Tree of the week: Toyon

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Good morning. This week’s ‘tree of the week’ comes with, at no extra cost, a few fire prevention tips from our tree-loving friend, Pieter Severynen.

About fires, Christmasberries and chaparral

Fire season will still be with us for a while. If you live close to wildlands, you will find excellent tips and references on making your outdoors fire resistant in a newly issued 2008 calendar and guidebook. Titled ‘Safe Landscapes’ and issued by the Los Angeles County UC Cooperative Extension, it is available here. That website also describes upcoming free workshops in Santa Clarita (Nov. 3) and Malibu (Nov. 17), where you may also learn about desirable and undesirable plants in fire-prone areas.

Toyon or Christmasberry – Heteromeles arbutifolia

Technically a shrub up to 10 feet by 10 feet, our native toyon, also known as California Holly, can be pruned into a very attractive single- or multi-trunk, small evergreen tree, 20 feet tall by 15 feet wide. The 2- to 4-inch-long leaves are thick, leathery, with pointed teeth. The bark is smooth and brown. Heads of small white flowers in summer are followed by abundant clusters of long lasting small bright red berries in fall or winter, beloved by birds and people alike and spectacular enough for this plant to supposedly give Hollywoodland its name. Drought resistant as any good native, in cultivation it actually looks better with occasional watering. Sometimes it is subject to fireblight, a bacterial disease.

Toyon is a prominent member of coastal sage scrub, chaparral (our most extensive natural plant community) and oak woodland. Chaparral is the unique and valuable shrub vegetation typical for the 5 areas in the world with a summer dry, rainy winter Mediterranean climate: California, Mediterranean basin, central Chile, South Africa Cape region, and Western and Southern Australia. The plants of each of those regions are different, but they share common leaf and lifestyle characteristics, including the ability to adapt to the occasional fire. Our region’s notorious fires occur naturally in chaparral and forest, but the explosion of urban growth in the wildlands has led to dramatically increased fire frequency and shortened intervals between fires, thus threatening native landscapes. We need more effective ways of protecting both our homes and our indigenous vegetation.

Thanks, Pieter
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E-mail Pieter: plseve@earthlink.net
Photo credit: bahiker.com