A Tree Dies, but Not Its Legacy

Los Angeles is a young and changing city with few landmarks from its distant past. A towering exception has been Encino’s majestic Lang Oak, which toppled to its death Saturday after punishing rains weighed down its giant branches and softened the soil around its trunk.

The tree is believed to have been about 700 years old in 1769 when Gaspar de Portola led the first expedition of European explorers into an oak-lined area they called Valle de los Encinos--the Valley of the Oaks.

Most of those ancient trees were razed to make way for a burgeoning city, but the Lang Oak survived, inspiring community movements to save it in the 1950s when developers wanted to bulldoze it and again in the early 1990s when bacterial disease threatened to kill it. Tree biologists believe the Lang Oak never fully recovered from when its water supply was severely cut with the building of the Encino Reservoir in 1921.

The city should help community activists who want to use the Lang Oak’s trunk for a memorial and its limbs for school programs educating children about their region’s history. But we can all pay tribute to the Lang Oak by helping its brethren survive. Most of Los Angeles’ oak trees can be saved only by reducing the smog that chokes them, avoiding the overwatering of nearby lawns and deterring the developers who want to chop them down.

Like a village elder, the Lang Oak represented what one of its caretakers, arborist Michael Mahoney, called “history, stability, nature in our midst.” Helping its relatives survive is the least we can do in return.