They do not call themselves pixies, but ‘citizen foresters.’

Most cultures have some fable about pixies or coyote spirits or tooth fairies or similar sprites who go larking about when decent folk are asleep, wreaking mischief or bestowing blessings.

Well, don’t look now, but Ventura Boulevard is haunted by creatures like that.

There’s no point in looking now because these are part-time pixies. They only come out on occasional Sunday mornings, while normal people are sensibly storing up sleep for an emergency.

Like the faerie folk of many a land, however, they worship trees.

This makes them an unusually determined species, because the trees of Ventura Boulevard are not a sight to make the heart soar. The Black Forest of Germany, the mighty oaks venerated by Druids in ancient Britain, the sequoias of the Mendocino Coast, these may indeed inspire raptures of the spirit. But a string of scrawny bottle-brush trees does not a rapture make.

Members of Treepeople, a Sherman Oaks-based conservation group that organizes these pixie expeditions, do not care about that.

They do care about trees, even the least of them.

So every now and then, early on a Sunday morning, they gather in a park on the Boulevard in Encino and set out to give the trees the woody equivalent of a rubdown, manicure and snifter of cognac.

It would be nice to say that Treepeople are just average human beings when they aren’t being wood sprites.

This is not true.

Average people do not get up early and work without pay on their day off, tending trees that belong to the City of Los Angeles. Average people don’t spend weekends planting trees in the mountains, trying to reverse the damage of fire, disease or smog.

Average people do not go out in driving rainstorms with shovels and labor like Welsh miners for hours, without pay, to save the homes of total strangers from mudslides. The Treepeople did that during the disastrous rainstorms that liquefied the topsoil of the Santa Monicas 10 years ago, burying many hillside homes and sending others slaloming into less fashionable neighborhoods. After the Fire Department was stretched beyond capacity, gangs of Treepeople piled out of pickup trucks at threatened homes, labored for hours and disappeared without so much as a “Hi-yo Silver.”

Caring for the trees of Ventura Boulevard is less dramatic, but the crews that gathered Sunday in the park across from the Encino Post Office were no less determined.

They do not call themselves pixies, but “citizen foresters.”

At an hour when the streets are monopolized by stray dogs, joggers and couples on tandem bicycles, the tree tenders were unloading tools from a white pickup truck with an “I brake for trees” bumper sticker.

The Encino Property Owners Assn. contributed a standing breakfast of juice, rolls and coffee. Then, off they went, eight of them, westward on the boulevard.

They weeded the ground around the bottle-brush trees, named for their spiky, cylindrical flowers. They pruned branches. They rewired the spindly trunks to the poles that support the trees against high winds. They shook the trees to determine if they could survive without support, and, in some cases, took the supports away.

“The supports can hurt the tree if they’re not needed,” said Jim Hardie of Hollywood, wrenching a support from the ground. Hardie, a tall, brawny man with long blond curls and beard and rimless glasses, wore white shorts and shirt with white knee socks, giving him the look of a Viking graduate student seeking a tennis match.

Actually, he said, he is an actor and writer who does this “because I love trees--they filter smog and clean the air and they’re pretty to look at and just all-around neat guys.”

Nancy Collis of Encino, a retired sociologist who headed the team in a “citizen foresters” T-shirt, said she and her husband, a movie production designer, “walk the boulevard a lot, and I started looking at these trees, and I could see they just weren’t growing.”

Treepeople “taught me how to go through the city bureaus and get permission from the street maintenance division to do this,” she said. A city maintenance official said the city lacks the money to care for the trees properly, and so helped train the Treepeople and welcomes their aid.

“We’ve been doing this for 15 months now, and the trees look a lot better,” Collis said.

Her team works only in Encino. They are looking for recruits to take over other stretches of the boulevard.

They are also trying to have each tree adopted by a nearby business “so the employees go out every now and then and throw a bucket of water on the poor things,” she said.

Mary Tannheimer of North Hollywood, a crew-cut Jill-of-all-trades (“carpenter, auto mechanic, dog sitter, bird sitter”) in wrap-around dark goggles and turtleneck shirt, dug into the soil.

“They need me,” she said. “It’s a hard life for trees out here.”