to the Editor: Thank you for the article on the phony palms and other cellphone tower "trees" that have sprouted up in Southern California. It was nice to finally learn some of the backstory. My wife and I, both trained botanists with doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley, first noticed them around 1998 and were amazed that we had somehow overlooked them (although they may have been new at that time). We soon spotted them all over the region, from a primitive pseudo-gymnosperm at the intersection of the 10 and 405 freeways, to a robust pseudo-date palm along the wine route in Temecula. Most people to whom we mentioned the fake trees were unaware of them and probably thought we were slightly nuts. It all comes down to plant blindness. I pointed one out to a colleague (not a botanist), and he couldn't "see" it even though it was right in front of him. We even found one in Honolulu about 20 years ago; it was a pseudo-coconut palm perched on the top of one of those mountains that surround Honolulu, not a place any real coconut palm would grow. Clearly, Dendrotelephonicus is extremely invasive and pops up everywhere. I even saw a large pseudo-araucaria in Botswana (by the way, pines do not grow in the Southern Hemisphere) about six years ago.