Native Oaks Fall Before Onslaught of ‘Progress’ : Conservation: Groups are fighting to preserve the trees, which are rapidly being destroyed by developers and private property owners.

Paul Wild knew something was wrong when he heard a symphony of chain saws one morning last May.

By the time he and other curious residents reached the dirt track at the edge of their West Covina neighborhood, workmen were already loading the logs onto trucks.

Gone, like fingers chopped from a hand, were 30 healthy native oaks, which for decades had graced the undeveloped slopes just north of the San Bernardino Freeway. Some of the trees were 100 years old or older.

Wild and others phoned City Hall to complain--”but it was a day late and a dime short,” Wild said bitterly. A developer had big plans for the site, he learned.

The same droning sound filled the elegant Rancho Santa Anita neighborhood in Arcadia this past November, as a resident decided to raze six native oaks to make room in his spacious back yard for a tennis court. Two of the trees were rare mesa oaks, native to the San Gabriel Valley.

“It was just devastation,” said Judi Draper, president of the local property owners association, one of several groups desperately trying to preserve local oak trees. “They were beautiful, well-taken-care-of trees, between 50 and 150 years old.”

For more than a century, native oak trees, part of the California scenery since long before the first European settlers arrived in the 17th Century, have seemed to be succumbing, one by one, to “progress.”

First, they made way for railroads, roads and pastures. Then they were flattened for ranches, citrus groves and freeways. Now it’s tract development and “mansionization,” with chain saw-wielding workers felling centuries-old trees with a few deft cuts.

And where it isn’t saws and axes, it’s often well-meaning property owners, soaking their drought-resistant oaks with so much water that they become vulnerable to disease, horticulturists say.

More than 1 million acres of oak woodlands have been lost in the state since 1945, those people dedicated to saving the trees say. By now, many of the remaining oaks are at the mercy of private property owners.

“Everybody’s talking about the tropical rain forest,” said Melanie Baer-Keeley, president of the San Gabriel Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. “But we’re deforesting California.”

In the San Gabriel Valley, a once-vibrant swath of unique mesa oaks, which covered large parts of Arcadia, Pasadena and Altadena, has been reduced to between 400 and 500 trees hanging on tenuously in private yards.

But activists and conservation-minded cities are fighting back. Volunteers are seeding areas like the Arroyo Seco with acorns and oak seedlings. Horticulturists are trying to raise homeowners’ consciousness about the value of the native flora.

And half a dozen San Gabriel Valley cities have now passed ordinances protecting native oaks, placing restrictions on cutting them down or even trimming them.

“They’re part of our heritage,” said Wild, a cutlery salesman who remembers seeing pheasants and coveys of quail when he moved to West Covina 34 years ago. “(The trees) were here before any of us were around.”

The Western native oak is indeed part of the heritage of California, where 19 species still thrive. The Thomas Guide for Los Angeles County lists 280 streets whose names begin with “oak,” from Oak Avenue in Covina to Oakwood Ridge in Lomita, to say nothing of streets with names like Glen Oaks and Encina (Spanish for oak).

The history of the state is full of references to individual trees, whose thick, twisted branches have served as landmarks and gallows, and to tangled oak forests, which Robert Louis Stevenson once described as “woods for murderers to crawl among.”

But the oaks ultimately got in the way.

For the San Gabriel Valley, where four species of native oak--mesa, coast live, scrub and valley oaks--are prevalent, many of the losses have come in the past 30 years. “The increasing desire people had back in the 1960s to live in hilly areas rather than in the flatlands led to the greatest loss of oaks,” said Martin F. Stoner, a biology professor at Cal Poly Pomona.

The mesa oak--also known as the Engelmann or Pasadena oak--is a broad-canopied tree with distinctive purplish leaves and long, fat acorns. It’s found mostly on gently sloping terrain, like the Santa Rosa plateaus in San Diego County or the broad alluvial fans at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

“This oak inhabits the smallest range of any oak tree in the southwestern United States,” Thomas A. Scott, a UC Riverside earth sciences professor, wrote in an article last year in the magazine Fremontia. “By unfortunate coincidence, this distribution occurs next to the fastest growing urban landscape in the country.”

In other words, said Rebecca Fisher, director of the local California Native Plant Society chapter, mesa oaks appear in “the most highly buildable areas.”

Her husband, Rick, a Monrovia horticulturist, landscape architect and also a member of the native plant society, pointed out an affluent neighborhood of broad lawns and meandering streets in northern Arcadia that he said is the heart of mesa oak country.

Rick Fisher indicated a century-old oak with a bed of impatiens at its base. “The fastest way to kill a tree is to grow grass or flowers right up to the tree trunk,” he said. “The constant wetness (required to maintain flowers) makes the tree vulnerable to a fungus.”

A few of the trees looked scruffy and overly pruned. Others were healthy-looking but had paved surfaces at their bases, leaving them “literally starving for nutrients,” Rick Fisher said.

He is a pessimist on the subject of the local mesa oaks. “All of these trees are sentenced to death,” he said, driving slowly past some rugged-looking specimens surrounded by manicured lawns. “It may take 10 or 50 years, but they’re going to die.” Native oaks often live to 300 years in the wilderness.

“Oaks put up with a lot of stress without showing it,” Fisher added. “By the time they show it, they’re almost beyond hope.” Only where the owners had either left the earth bare under their trees or else planted drought-resistant desert succulents did he nod approvingly.

The loss of oak woodlands is changing the ecology and the climate of the region, Baer-Keeley said. “All of these plants are interrelated with wildlife,” she said. “There are whole ecological societies dependent on oak trees for their survival.”

For humans, however, the most important thing is the erosion of a moderate climate. Because they grow new leaves every season, oak trees are smog resistant, experts say. They require little water, and they don’t have the sponge-like qualities of conifers, which sop up much rainwater rather than shedding it into streams.

“The oaks help to keep an area cool and humid,” Baer-Keeley said.

City officials in the San Gabriel Valley are beginning to appreciate the worth of their own oaks. For example, the West Covina City Council responded quickly to complaints from Wild and others.

Within days of the cutting of the 30 West Covina oaks, the council passed an urgency ordinance to prohibit further cutting. Residents had noted that about 60 other trees were marked with spray-paint, apparently indicating that they would be cut down.

Then the city adopted an ordinance making the unauthorized removal of an oak tree a crime, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Rosemead, Monrovia, San Marino, San Gabriel, South Pasadena and La Verne also have adopted ordinances either specifically protecting oak trees or including oaks in broader protections. Arcadia and Pasadena are considering such ordinances.

A group called the Earth Team has been collecting mesa oak acorns and others for the past two years to seed bare spots in the Arroyo Seco. The group’s volunteers have planted seedlings in the Rose Bowl area of the arroyo, said leader Ben Lovejoy.

Things are tough enough for oaks trying to procreate, without interference from humans, said Lovejoy, a Rose Parade float designer. Scrub jays store thousands of acorns every season, deer eat them in large quantities, the larvae of filbert weevils infest them. Once they sprout, they become food for gophers and leaf-eating insects.

Lovejoy and his motley group--”We’ve got Hells Angels, Girl Scouts, plumbers and astronomers,” he said--collect acorns in the fall, start them off in donated space in a nursery in La Canada Flintridge, then plant them in the wilderness in the winter.

To protect the seedlings from predators, each is ensconced in a plastic tube, which keeps gophers away from the roots and leaf eaters away from the leaves. “Our aim is to stretch more green around,” Lovejoy said. “The more trees there are in the area, the more shade you spread around and the lower the temperature gets.”

But ultimately, the protection of oak trees relies on the good will of people, environmentalists say. Without the cooperation of residents and developers, even the new ordinances actually promote destruction of trees, they said.

“The ordinances say that every tree over X size is preserved,” Rebecca Fisher said. In the case of West Covina, for example, it’s any oak tree with a trunk larger than six inches in diameter. “What happens,” she explained, “is that all the trees under that size get removed” before they can be protected, and all that is left are the protected mature trees and saplings.

The important thing is for property owners to appreciate the value of nearby oak trees, the environmentalists say. “It’s one of the choicest trees to have on your property,” Stoner said. “It’s almost unequaled in form and beauty.”

CARING FOR NATIVE OAK TREES Oaks adapt to drought conditions, experts say, and don’t usually need extra water. If there has been a particularly dry winter, water occasionally between March and May and give the tree a single deep soaking in hot weather. Also:

* Don’t wet the trunk. Too much water in hot weather can expose a tree to deadly oak root fungus.

* Don’t plant grass or plants that require warm-weather watering under the tree.

* Don’t pave ground under the tree. Avoid compacting earth there too.

* Don’t grade the ground under the tree. In particular, avoid covering the root crown, the bottom-most part of the trunk, with soil.

* Don’t do heavy pruning. In September or October, remove only dead or diseased limbs.