Wild Animals Share Their Park With Rare Plants : Endangered Flora Given Special Care

Jim Gibbons knows all about endangered wildlife species. At the San Diego Wild Animal Park, he helps nurture and feed them, not with a grooming brush and a bucket of feed pellets, but with a garden hoe and a wheel barrel filled with fertilizer.

Indeed, not all the endangered species at the San Diego Wild Animal Park come on two wings or four hoofs. This nature preserve might better be known to some botanical buffs as the San Diego Wild Plant Park, given its collection of flowers, shrubs, bushes and trees, including more than a score that are endangered in their own right.

The plants--many of them donated to the park by private collectors, homeowners and developers--are intended to add a sense of realism to the animal enclosures by duplicating, as nearly as possible, the animal’s natural habitat, said Gibbons, the park’s horticulturist.

But rare or unusual flowers, bushes and trees are accepted by the park sometimes for no other reason than that they’re rare or unusual.

“Ninety-nine per cent of what we grow here is not indigenous to this area, and there was nothing here at all when the park opened 15 years ago,” said Gibbons.

Today, there are are close to 2 million plants thriving at the park, representing more than 2,800 different species--although eucalyptus trees alone represent a full half of the park’s plant inventory. (Eucalyptus branches are offered daily for the munching delight of the koalas on exhibit at the park.) And Gibbons’ staff looks over a 30-acre grove of acacia, whose leaves and branches are provided as a snack to the park’s hoofed stock.

Among the more unusual plants and trees at the park are 100-year-old cycads, a primitive Japanese evergreen displayed near the elephant show arena, blue palms from Mexico, pygmy date palms from Asia, livistonas from Australia, and coral trees, aloe bushes and euphorbia trees from Africa.

Many of the park’s plants are donated by persons who had them growing in their front yards and, for one reason or another, decided to give them to the Wild Animal Park.

“A lot of people will say they’ve got this or that and it’s gotten too large for their yard. If it’s not an ordinary tree that we could buy cheaper at a nursery, we’ll try to move it out here,” he said.

The park has plenty of space to take the plants--1,800 acres, of which only about a third so far are developed.

Depending on budget constraints, the park will pay upwards of $100 to have a tree transplanted.

The most expensive move--costing $4,000--occured when the park acquired the large Australian ficus tree that serves as the centerpiece in the gorilla compound. It was acquired from a developer who was bulldozing land near Cuyamaca College in Rancho San Diego.

“He told us, ‘If you can get it out of here, you can have it,’ ” Gibbons said. “We had to cut the top off the trunk, and we just brought the trunk up here. It weighed 17 tons. But now it has leafed back out and is looking pretty good.”

In fact, Gibbons would have preferred a tree from west Africa to use for the gorilla exhibit, but such hot-tropic trees would not grow in the San Pasqual Valley so Gibbons accepted the Australian ficus as the next best thing.

Gibbons heads a staff of 23 landscapers and groundskeepers and administers a $1-million annual budget. But his job is hardly drudgery; he travels four to six weeks a year throughout the United States and to other continents to identify the flora he wants to grow at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

His dream is to someday acquire a full-grown baobab, an East African tree that resembles an aged, gnarled oak tree with fewer leaves. Gibbons planted some baobab seeds ten years ago but so far they have grown only 18 inches “and they’ll never be full-grown in my lifetime. What I need to do is come up with an empty 747 and fly one home.”

Perhaps the most unusual tree at the Wild Animal Park, Gibbons said, is found on the conifer trail between the elephant enclosure and the lion enclosure. It is a North African cypress, which looks like a fat version of an Italian cypress. The species is extinct in the wild, and the park’s tree is one of only 12 in the world, he said. The park received it eight years ago from a private collector in Northern California; it stood six feet tall at the time; today it measures 50 feet tall.

Among the steady contributors of flora to the Wild Animal Park are federal customs agents who seize plants smuggled into the country such as orchids, aloes, cycads and cactus. The government turns the plants over to Gibbons.

If acquiring plants is half the battle, the other half is protecting them from the park’s animal life, Gibbons said. “We put rocks at the bottom of trees to keep the rhinos from rubbing up against them, and then we’ve got the mountain goats jumping off those same rocks into the branches of the tree. You can’t win,” he said.