Arbor Lovers Can’t Leaf Well Enough Alone
The big pepper tree at the house of the president of Cal State Fullerton recently wore out, but replacing it was not easy.
Everybody loves a lifetime guarantee, but how many times have you seen a deal like that actually work out?
Barring a nuclear holocaust, which is beginning to look a lot less likely these days, a lifetime can last quite a while, at least longer than most Veg-O-Matics. So if some huckster tells you that the edge on his new line of Wazoo kitchen knives will be effortlessly slicing tomatoes into wafer-thin rounds when your grandchildren are buying bifocals, you might want to check his sleeve for the ace of spades.
Things break. Repair people get rich. It’s a consequence of living in the most ravenous consumer society on earth. For instance, how many Corvairs have you seen on the way to work this week?
But you’d think you could get a pretty good warranty on a California pepper tree. They’ve got a heck of a track record. Brought to California from their native Chile by Spanish missionaries, they grow beautifully in the wild all over the Southland, in large open areas. In San Juan Capistrano, for example, there are pepper trees that Father Serra probably picnicked under, and they still look terrific. They resemble willows in that their leaves and branches droop languidly, and their trunks look like they’d break the teeth on a chain saw.
But, up at the house of the president of Cal State Fullerton, the big pepper tree that dominated the front drive recently wore out. And, consequently, forces were marshaled for what probably was the biggest transplantation job anybody in the neighborhood had seen.
Actually, it didn’t wear out. It rotted. After an estimated 150 years of lordly existence on the little Fullerton hill, it succumbed to crown and root rot, said Rico Montenegro, the assistant director of the Fullerton Arboretum.
The rot, he said, creates large cavities in the tree that become sources of infection, a condition not dissimilar to a diseased tooth. The trunk, which Montenegro said was at least 5 feet in diameter, simply split, and the 50-foot-tall tree fell. And, because the limbs of the pepper tree also spread at about 50 feet, much of the tree crashed into an adjacent cactus garden on the other side of the driveway.
Because the president’s house (the former Chapman family mansion, which was donated to the university) had had a pepper tree looming over the front door since it was built, it was decided to go in search of another pepper tree to take its place. But a sapling wouldn’t do. There was, after all, a fairly huge planter to fill up, not to mention a fairly regal vista. A mature tree was needed.
In stepped the Union Oil Co. There was a pepper tree on a plot of company-owned land in Placentia, said Montenegro, that was healthy, mature at perhaps 35 years, and big enough to occupy the vacancy.
But this would not be like transplanting a fistful of morning glories. Trees, in the evolutionary scheme of things, are built to resist movement. And trees like the pepper, being enormously drought-tolerant, have roots that grip the ground tenaciously in search of every drop of water. You aren’t supposed to plant them near sidewalks, underground pipes or other items that can be choked or ruined by creeping roots.
A professional outfit was needed, and the Valley Crest Tree Co. of San Juan Capistrano was called in to perform as surgical a bit of business as is seen in botanical circles.
The tree, said Montenegro, couldn’t simply be yanked out of the ground, even if there were the means to do it.
“The biggest problem,” he said, “is the stress the tree will be under. Because of that, it’ll probably drop leaves for a week. It’s a very hardy tree, and they’re usually successful in transplanting it, but there’s no guarantee.”
Getting the tree out of the ground was like wrapping a huge, unwieldy package. The workers, said Montenegro, first dug down several feet from the trunk at a shallow angle. From there, they were able to slide (with no little effort) a series of planks beneath the lowest roots. They then built up planks around the trunk on four sides, forming a huge planter box, and tied it all together with metal bands. The tree was then ready to be lifted out of the ground and tied down sideways on a long flatbed truck, the larger limbs supported by thick boards.
Finally, late last week, the pepper tree was lifted off the truck by a crane and slowly lowered into a yawning hole in the middle of the brick planter in front of the president’s house.
Montenegro said he was optimistic that the tree would have a long life. The soil and climatic conditions at the president’s home are nearly identical to those of the Placentia field where the tree grew to maturity, so “the roots should regenerate fairly quickly,” he said.
It looks fairly stately already. But I’d still like a guarantee. After all, the old one turned into a lemon after only a century and a half. That means the new tree may only be around and in good shape for another 115 years or so.
Maybe the Japanese will come up with an improved model by then.
