Leaves of splendor

Chapter 1

At 20,000 feet -- the altitude for most aerial photography -- Los Angeles is a city of rooftops and parking lots. Sunlight and shadows blur across a grid of streets. Look carefully, however, and trees emerge like green cotton balls on a plywood sheet. They line roads, shadow homes and pepper golf courses, parks and schools. Stand beneath them on a summer day, and the air is cool. Walk beneath them during a winter storm, and rainwater falls into pools and disappears into the soil at their roots.

Yet not until John Quigley took his place in early November in the branches of an oak in Santa Clarita in an attempt to save the tree from a road-widening project did we stop and think of Southern California as a place of trees. Now we can’t escape the thought. Far from being a concrete jungle, the region brims with arboreal splendor, and it doesn’t take someone living in a tree to make it apparent. When the U.S. Forest Service did a reconnaissance of the trees of Los Angeles a couple of years ago, it determined that the city’s tree cover amounted to nearly 16%, the rest falling to buildings, grass, soil and pavement. It is a proportion, according to Greg McPherson, director of the study, comparable to Sacramento’s and Chicago’s.

“There’s no question that trees are important to us. Look at them carefully and they become a window upon people, culture and values,” McPherson says. “They are a way to frame who we are, what we think about nature and what we take for granted in our environment.”

Chapter 2

They begin arriving in the early morning. They come with empty laundry detergent boxes and pick their way among the fallen leaves, a carpet of autumn gold. They are the Chinese herbalists, and their quarry is the pungent seedpods of Ed Tessier’s Ginkgo biloba, rumored cure-all and palliative. Tessier’s ginkgo, believed to have been planted in 1927, is also a favored destination for quinceanera and wedding photos. In the fall, the tree -- belonging to one of the oldest species in the world (fossils of its leaves have been dated to nearly 270 million years ago, well before the age of the dinosaurs) -- is a beacon visible for at least four blocks in old town Pomona. In sunlight, its leaves, turning from green to gold, seem to burnish before your eyes.

The tree gained attention courtesy of Donald R. Hodel. Eighteen years ago, Hodel, a horticultural advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension, drove 5,000 miles on an ambitious project to photograph and record nearly 1,000 local trees for his 1988 book, “Exceptional Trees of Los Angeles.” The book is the bible of arboreal life in the Southland, and Tessier’s ginkgo is one of the 167 specimens that made the final cut.

Southern California is a remarkable place for trees, argues Hodel. “We have perhaps the greatest diversity of trees of any urban city,” he says. “It is our climate -- from frost-free zones on the coast to arctic zones in some of the mountains -- and our enthusiasms that have created a rich environment for trees.”

Enthusiasm or not, trees are easily taken for granted. Tessier remembers the day he drove down the street and saw trimmers busy pruning the tree. “Butchering was more like it,” he says. “ I saw half the tree was standing and half of it was stacked on the lawn. It was so upsetting to neighbors and residents that it triggered calls for a tree preservation ordinance, which was just adopted two years ago by the city of Pomona.”

So he bought the house and saved the tree.

Chapter 3

Trees have wrapped their roots into the Southern California psyche in ways that we may not know, and although popular sentiment and cinematic expression have placed the palm foremost in our imaginations, it is really the citrus tree that put the region on the map.

Harry Murakami throttles back his leaf blower to a low idle. It is nearly 7 a.m. and he has completed two hours of work. Gone are the scraps of paper, the fallen leaves and grapefruit rinds that littered Noguchi Plaza, a brick courtyard just off San Pedro Street in downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. Beneath the gaze of a plastic owl, nearly hidden by pines on the street, stand a dozen feather-leafed jacarandas, a cluster of red plum trees and a grapefruit tree. A tuft of oily luminescent foliage, rising from a dark striated trunk, burled and knotted from past trimmings, shades an abundant crop of fruit, high overhead.

Murakami, 72, grabs a branch trimmer from his Toyota pickup and stands beneath the tree. He reaches up and cuts down two grapefruit. The fruit is thin-skinned and tart. It’s not often that you eat a grapefruit from a 120-year-old tree, he says, lighting a cigarette.

The tree is believed to have been planted by William Wolfskill in the late 1800s. Wolfskill, a Kentucky-born trapper and trader, created the city’s first commercial grove, a 28-acre site close to the center of Los Angeles, from seedlings he took from a citrus orchard in San Gabriel. Whittled away as downtown grew, the grove slowly disappeared, until one day 20 years ago the Southern California Gardeners Federation was invited to save the sole survivor of that era from a new development. “It was growing just over there,” Murakami points to a five-story parking structure half a block away.

Today it thrives in its transplanted location. On a weekday afternoon, schoolchildren run around the plaza. They gather on the steps beside the tree, and their teacher marches them out in single file. Three homeless men descend on a trash container for remnants of their lunch and recyclables.

Chapter 4

When naturalist Edward O. Wilson coined the word “biophilia” in 1979, he sought to describe humankind’s innate connection to the natural world. It is an awkward locution, somewhat clinical and insufficient to explain how easily the world outside our windows can get beneath our skin.

Tears still come to the eyes of Dewitt Etheridge when he thinks back on the last few years. Not only did he lose his wife, he also was forced to cut down the tree that was once so important to them. The Etheridges’ tree in La Habra Heights was the original Hass avocado, the genetic mother lode for the world’s most popular variety of the fruit.

At its maturity, the tree was nearly 65 feet tall; its trunk 7 feet around. The numbers are hard to confirm: It is believed that nearly 15 million trees were propagated and planted around the world from this single one, which produced nearly 500 pounds of fruit a year.

Planted in 1926 along with a number of other seedlings by Rudolph Hass, a mailman turned gentleman farmer, the tree nearly didn’t make it. The skin of its fruit was rather unsightly, leathery and rough, and when it was time for Hass to thin the grove, a neighbor -- according to legend -- persuaded him to spare this oddball. Hass’ children believe it was an act of God, so loved is the fruit today for its distinctive buttery, nutty flavor. In 1935, Hass agreed and drew a patent on the tree. In 1975, the Etheridges became custodians.

Four years ago, however, the old avocado grew ill. Some blame the persea mite. After a leafless year, in spite of Etheridge’s best efforts, he cut the tree down. The date was Sept. 11, 2002. Now Etheridge, 78, has the stump in his frontyard, a stack of newspaper clippings citing the tree’s august history and a few pictures taken from that sorrowful day.

“There’s no question trees have an emotional hold on us,” says Andy Lipkis, president of TreePeople, the Los Angeles environmental group. “Yet we don’t have the tools to talk about them. So many things have left our current conversation that we don’t realize that trees are a part of our lives until they are gone.”

Chapter 5

No one remembers who placed the small wooden sign with hand-carved letters on the lemon-scented gum tree in South Pasadena, but who needs memory when the legend is so rich?

The Wynyate Estate is one of that city’s more spectacular properties. On a grassy knoll featuring views of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Queen Anne-style home was built in 1887 by Donald M. Graham, the first mayor of South Pasadena, and his wife, Margaret Collier. Today the property is nearly obscured by pines, peppers and eucalyptus trees. None is quite as famous as the lemon-scented gum, believed to have been planted by John Muir, 1889.

Never mind that no one seems able to place Muir in Southern California in 1889. There are times, especially when tracing the life of an old tree, that the imagination is more powerful than memory. As the story goes, the Grahams, who were riding a wave of personal reinvention that was turning this quarter of Southern California into a haven for artists and bohemians, had created something of a salon at Wynyate. Muir was said to have been a frequent visitor, staying once to plant the tree before heading off to the mountains with a loaf of Boston brown bread and a bag of tea thrust into the pocket of his Prince Albert coat.

Today the gum tree is a shadow of its former self. All that remains is a single willowy limb, stretching overhead. But the health of the tree somehow pales next to the more urgent reality of this particular property. If the state has its way, the extension of the Long Beach Freeway will send its southbound breakdown lane less than 30 yards from the home’s front door.

Chapter 6

Reading through “Exceptional Trees of Southern California,” you come to realize that the landmarks of Los Angeles are as much horticultural as they are architectural. Visit the area’s formal gardens -- the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia, the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, the Orcutt Ranch Horticultural Center in West Hills or the Virginia Robinson Garden in Beverly Hills, Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge -- and you will find yourself in the presence of well-tended trees. What’s been lost -- the Indian rubber tree in Whittier, for instance, nearly 100 years old and 70 feet tall, which the city razed to widen Whittier Boulevard -- is as irreplaceable as, say, Irving Gill’s Dodge House. Trees on private property are the most vulnerable.

Gloria Zamudio climbs into the trunk of the Moreton Bay fig on the grounds of Rancho Los Amigos in Downey and smiles like a little girl. Its roots flare at her feet as broad as an infield, and its canopy of green and gold rises above her like a hot-air balloon. The tree is one of the largest in Southern California and is something of a landmark. Zamudio, the contract administrator for landscaping at the rehabilitation center, has a soft spot for this particular tree, even if it no longer falls under her jurisdiction. Last year, in a cost-cutting measure, the facility relinquished its south campus, where the tree is situated, to the county. So when an enormous branch broke off last spring, she was devastated.

As the county Board of Supervisors debates closing Rancho Los Amigos, Zamudio grows ever more nervous. “It is a running joke around here,” she says, “that if it takes one man in one tree to stop a development, perhaps we should all climb into the trees around here and save a few thousand lives.”

Nearby, a flight of sparrows circles in the top reaches of a bunya bunya tree. Nearly 100 feet tall, this specimen is one of the more notable trees in Southern California. Scraggly and narrow as a pillar, it is both majestic and peculiar. Patients in wheelchairs scatter on a basketball court, and an old man pedals a bicycle past a stand of four pink cedar trees, native to the forests of Burma and India.

Later in the day, Zamudio pulls a branch trimmer from her car. We reach up into a white sapote, a Mexican apple tree, and knock two apples to the ground. A native to the mountains of Mexico, the tree is known as cochiztzapotl or “sleepy fruit” in Nahuatl. Its bark, leaves and seeds contain a chemical that is not only curative but also can induce a deep sleep. We slice the fruit. It tastes like peach and banana.

Chapter 7

“It seems so basic,” says Cheryl Kollin, director of the urban forest center at the national conservation organization, American Forests, “that trees provide tangible economic benefits to communities whether controlling storm water runoff, minimizing air pollution or cooling the city. We just need to change the mind-set, that trees are assets not liabilities.”

Business is brisk at the Woodhill firewood lot in Irvine on a Saturday afternoon. Monster pickups and modest sedans sink lower on their springs as lengths of wood are heaved into their beds and trunks. Stacks of split and curing logs -- mostly red eucalyptus and almond -- tower above visitors like enormous cenotaphs. This is the graveyard, the final resting ground of trees. Here -- if they don’t dissolve into a chipper for mulch -- trees wait for the crematorium of a stranger’s fireplace. Owner Tom Rogers is the undertaker, a man not insensitive to the meaning of his job.

“I remember once clearing oaks in the nearby foothills,” he says. “A developer wanted to put in a golf course and change the contour of the land, and I’ll never forget one tree in particular. It was bigger than most, and when I looked at it, I thought about all the years it had grown there. It didn’t make too much sense to cut it down.”