The Start of Something Big : A Tree is Planted in Glendale, and a Redwood Forest Takes Root
Burly Allan Silliphant took a step backward and craned to see the top of the fragrant sapling thriving alongside the creek. It’s a redwood in Glendale--just one of a couple of hundred others that Silliphant hopes will be growing in the vicinity before too long.
Silliphant’s idea of an urban forest began in October 1984, when the native of Glendale, a self-employed manufacturer-designer of everything from motorcycle accessories to computer keyboards, was spending a Saturday morning on a personal civic enterprise: ridding the creek of Verdugo Park of broken bottles.
A friend and his girlfriend strolled up, the three began chatting--nature being among the subjects--and thus began an informal group called Urban Redwoods.
“You can’t duplicate the Grand Canyon, Yosemite or Yellowstone,” Silliphant says. “But it is possible to re-create a redwood forest.”
A year later, where there once was featureless soil, life has taken root--about 115 redwood trees, at the moment between 10 and 13 feet tall.
The first redwood a visitor encounters at Colina Drive, the north entrance to the park, is about 10 feet high. The rest of the trees are situated along both sides of the spring-fed creek for perhaps a quarter of a mile, ending at a maintenance road.
Overlooking it all with tolerance are elderly sycamores, which have established squatter sovereignty. They contemplate in silence as the new kids are pampered with special watering. The area, according to the 44-year-old Silliphant, is naturally about the wettest in the Los Angles basin. And he thinks that in a few years, when the roots are well established, watering by humans will be unnecessary.
“But for the time being, a few of us come down once a week with a hose,” Silliphant says. He and a few of his friends do the watering and the planting of the trees, digging each of the holes about two feet deep, on behalf of Urban Redwoods’ 60 or so donors. “Fortunately, the firefighters in the nearby Glendale firehouse saw us in the early days out there with buckets. As a result, we have on loan 100 feet of surplus fire hose.
“It can spray 40 feet into the air, duplicating rain, “ he says. The water is unchlorinated, pumped from the creek. “After we do that for a few minutes over each redwood, we deep-water the ground for several hours.”
Donors to the Glendale forest pay $32 to have a tree planted. “We get the trees in 15-gallon containers from a nursery,” Silliphant says. “At that stage they’re about seven feet high, and they grow about four feet a year during the first 10 years.”
Anyone who donates money to Urban Redwoods, which can be done through the Glendale Park and Recreation Division, automatically becomes a member of the organization. The group has no meetings, issues no newsletter. What it does provide is satisfaction.
“It is a wonderful feeling to be leaving something permanent,” Silliphant says. “Redwoods have an incredible power of survival. It is common for them to live much more than 1,000 years.”
Commemorative messages scribbled with marking pens on the support stakes adjoining the trees include one written by a 19-year-old man: “To Gramps and our Mother Earth ‘85”
Silliphant spends about eight hours a week on the redwoods. A semicircle of 10 saplings is planted in memory of his mother, Virginia Rose Silliphant, who died earlier this year. He hopes that some day it will become a free, open-air wedding chapel.
“We’ve hauled in tons of rocks from Ventura County,” he says. “They’re landscape grade, the kind for which you pay $200 a ton commercially. We saw them on avocado ranches, and the owners let us pile them free into my van.” Ferns have been planted, and Silliphant wants the small creatures appropriate to a redwood grove--salamanders, frogs, banana slugs--to have a home here, too.
The city has been supportive, assigning a staff architect to produce a master plan for the couple of acres inside the 32-acre park that have been given over to the redwoods. On Arbor Day, city workers added six redwoods paid for by residents who requested that the trees be planted in the grove.
“We did a population-density study to indicate how many redwood trees that area would support,” says Bob McFall, Glendale parks superintendent. “We came up with a figure of 205 trees.
“This will never be an arboretum. The intent is to create a redwood effect that will complement recreation activities presenting taking place. It is a passive park--for Frisbee throwing, fishing and hiking.”
Muir Woods it isn’t. No trunks yet soar 200 feet toward the sky. But come back in a couple of hundred years and check it out. A tree grows in Glendale--quite a few of them, in fact.
