Ventura County Perspective : PERSPECTIVE...

I hate to wish for hard times but if that’s what it takes to halt the proliferation of palm trees, then bring them on.

Until I read about the Palm Queen, I had no idea that one misguided person was the force behind the marring of our once beautiful county with these ridiculous-looking trees (“Tropical Tree Sales Growing” and “Ventura Woman Has a Heart for Palms,” Aug. 14). Instead of smiling through palm fronds, Pauleen Sullivan should apologize to every person in Ventura for swinging the balance of “beautification” to this trendoid tree that serves no purpose on the urban landscape.

I prefer a very different Ventura, shaded and sweet-smelling from an abundance of eucalyptus trees.

Now, I know that the euc is no more native to our shores than the haughty palm. But it’s the tree I grew up with and associate very strongly with our county. I remember coming down the Conejo Grade and seeing the avenue of eucalyptuses that lined Highway 101 for years and years when both sides of the highway were planted with crops, not housing tracts. I remember the same about Highway 126 before they took all the bends out of it.

Ventura felt like “the country” then, not a concrete extension of Los Angeles. These big trees, planted to hold back the wind, rustled calm and reassurance. They complemented the highways’ unpaved shoulders and produce stands, inviting you to pull over.

OK, so the good old days are gone, and the eucalyptuses are suffering from some killer blight, and everybody in Southern California wants to live here so we have to chop down and carve up everything green and growing to make way for these tax dollars to move in. I don’t like it but I’m resigned to it.

I’m not resigned to palm trees.

Trees serve several important functions in the urban environment. Besides being beautiful to look at, we seek trees for cooling shade, admire them for softening the hard edges of our cities and rely upon them to muffle the noises of our cacophonous world. Guess which trees can’t do that. You got it. It’s not the trunk that does it, it’s all that other stuff, like branches and leaves and twigs, body parts clearly missing from palm trees.

At the Fourth of July street fair in Ventura, I witnessed a very funny Kodak moment--without my camera. A group of four friends sought a shady respite from the heat of the noonday sun--a challenge on a street lined with palm trees. Their solution? They aligned themselves single file from the curb into the street in the shadow of a stick-figure palm to take advantage of its “shade.” Fortunately, the street was closed to vehicular traffic and they could only be bumped into by pedestrians.

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We need to use our good, old-fashioned observation skills before we commit our community to this in-fashion tree. Go to any public parking lot early in the day and where are the first cars parked? Where do people first plant their chairs the night before parades? Which picnic spots in parks are the first taken? What do you plant in your yard when you’re trying to sell your house?

It’s true; you can follow the fashion and plant a slow-growing palm. And in 30 years you’ll have a trunk in your yard with shrub on the top. No shade tree to give you relief from the summer’s heat, no branch for a hammock or a treehouse for the grand kids. No firewood from periodic pruning, no place to hang birdhouses. You have a trunk in your yard with a shrub on top. That’s it. It’s ugly, unfriendly and useless.

So I suggest that we form the Anti International Palm Society (or AIPS--”We like trees you can swing from!”) and depose the “lone branch” Queen of Palms and send her shadeless monsters back to Venezuela or Sulawesi or Malaysia or wherever she got them. Then maybe we can let Ventura get back to looking like Ventura, with oaks and sycamores and, if we’re lucky, eucalyptuses.

Pepi Petrucci lives in Ojai.