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Updated

A little southern flora is coming to southern Ontario, with palm trees coming to the sands of Port Dover today.

Peter Knechtel, owner of The Beach House has been bringing them in for the last decade to give it that bit of a Florida feel. “I saw a developer brought one in to feature one at his model home. I thought that was a great idea.”

“I have a beach restaurant and a patio, I love palm trees, I go to Florida almost every year. Why not bring a little Florida up here and jazz up the atmosphere of the patio?”

“The big two questions for this restaurant are ‘when are the palm trees going out’ and ‘when are they coming back in?’ People look forward to them. The sound of the palms in the wind and stuff like that, you are sitting on the deck and you are transformed to being
in the Bahamas or Florida or in the Caribbean.”

Knechtel told CHCH News “I had a couple of customers once that came here and they were supposed to be in Florida at a convention, but unbeknownst to their wives they were here on my deck.”

“They took a picture and sent it to their wives and said ‘Here in Florida having a great time.’ They asked them what the temperature was and they had to Google it really quick to find out what the temperature was.

Knechtel gets his palms from Rice Road Greenhouses in Welland. “They have been bringing them up for the last six years or so. We get really good service.”