Color and Concrete : It’s Time to Take Advantage of Showy, Exotic Trees

March 7, Luther Burbank’s birthday, is Arbor Day in California--set aside for the planting of trees.

Surely you’ve noticed that the buildings are growing taller and the space between is getting smaller and darker, even in areas miles from the central city. The cumulative effect of the sprouting high-rises is a wall-to-wall environment lacking in green relief. Yet sociologists say we have a need, deeply buried but not erased, for some association with nature.

The traditional solution has been to create a park--Central Park, Golden Gate Park, Griffith Park--with grass, flowers and streams or lakes, and the essential element: trees, lots of trees, not only adding welcome shade but also evoking the natural scene. And though grass and flowers may not thrive along our thoroughfares, trees can be part of the street scene.

Southern California is, or was, essentially a desert--not a Lawrence of Arabia desert, but an arid land with vegetation that regularly explodes in firestorms, nature’s answer to 12 inches of rain a year. These native plants, though, are not widely used in our parks or gardens. The green scene one beholds from a window seat, smog permitting, on an airborne approach to LAX includes trees from around the world--eucalyptus and acacias from Australia, deodars from India, pepper trees from Peru and on and on. What makes all this possible is water imported from far-off sources.

Ours is an altered environment into which we have introduced the best of the world’s ornamental trees. Nature endowed our locality with a few worthy trees--the live oak, the sycamore and the California bay among them--but the list is short, and color is conspicuous by its absence. Park and street-tree superintendents have taken advantage of the spring bouquet offered by the Brazilian jacaranda and the orchid trees from India and China, but by and large, urban and suburban streets have precious little color. That’s not to say that color isn’t possible. Residential gardeners have been a bit more adventurous, and here and there splashes of red, pink and gold enliven the continuous green.

There’s a nearly year-round display of dazzling color at the L.A. County Arboretum when tulip trees, trumpet trees, coral trees and gold medallion trees, all imports from subtropical regions, come into blossom. A few won’t grow here--the coconut palm and the flamboyant of the tropics, for example--but a thoroughly colorful palette finds our climate quite acceptable.

We’re much too slow to introduce and make use of showy, exotic trees. The silk-floss tree of Brazil lights up the autumn sky with a profusion of rosy-pink hibiscus-like blossoms--but it has taken 60 years for the horticultural profession to exploit it. Landscape architects, nurserymen, park superintendents and the gardening public must join forces to do a better job with the aforementioned red, gold, pink and white flowering trees exhibited at the Arboretum if the broad enjoyment of new species is not to be postponed for yet another 60 years.

Imagine whole avenues or suburban streets of golden yellow, coral red or rosy pink in place of the pavement breakers found all over Southern California. The Civic Center Mall downtown has many fine specimens. Not all the species are commonly available from growers, but they will be if demand develops--which is where we all come in. There are still plenty of streets with sunshine enough for these trees to flourish and bring a bit of nature, and color, into our suburbs and the heart of our city.