MIAMI — After the wind and rain had passed, and the Florida sun had begun shining again, Bruce Mawry emerged from his Miami Beach home to find a grisly scene of fallen trunks, scattered fronds and rolling coconuts. It amounted to a palm tree massacre.

“I was amazed at the number of trees that had damage,” said Mr. Mawry, the chief civil engineer for the city of Miami Beach, who immediately began dispatching teams to tag every tree that could be saved. “Many had their roots pulled out. Even mature trees split down the middle.”

From the retirement communities around Naples to the sprawling white beaches of Jacksonville, Florida is home to more than a dozen species of palm trees, which cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $20,000 and are an important part of the image of the state. Perhaps more than any building or home, it was the palms, and a host of other canopy trees, that took the full force of Irma.

Some had their tops ripped clean off, leaving them looking like lonely toothpicks sticking up out of the ground. Others were toppled or split, turning formerly majestic rows of Florida royal palms into mazes of debris. Even those that survived had their fronds battered, all pointing in one direction, a reminder of which way the fierce winds blew.

Along the Venetian Causeway, which leads from downtown Miami to the beach, coconuts littered parts of the roadway, their parent trees torn apart.

In Palmetto Bay, Althea Harris and her husband, Robert, were mourning their garden. They bought their home in January, and continued to nurture their 1.4-acre property, originally planted by a botanist. Ms. Harris, 48, knew them all by name — the saba tree, the orchids, the palm trees.

She rattled them off as she flicked through pictures on her phone: “Saba tree? Gone. Palm trees? Gone.”

The saba tree, Ms. Harris said, woke her up at 4:30 Sunday morning, slamming across her yard and onto her porch roof.

When she went out Monday morning, the tree had snapped, half wedged in her poinciana tree, the rest leaning on her roof. The rest of her garden, she said, was in shambles, with branches and leaves torn everywhere.

Her house was O.K., she said, “just by the grace of God.”

— MARC SANTORA and EMILY COCHRANE

Tampa’s Luck