Keeper of the Oaks : City’s Landscape Consultant May Be Left Out on a Limb

Eyes fixed on his quarry, George Moore stalked along the sidewalk, a fit man with blondish hair and graying beard, already outraged at the crime he was poised to unveil.

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About to pounce, Moore stopped short next to the sinner--or, in this case, the sinned upon.

A spindly trunked oak tree along Hodencamp Road had been pruned into a tidy ball-shaped mound. If left alone, the tree would have sprawled its branches into the evocative, inviting tangles so characteristic of oaks. But clippers and snippers had confined it into a cramped circle--clear evidence of illegal topiary.

“This tree’s been trimmed improperly,” Moore announced.

As Thousand Oaks’ landscape consultant, he should know.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Moore has been in charge of safeguarding the city’s namesake oaks. For almost a decade, he’s been responsible for checking the landscaping programs of every residential, commercial and industrial development.

He sends dead trees to the buzz saw, saves old trees from the bulldozer and supervises implementation of the city code that requires builders to plant three new oaks for every one chopped down. Moore also reports shady goings-on, such as the illegally trimmed oak on Hodencamp, to code enforcement officers for follow-up action.

“He has provided a great service to the city,” Principal Planner Paul Metrovitsch said.

But now, Moore is fighting to retain the job he’s held since 1971.

New city guidelines require each department to hire consultants only after a competitive bidding process to ensure that “we get the best individual at the lowest price,” Metrovitsch said.

After soliciting proposals from landscape architects across Ventura County, city staff last week interviewed nine candidates and will select finalists by early this week.

Moore is eager to keep his job, which brings in $50 an hour and takes about 20 hours a week. But several of his competitors said they think that Thousand Oaks’ oaks, not to mention the peppers and sycamores, deserve a caretaker with fresh eyes and a new attitude.

Criticism of Moore centers around one main charge: He plays favorites.

Plays favorites with plants, that is, rejecting some landscape designs simply because he’s not fond of, or not familiar with, a particular type of ground cover.

“Sometimes, he isn’t real objective,” said Jo Ann Hutchison-Rosdahl, a Camarillo landscape architect bidding for the Thousand Oaks consulting job. “That tends to happen over time. It gets to be like, no one can use those plants because I don’t like them.”

A friendly rival who is not competing for the Thousand Oaks job, landscape architect James Dean describes Moore as “a controversial person, very opinionated.”

Moore is “thorough, good and talented,” Dean said, but “he might be a little inflexible. He has very definite opinions, and he doesn’t back down.”

To that, Moore offers a ready response.

In reviewing landscape plans, he said he tries to be conservative and cautious, sticking to plants that he knows will grow well in the soil and climate. “No one knows micro-climates in Thousand Oaks better than I do,” he said.

He admits a distaste for certain species--he derides palm trees, for example, as “telephone poles with a little tuft of hair on top.”

But in general, Moore said, his bias is simply pro-green.

“In this city, I’m known as a bit hard-nosed because I really can’t see the point of paving over the whole city,” Moore said, risking ant bites as he leaned against a 400-year-old tree.

An avid surfer who hits Ventura beaches each morning, 55-year-old Moore developed his aversion to pavement while growing up in the then-rural San Fernando Valley.

His parents, fleeing the numbing uniformity of suburban tract houses, moved from Hawthorne to North Hollywood when he was young, then jumped from an orange orchard in Northridge to a walnut grove in Van Nuys to a small horse ranch in Canoga Park.

Tending the horses seemed a lot more appealing than sweeping up after pepper trees, so Moore decided to study animal husbandry when he entered Pierce College. But a landscape design class caught his fancy, and he soon embarked on a new career--with a passel of credits and a state license, but no college degree.

He speaks of trees lovingly, like a kindly family doctor, fussing over their circulatory systems when the leaves look funny and poking at the bark when the branches appear dead.

His goal is simple: to keep Thousand Oaks looking lush and verdant.

“He’s got a tough job,” Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski said. “These are challenging times for someone of such dedication (to trees) because of the enormous pressures” for development.

But despite the pressures, Moore thinks that Thousand Oaks can evade the creeping concrete that has overtaken the San Fernando Valley, especially if the council approves a strict forestry law up for a public hearing later this year.

The forestry law, proposed last spring and sent back to staff for revision, would require city permits for all branch-pruning or tree trimming. If passed, the law would extend the city’s strong defense of oaks to all trees within Thousand Oaks, including those on private property.

Such sweeping protection makes sense to Josephine Maturo, a homeowners association representative on the Thousand Oaks Tree Advisory Board.

“When I look around at all our oak trees here, I think, ‘Thank God for Mr. Moore,’ ” Maturo said. “He’s very personable, he’s very fair and he’s the No. 1 guy with our oak trees.”

In fact, Moore helped draft the original oak ordinance back in 1971 on the theory that preserving trees would save the Conejo Valley.

“The hills and canyons and barrancas you still see in Thousand Oaks, a lot of them are here because of the oak trees,” Moore said.

Because the law protects oaks, he said, the gnarly, knotty trees in turn protect the environment. If developers have to save pockets of green to keep an oak and its roots intact, then they can’t engage in wholesale grading or filling, Moore said.

As a landscape architect who often works for large developers, John Innes can testify to Moore’s hard line against tree destruction. But he’s more concerned about his perception that Moore resists using new hybrids or untested varieties of plants.

Innes, who has applied for the Thousand Oaks consultant job, recalled encountering “a lot of resistance” when he submitted a landscape plan using a hybrid crape myrtle. “George doesn’t like new plants,” he said.

Sometimes, however, that conservative streak pays off.

Dean remembers feeling infuriated when Moore turned down his proposal to spread ivy around a residential development on Lynn Road in the mid-1970s.

Moore insisted that the ground cover would provide a haven for rats. Dean dismissed that excuse as irrelevant because no rats lived in the area. But Moore, predicting future rodent infestation, held his ground. Reluctantly, Dean chose a different plant.

Moore’s stubborn anti-ivy policy was soon vindicated.

“It turned out he was right and we did develop a rat problem in that area,” Dean said. “Now, I don’t use ivy.”