm leaf to check out an attractive middle-aged woman walking by. When she pauses for a moment to admire his work, Adams grins and hands her one of the three palm frond roses lying in front of him. Instantly, she smiles.
"In my age, you gave roses to every woman you knew," Adams, 45, tells me. "These days, guys don't do that.'"
His eyes fall back down to the palm leaf in his hands. As he manipulates it, the long strand of palm starts to morph into another rose.
Out of all the homeless walking the streets of Ybor City, Adams may be the most well known. For the last three years, he's sat on a grate under a palm tree in front of this popular Seventh Avenue restaurant peddling the green-tinged palm frond roses and the occasional cross. Adams is not the only man out here trying to hustle roses to the tourists. (There's Greg, Alex, Kelly and Billy, too — all Adams' students.) But his quiet and courteous demeanor has earned him the respect of business owners, police and locals who allow him to sit in the same spot every day unmolested. While the others approach potential customers, sometimes even badgering them, Adams just sits under his tree and waits for people to come to him.
You might think a man who makes his living from a unique craft might hide its secrets, but Adams is quick to teach anyone willing to learn — even me. First, though, we needed more palm fronds.
Adams never thought he'd be on the streets relying on palm fronds for money. Even after first becoming homeless 12 years ago, he maintained his job as a carpenter. But a "$300-a-day cocaine habit" always kept him chasing more money. It wasn't long before he went from rooming houses and motels to living in the woods, camouflaging his tent with, ironically enough, palm fronds. Then three years ago, while grabbing a handful of palm fronds, the sharp leaves stabbed him in the eyes, blinding him. After numerous surgeries, Adams regained partial eyesight, but he was left legally blind and could no longer work carpentry.
Soon after the accident, during a walk through Ybor City, Adams came across a man weaving intricate roses out of palm frond leaves.
"He told me it took him a year to learn [the art]," Adams recalls. "While he was talking to me, I made a rose just like him."
It took Adams several months to perfect the weaving and develop his own style. After his teacher left Ybor City, Adams began to sell his flowers and crosses along the club-lined streets.
"The Lord gave me another gift to support myself," he says.
Now he sells only enough flowers to buy himself food and, some days, a motel room. He says it keeps him from falling back to the habit that pushed him into the streets: "Since I got off [drugs], I don't care about money."
Adams and I head about two miles outside Ybor City to a patch of thick woods near a row of warehouses. We trudge through waist-high brush to get to a small clearing. Stopping under a 12-foot sable palm tree, Adams spots his prey: a large frond, second from the center, with long and wide leaves. The nearly blind man grabs the fronds near the base of the stem, sets his foot on a broken stem along the trunk and carefully hoists himself up the tree. Several dead stems break under his weight, but he keeps moving upward. Once he reaches the top, he takes a small knife, saws off the frond and throws it to the ground. Slowly he crawls back down, and I notice his wrist is bleeding from a small cut.
"There's a lot of danger in doing this," he says. "I've fallen many of times."
That's in addition to the water moccasin and brown recluse spider bites.
Adams finds another tree, this one nearly 25 feet tall, and scales it the same way. It takes him five minutes to cut two more fronds from the tree. He's acquired a few more cuts to his arms, but it's worth it — he has three "racks" of palm fronds, enough to make 60 roses or crosses.
Once we get back to the Green Iguana, Adams tears off two long strands from his palm frond and hands one to me.
"Now don't think about what you're doing," he says. "Kids always learn easiest, because adults are always afraid of making mistakes."
He begins to fold and twist his leaf into a spiral shape.
"Up and over," he instructs me, occasionally correcting my technique with his coarse and grimy hands. "Up and over."
Slowly, our palm leaves begin to resemble roses. He uses any remaining strands to tie knots around the stem and cuts off any extra plant fibers sticking out. Finally, he stuffs a red or purple bougainvillea flower petal in the center of the rose.
The whole exercise takes me 15 minutes, with lots of help from Adams, but my finished rose mirrors his.
"As long as you do the tie right it will stay together," he says. "Some of the other guys' roses are not tied right, and they will fall apart the next day."
(Sure enough, the one I make falls apart two days later.)
Adams takes another palm leaf and, in just under a minute, weaves another rose. By the end of the afternoon, he'll have made dozens of roses with the three racks of palm fronds, each one distinctive and unique. Then, in another day or two, he'll return to the woods and cut down more to last him through the busy weekend.
"Three years ago, these things blinded me," he says, waving a large palm leaf with broad smile. "Now, I'm getting back at them."
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2007.