Un-Greening of Los Angeles: A Champion for Flowery Trees

It was in 1921 that Samuel Ayres, a young doctor fresh out of medical school, and his new bride, Helen, first drove into Los Angeles to start their new life together. He still remembers his first impression.

“Beautiful landscape, but boring,” he recalled thinking then. “People had planted only maples and elms and other trees they had grown up with in the East. We saw almost nothing but green. No color.”

Green is not a color to Ayres; it is the absence of color.

To him, green is what remains on a tree after the blooms fall. Green is an admission that the imagination has failed, that orthodoxy has won out again. The most he will concede about green is that it provides a palette upon which to display hot pinks and brilliant oranges and glorious yellows.

Evangelical Crusade

He has spent a lifetime in this fighting of the green, waging an almost evangelical crusade for color. The result is that semiarid Los Angeles is gradually becoming a city of flowering trees.

Stately floss silk trees with their sprays of deep pink flowers are coming into their late summer bloom around government offices downtown. A stand of orange-red coral trees marches from Brentwood to the sea. Pink and purple crepe myrtles thrive in the August heat of Burbank.

Ayres would be the first to say that he is not solely responsible for the change. But, in a thousand small and large ways, he has made the difference.

In the 1940s, he was the prime mover behind the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum. In the 1950s and ‘60s, he was one of a breed of botanical explorers who traveled to faraway places to bring back the seeds of exotic plants. And he still has not stopped bullying bureaucrats who might otherwise settle for, say, a nice sycamore to stand beside a city street.

“He has been forceful--nice, but forceful--in his crusade for flowering trees,” said Francis Ching, director of the Arboretum. “It’s largely because of his crusade that you see color in Los Angeles.

“Every time I have come up with a project for the Arboretum that doesn’t have to do with a colorful flower or tree, Dr. Ayres wants to know why, why are we having anything to do with those old green trees?”

Ayres is 94 now, and although he himself was unaware of it, the oldest doctor known to be practicing medicine here, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Assn.

He still goes to work at 7:30 a.m. every day at his office at Good Samaritan Hospital, still takes the traditional Wednesday afternoons off.

Three-Acre Estate

Ayres now is too bent over to work much in his own three-acre estate in La Canada-Flintridge. He is old enough that his memory slips occasionally, interrupting his once-perfect recall of six-syllable names of species. But he is young enough, too, to rattle off the spellings when the unpronounceable names come back to him.

Ayres said he first became interested in horticulture as a child. While neighboring children sold lemonade, he sold flowers. Once, he said, his wife found a second-grade arithmetic paper of his in an old trunk that was signed, “Sam Ayres, florist.”

He followed in his father’s footsteps instead, opting for a career in medicine. But Ayres hesitated a moment before explaining how he settled on his specialty: dermatology. He made the decision, he said at last, one day in medical school when he treated a patient with a stunningly “beautiful” skin ailment.

“Skin lesions are often a beautiful color,” he said. “This patient I had had a case of Erythema multiforma that displayed quite beautiful color. I tried to make the patient appreciate the beauty of her skin eruptions, but it didn’t work.”

Ayres and his bride eventually settled on an arid plot of land in La Canada-Flintridge in 1927. (The estate, now a flowering paradise of exotic plants, many of which were grown from seed, is to be willed to the Arboretum. Ayres’ two children, including a son who followed him into dermatology, did not take up his interest in horticulture, he said.)

It was not until 1939, when Ayres and his wife took a vacation to Hawaii, that he became a convert to flowering trees. “We were so impressed with the color,” he said, “and then we came home and drove for miles without seeing a single flowering tree.”

He railed against what he called the “monotonous green” in a garden journal of the day.

“It almost seems as though our Puritan ancestry were asserting itself,” he wrote. “It is as if anything that is more beautiful must be sinful and therefore is to be avoided at all costs!”

He proposed that the Southern California Horticultural Institute, to which he belonged, establish a botanical garden to propagate such plants. Ayres was appointed to head a committee to find a site.

Eventually, Ayres said, he stumbled upon the old Lucky Baldwin ranch in Arcadia, a 111-acre piece of land once owned by a man who made his money in silver mines. The land was owned at the time by Los Angeles Times Publisher Harry Chandler, who had subdivided it and was preparing to sell off lots.

At Ayres’ request, Chandler took it off the market. The state and county eventually jointly bought the land for $320,000, and the Arboretum was founded in 1948. Ayres was a member of the founding board of governors.

“We think of him as our founding father,” said Ching, director of the Arboretum.

Ayres and his wife, an amateur ornithologist and horticulturist until her death four years ago, remained active in the affairs of the Arboretum. The Helen and Samuel Ayres Hall of Education at the Arboretum is named after them.

A book on the history of the Arboretum is dedicated to Ayres who, as the inscription puts it, “thought there should be more color in the Southern California landscape and did something about it.”

Ayres also oversaw the publication of booklets on flowering trees, shrubs, vines, and ground covers (in descending order of importance to him) that were incorporated into the now-standard handbook, called “Color for the Landscape: Flowering Plants for Subtropical Climates.”

Page through the voluminous records of the Arboretum and you also find that Ayres has been a consistent donor of seeds from Australia, Mexico, South and Central America and South Africa. Among them: dramatic fire wheel trees, yellow oleanders, purple orchid trees, floss silk trees.

He brought back a smattering of seeds for flowering shrubs and vines, too, but it is clear that it was the trees that stole his heart.

He said he always donated half the seeds he collected to the Arboretum and planted the other half in his own small commercial nursery (called Rare Plants From Far Horizons), thereby doubling their chances of survival.

Asked which species he had been the first to introduce to California, Ayres quipped:

“Don’t remember. Just picked the seeds, put them in little envelopes, and brought ‘em home. Never kept records. If I’d have known I was going to be interviewed about this this late in life, I’d have kept track.”

Although many horticulturists have introduced exotic plants into semiarid Southern California, Ayres is given credit for first bringing to the Arboretum the seeds of the Cassia leptophylla vogel (the gold medallion tree) from southeast Brazil in 1958 and the Tabebuia chrysoticha (the Golden Trumpet Tree) from Colombia in 1958. Both species are now at nurseries and are rapidly becoming popular in Los Angeles.

The Arboretum acquires about 1,200 plants and seeds a year, Ching said. Of those, perhaps 10 to 20 thrive and are added to the collection.

“We show them at the Arboretum, the public sees them and begins putting pressure on the nurseries to propagate them, or we will supply material to nurseries for propagation,” Ching said.

That is how trees native to, say, western Australia, wind up in West Los Angeles.

Ching said that although there were isolated specimens of the now highly popular Chorisia speciosa, or floss silk tree, in Los Angeles at least as far back as the 1930s, it was seed brought in by Ayres in 1955 that enabled the Arboretum to provide the plants to nurseries for consumer use.

When Ayres and his wife happened to drive down San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood years ago, Ayres recalled, they decided that an abandoned trolley right-of-way in the media strip was an eyesore.

Active in a group called Los Angeles Beautiful Inc., a now-38-year-old civic organization that grew out of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Ayres approached city officials, who were already working to improve the median, and proposed coral trees. When some of the trees later faltered and gardeners contended that they were ill-suited to this environment, Ayres saw to it that they got more water. They thrived.

Upon the urging of Los Angeles Beautiful, the species became the official tree of Los Angeles in 1966. Although the tree is native to South Africa and parts of Latin America, it was chosen as the official city tree because it flourishes in Los Angeles, stands up to smog and, Ayres points out, because of its bright red-orange blooms.

Ayres’ campaign has been waged slowly.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, before air conditioners were widely used, most trees were planted for their cooling shade, according to Robert Kennedy, street tree superintendent for the City of Los Angeles.

When the city decided to develop the City Hall Annex and mall in the 1960s, Ayres fought for putting more flowering trees in the plan and wound up donating some plants from his own collection.

“Sam and I have on a lot of occasions had some mild battles,” said Bill Bridgers, landscape architect whose firm was contract landscape architect on the project.

“He’s almost a religious fanatic on flowering trees, and normally you would want to balance them with some green trees. But, well, he has been the strongest and most consistent spokesman for the placement of flowering trees in L.A. and particular downtown of anyone else for at least 50 years.”

Kennedy tied the increasing popularity of flowering trees--such as the lilac-hued jacarandas and scarlet eucalyptus--in part to the “flower children” in the 1960s, and in part to one man: Samuel Ayres.

“Dr. Ayres has drummed into me right and left the idea of planting flowering trees,” Kennedy said. “He is right. And that man knows more about flowering trees than I’ll ever hope to. But I just can’t always plant them.”

The reasons: Some flowering trees drop fleshy blooms onto sidewalks, causing people to slip, fall, and sue the city. Some prove too delicate. Some spread out too much and are likely to block a driver’s vision.

Because of such problems, (which Ayres recognizes only reluctantly), only two of about every 10 street trees now planted are of the flowering varieties, Kennedy said. But he credits Ayres for the fact that flowering trees have passed palms in popularity.

Not all of Ayres’ endeavors have been successful.

Why, he wondered aloud, has not someone planted some of the, say, 400 varieties of flowering eucalyptus along the largely barren Glendale Freeway that runs between his home and office.

Why, he wondered, are Southern Californians still importing Douglas firs at Christmas when they can grow a glorious white-flowered vine that makes its own ornaments just at Christmastime?

“Christmas trees are boring next to Montanoa guatemalensis ,” he declared. “Doesn’t need ornaments, just covers itself with white daisies so you can’t even see the leaves.”

Why, he wondered with the greatest of frustration, has he not been able to get his very own prize coral tree to bloom?

“I planted that Erythrina over there from seed 25 years ago,” he said, pointing to a beautifully leafy, and unmistakably green, coral tree in his yard. “Never bloomed, not once. Can’t figure that out. That was one of life’s disappointments. But I’m still hoping.”