CALABASAS : Students Help Replant Oaks at Ahmanson

Jacqueline Zajdman was stooped over, her forehead crinkled in concentration, her fingers moving deftly as she busied herself at her task.

She was one of 55 sixth-graders from Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park who planted oak trees at Ahmanson Ranch last week as part of a program to replace trees cut down to make way for a more than 3,000-home development.

“We are doing this for the community,” Jacqueline said. “We want to keep it beautiful here.”

“I like to plant trees to give animals shelter, and also, to give us more moisture and rain out here,” said another student, Adam Bushmore.

The students, who are studying plants, benefit by getting hands-on experience, said one of their teachers, Nancy Kollander.

“We’ve been studying plants all quarter, and this is an excellent tie-in,” she said.

The kids gathered acorns at one end of the property and brought them back to a nursery behind the office of Ahmanson Ranch in the southeast corner of Ventura County. There, they planted the acorns in small containers where they will be kept until they mature.

In about a year, the young oaks will be transplanted into larger containers, where they will be kept for two more years, said Gil Nielsen, senior vice president of Ahmanson Land Co., the housing project’s developer. The plants from those containers will then be planted on the property.

In 1989, Boy Scouts planted about 2,000 acorns, according to Ahmanson Land officials. Those trees, which are still in containers, are now about five-feet-tall and are ready to be transplanted.

Ahmanson Land officials eventually want to plant 4,000 trees, as part of a development agreement in which they must plant five trees for every tree they destroy to build the development, said Donald Brackenbush, company president.

The company plans to build 3,050 homes, two golf courses and 400,000 square feet of commercial space in a hilly area southeast of Simi Valley near the Ventura County-Los Angeles County border. Many area residents oppose the project and several lawsuits have been filed to block the development.

In an environmental review of the project, it was estimated that 1,300 oak trees would have to be cut down, Brackenbush said. The company has altered its project and reduced the number to 700, he said.

Planting trees to replace trees destroyed by the project is a good idea, said Jacqueline, who added, “But they are going to cut down these hills, and it’s not going to be beautiful here anymore.”

But classmate Ryan Poyer said he is not sure if the planting was worth the effort.

“It will take 100 years for (the acorns) to get as big as” the large, established oaks in the area, he said.

Oaks trees in general seem to be having a difficult time regenerating in the area, said Rosi Dagit, conservation biologist for the Topanga-Las Virgenes Resource Conservation district.

Experts aren’t sure why, she said, but overgrazing could play a factor. It could also be, she said, that the natural reseeding process--through bird droppings, for example--has been stymied, for some reason.

The recent drought, too, may have hampered acorn reproduction and air pollution could also play a role, Dagit said.