Designer Forest : Developer Spends Millions to Relocate 1,600 Oaks

Like a scene out of Macbeth, the oak forest near Lake Sherwood is on the move. Not so much 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 centuries old, have been hoisted out of the ground by cranes and 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.

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 is thousands of dollars annually.

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.

The county’s permits required Murdock 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.

Janet Cobb, a tree consultant and president of the foundation, said Murdock “may be shrewd, and he may be environmentally sensitive. Whatever it is, we’re very interested in documenting the results.”

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

University of California oak tree researcher Tom Scott, who once examined the oaks at Lake Sherwood, says the trees are slowly dying. “They’re beautiful trees, but they’re really the living dead.”

The two types of trees at Lake Sherwood, the coastal 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.

“We won’t know if these transplants are a success for 10 or 15 years. In the interim, you have a tremendously big experiment,” Scott said.

Nelda Matheny, a member of the California Urban Forestry Council, which advises the state Department of Forestry, also has doubts about the success of 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. So far, he said, he has no reason to believe that the trees are dying.

Each month, workers examine the trees 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 a canopy of leaves.

“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.”