Committee Carves Out Plan for Fallen Oak

How many bureaucrats, City Council aides, homeowners, urban planners and arborists does it take to decree the fate of a fallen king, the mighty oak of Ventura Boulevard?

Well, if you give them six weeks and half a dozen meetings to whittle--er, narrow--the options, it takes about 20.

Since the beloved Lang oak was felled by an El Nino storm in February, the stripped trunk has been held at a secret location while members of a special committee debated what to do with the behemoth and the plot of land where the tree flourished in majesty for a millennium.

A giant picnic table at the site?

Nah.

An oak sculpture of famous Encino residents?

Ummm, no.

Maybe a many-ringed slice for City Hall, the Museum of Natural History and some local schools, with smaller hunks hawked--for a reasonable price--at an annual community street fair?

A possibility.

The committee, which is still seeking an answer, will meet today for what may, or may not, be the final time.

“When you have anything that’s been part of the community for 1,000 years, you can’t just make a decision in [a few] weeks because the decisions you make are permanent,’ said David Lynn, head of the Encino Chamber of Commerce.

“If it takes three months so that for the next 30 years, or next 500 years, we have something nice, that makes more sense to me.”

Indeed, everyone involved in deciding what will happen to the remains of the 70-foot-tall pater of Los Angeles’ oak trees has been extraordinarily cautious.

Some of them drove by the oak every day on their way to work. Some had spent years, decades even, caring for the tree, nursing it back to health after bouts of a fungal sickness, sitting in its towering shadow on 110-degree mid-summer days.

They joined the neighbors who shed tears after it toppled under the force of a fierce storm and the weight of its centuries. They understood why, when in 1992 famed arborist Alex L. Shigo prodded the ailing tree with a “Shigometer” in an effort to diagnose it, passersby by shouted at him and an accompanying reporter to leave it the heck alone.

And so they have met every other week or so in the Encino offices of City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, trying to determine the best course of action.

“It’s a 1,000-year-old oak,” said Cheryl Weaver, Miscikowski’s field deputy in charge of the oak. “People are concerned about it.”

Varnishing the entire trunk of the tree and plopping it back in the tiny park, around which Louise Avenue was routed, seemed a bit tacky.

Importing a mature replacement oak--due to be felled in nearby Woodland Hills and offered as a gift--would probably only bring more heartbreak. The stress of replanting, arborists said, and the same common fungus that hounded the Lang oak, would probably kill the pretender.

*

Hewing a wooden celebrity, well, “That idea got the kibosh right away,” said committee member Elaine Skaist, of the Encino Property Owners Assn.

“Los Angeles is a bureaucratic city,” Skaist added, “and you just don’t do things one-two-three. But we feel like we’ve all had our say, and the city has listened.”

Committee members said they are likely to vote in favor of preserving a cross-section of the massive trunk--some 24 feet in circumference--and displaying it at the site, possibly with helpful arrows pointing to certain rings: the year Marco Polo headed for China; the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake; the year Christopher Columbus set sail in search of the New World; the year before the Lang oak finally called it a life and lay down in the darkness and rain.

Just how many rings there are is still unknown, and will be until the day some municipal woodchopper finally slices through the 8-foot-thick central trunk and starts in: one . . . two . . . three . . . .

They’ll landscape the area and plant some vegetation. And they’ll hope it all grows tall and shady.

“There’s this void on the street,” said Ellen Stein, president of the city’s board of public works and a two-decade fan of the Lang oak. “Although we can’t replace the tree, we hope to create something that will be beautiful in its own right.”