By the Roots : Lake Sherwood: David Murdock is moving old oaks to create a forest. Some wonder if the trees can survive.

Like the woods in a scene out of “Macbeth,” the oak forest near Lake Sherwood is on the move. Not because of a witch’s prophecy, but the deep pockets of billionaire David H. Murdock.

Murdock, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars refilling and maintaining Lake Sherwood, has spent $6 million moving more than 1,600 oak trees around his lavish development and country club in the hills south of Thousand Oaks.

During the past three years, gnarled oaks, most of them centuries old, have been hoisted out of the ground by cranes and later strategically scattered around a championship golf course in a kind of designer forest.

Others have been moved to a boulevard leading up to the Sherwood Country Club to grace the tennis courts.

And last week, more trees were uprooted from a canyon north of the lake and moved to a scenic lakefront location.

“In Washington, the cherry trees give it a certain sense of formality,” said oak tree consultant Lee Newman. The majestic oak trees at Lake Sherwood give “a formality, a grandeur to the project. It has a grand, classic look.”

Moving an oak tree can cost up to $100,000, depending on its size, tree experts said, and the cost of maintaining them for years is thousands of dollars more.

County planners say Murdock’s effort is unprecedented in Ventura County, primarily because most developers are reluctant to spend the massive amounts of money it takes to move mature oaks.

Permits the county issued to Murdock required him to replace each oak that is removed with three oaks. But instead of planting only saplings, he decided to incorporate whole groves in his design, County Planner Chet Bauman said.

Oak tree preservationists with the California Oak Foundation in Sacramento say the tree relocation at Lake Sherwood is the largest and most ambitious project in the state.

“I’ve never heard of such a large-scale movement of oaks,” said Janet Cobb, a tree consultant and president of the foundation. Cobb said some developers have recently recognized the financial pay-back of preserving rather than destroying large oaks.

“What we’ve found is that a mature oak tree can add $50,000 to $100,000 to the value of a property,” she added.

Murdock “may be shrewd, and he may be environmentally sensitive. Whatever it is, we’re very interested in documenting the results,” she said.

The process of transplanting oaks is lengthy. It took three years for Valley Crest Tree Co. in Calabasas to transplant the first 1,500 oaks around the golf course and country club.

Mark Barrett, owner of the Landscape Center in Upland, said his contract to move the remaining 100 of the trees is $1 million. It will take about four months to move the largest oaks from a canyon in an area called China Flats to lakefront locations, he said.

Workers spent two days building a large wooden box around each tree’s roots, then fastened planks around the soil to keep the roots intact.

The trees are left in the boxes for about 90 days to re-establish their roots. Then 100-foot-tall cranes lift them out of the ground onto large trucks, which transport them to their new homes.

Barrett said the heaviest tree he will move is as wide as a small house and about as heavy as the crane that lifts it, about 120 tons. One 50-foot-tall tree awaiting relocation is 500 years old.

“When it was a sapling, Columbus was sailing the ocean blue,” he said as he watched his workers scurrying at the trunk of an oak.

But some oak tree preservationists question Murdock’s ability to re-create the native oak woodlands and the habitat that comes with it. They say the move may shorten the trees’ lives by weakening their root systems and making them vulnerable to disease and insects.

UC Riverside oak tree researcher Tom Scott, who once examined the oaks at Lake Sherwood, believes the trees are slowly dying.

“They’re beautiful trees, but they’re really the living dead,” he said.

The two types of trees at Lake Sherwood, the coast live oak and the valley oak, are particularly sensitive to such moves, he said.

At developments in Orange County where mature oak trees have been transplanted, many have died, he said. Their canopies thin when the leaves and bark fall off, and eventually the roots die, Scott said.

“We won’t know if these transplants are a success for 10 or 15 years,” he said. “In the interim, you have a tremendously big experiment. So much is at stake. The jury’s out (on) whether it’s a successful technique or not.”

Nelda Matheny, a member of the California Urban Forestry Council, which advises the state Department of Forestry, also has doubts about Murdock’s tree relocation project.

“I think they’re going to have a short life,” she said. “In my mind, you could have a healthier woodland for a longer period of time by planting new trees.”

Newman, Murdock’s tree consultant, said he has given the developer no guarantees that the centuries-old oak trees will live for several centuries more. But so far, he said, he has no reason to believe any of the trees are dying.

Each month, workers examine each tree two to three times, looking for signs of disease, decay and overwatering.

Newman has taken infrared aerial photographs to determine whether the trees are showing signs of decay.

So far, although some trees show signs of beetle infestation, all but one of the transplanted trees appear to be flourishing, he said. During the last few months, the trees have sprouted new canopies of leaves.

One particularly large tree with a double trunk sprouted new roots the size of fingers only six months after it was moved.

“Everybody’s watching this project,” Newman said. Murdock “has done something no one’s done on a large scale. We’ll all learn something from it.”