Tempest in the Treetops

SANTA CRUZ —  To Robert Sward, the blue gum eucalyptus trees standing by his back fence resemble a leafy gang of thugs, menacing and ready to strike.

Sward and his wife, Gloria Alford, hate them. They worry that one of the big, bark-shedding trees might snap and flatten their home, or that a spark from a neighbor’s barbecue could turn the naturally oily foliage into an inferno.

After a decade of unsuccessfully fighting City Hall for permission to ax his grove, Sward--a poet, retired college professor and avowed environmentalist--resorted to a botanical form of civil disobedience. He hired a tree cutter to take them out.

Scarcely had the buzz of the chain saw kicked up when city parks inspectors--”tree police,” as some locals call them--stepped in, halted the cutting and hit Sward with fines initially totaling $5,000.

Welcome to California’s eucalyptus wars.

From the dense groves that step up from San Francisco Bay to San Diego’s leafy canyons, the fate of Eucalyptus globulus is increasingly at the center of impassioned debate.

In its native Australia, the tree is routinely branded a fire hazard and has been dubbed “the widow maker” for its propensity to drop lethal limbs unannounced.

But in the Golden State, it has earned a resolute constituency. Eucalyptus aficionados prize the trees’ leggy beauty, their soothing medicinal scent, the homey roost they provide monarch butterflies. They’ve fought hard to protect the grand forests that have added a dash of greenery to California’s bleached coastal scrublands in the 150 years since the species arrived on U.S. shores.

In Carlsbad, a civic referendum once halted plans to cut 53 acres of eucalyptuses. Civic protest also stopped a move to fell trees on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. When the ax came out in a Dana Point subdivision because of liability fears, outraged residents protested in the streets and won a court reprieve for surviving trees. Removal of a thicket in the funky Bay Area enclave of Bolinas was abandoned after foes compared it to genocide and labeled logging advocates “plant Nazis.” Eucalyptus aficionados howled recently when a big, rancho-era tree was felled in favor of a parking lot at the new Westside office of famed architect Frank O. Gehry.

“A tree is a living being, and every one is valuable,” summed up Celia Scott, an environmental lawyer and former Santa Cruz councilwoman whose home is nestled happily among eucalyptuses. “I don’t see any reason to discriminate or live in fear of them.”

But the rangy tree stirring such deep-rooted support has an equally vocal band of critics. Though the eucalyptus family has about 600 species, the blue gum is the shaggy bad boy of the bunch.

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‘Gasoline Tree’

Some firefighters call it the “gasoline tree” for the way the blue gum ignites like a bomb upon the approach of flames. The trees, which under ideal conditions can reach 200 feet tall, are cited as one of the culprits in the devastating 1991 Oakland Hills blaze.

Botanists say the blue gum’s speedy growth and profuse bark and leaf litter can smother native species such as coast live oak, wax myrtle and bunch grass. In the cool, muffled beauty of a eucalyptus grove, some ornithologists contend, coastal songbirds can meet their deaths, their airways plugged by the tree’s gummy resin.

A recent Audubon magazine article ridiculed the blue gum, the dominant species in parts of California, as the nation’s largest weed.

“They should all go,” groused Sward, an otherwise egalitarian man. “They’re like a contagion.”

A native of Chicago, a Guggenheim fellow and the author of several books of plain-spoken poetry, Sward moved to Santa Cruz for its laid-back ways, hip politics and natural beauty. Eucalyptuses are a big part of that scenic charm, commanding huge swaths of the canyons that carve the seaside town.

Sward landed right in a thicket of the trees, chubby 100-footers that hug two edges of the wood-sided house designed by his wife, artist Gloria Alford.

But what the eucalyptus offers in beauty from afar, it takes back up close, Sward discovered. Few other plants would grow beneath the trees’ fragrant umbrellas, and the shedding bark and leaves were a constant maintenance headache.

Over the years, he pleaded with the city for permission to have them removed. Always, his efforts were blocked by Santa Cruz’s tough Heritage Tree Ordinance, which prohibits toppling any big tree unless there’s a really good reason--like unfettered disease, a threat of imminent property damage or injury.

Sward contends he is under imminent threat, and cites as evidence his wife’s near death-by-eucalyptus episode.

During a fierce storm in March 1996, one of several eucalyptuses on a neighboring parcel nearly took out a Pacific Gas & Electric substation. Alford went outside to inspect. As she gazed into the churning sea of wind-whipped foliage, a nearby PG&E; worker called out a warning.

Alford remembers taking a few steps backward just as the swollen green-gray mass of another blue gum eucalyptus slammed to the ground nearby.

In its descent, the tree took out electrical lines on both sides of the street and snapped a telephone pole like a toothpick. The local newspaper put this near-miss story on its front page.

Alford was left with a fright that remains to this day.

“When the wind blows, you hear that awful creaking,” Alford said, voice shuddering. On those nights, the couple retreat from their bedroom to sleep at the far side of the house, away from the groaning trees.

After his wife’s experience, Sward launched a crusade against the eucalyptus.

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Gold Rush-Era Roots

He began by boning up on his foe. Sward learned that the tree’s domestic roots date to the Gold Rush era; by most accounts, San Francisco nurseryman W.C. Walker propagated the first seeds in 1853.

In the years since, blue gum eucalyptus has been eyed as quick-strike treasure by a long parade of California schemers. Eucalyptus was to be a medicinal cure for all kinds of ailments, the abundant replacement for vanishing hardwoods, rough-sawed framing lumber and railroad ties.

But the state’s young trees, denied the century of growth needed to achieve the density of Australia’s venerable eucalyptuses, proved to be under-performers. Railroad ties wouldn’t hold a spike. Lumber cracked. Cure-alls succumbed to reality. Even its most common use--as firewood--was scuttled by the advent of electric and natural gas heaters.

Still, vast eucalyptus groves remained, gaining fame as subjects for a whole genre of California art, becoming parks and sanctuaries for road-weary travelers, providing windbreaks for citrus orchards and Central Valley highways.

In the right places, away from homes and buildings, that’s fine, arborists say. But in several parts of the state, aggressive efforts are underway to clear out trees where mankind has crept close, pests have interfered or native plants are threatened.

On Angel Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, parks officials overcame significant opposition to take out stands of eucalyptuses and replant with native trees. Across the bay, a fight is being waged over logging 4,000 trees--mostly eucalyptuses--at San Francisco’s Presidio, a former military installation.

Los Angeles faces the costly task of removing 20,000 pest-infested eucalyptus trees in parks, said Eric Oldar, a state urban forester in Southern California. In San Diego County, some insurance companies have refused to renew policies for homes near fire-hazard groves, Oldar said. “Eucalyptus is about as explosive a tree as there is,” he said.

Globally, the eucalyptus is still seen as a cash crop, albeit a controversial one. In China, where eucalyptus plantations are producing biomass fuel and pulp for paper, some complain that the trees rob soil of nutrients and push back natural vegetation. During the early 1990s, farmers in Spain and Portugal uprooted eucalyptus seedlings and battled police over such industrial forests.

Robert Sward’s fight in Santa Cruz was not nearly so grand. He simply wanted to remove eight blue gum eucalyptuses. When his appeals went nowhere, Sward turned to his pen.

In tough-worded newspaper opinion pieces and on a Web site otherwise devoted to his poetry, Sward called the Santa Cruz tree ordinance an “unreasonable use of police power” and warned of a “blue gum apocalypse.”

These days, a tree more than 14 inches in diameter is considered of heritage stature in Santa Cruz. A healthy blue gum can achieve that size in less than a decade.

Even so, saving such trees in Santa Cruz “has become a religious crusade, a matter not of reason, but of faith,” said Gerald Bowden, an attorney who helped craft the heritage tree law two decades ago. Though intended to preserve a few big native trees, the law has been twisted, Bowden said. Nowadays, “Anyone who wants to cut a tree of any size is regarded as a philistine.”

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Blue Gum’s Advocate

More often than not, he said, Gillian Greensite is the preacher in that pulpit.

A native of Australia who has resided in Santa Cruz for a quarter of a century, Greensite has scored several victories, most notably halting a housing tract that Alford’s ex-husband planned a decade ago in a thick eucalyptus forest next to the house where Alford and Sward now live.

Sward, Greensite contends, is spreading “ignorance and misinformation” about the eucalyptus.

She calls the notion of songbird deaths absurd and notes that hawks and herons roost in eucalyptuses. The blue gum’s role in the Oakland Hills fire has been overstated, Greensite says. Wood roofs and thick brush were the real problems, she says. The coast’s native oaks were eliminated by dairy farmers, she contends, not by any spreading scourge of eucalyptuses.

Greensite believes the tree has been turned into a scapegoat. The city’s tree ordinance has hardly helped, she insists. Over the last five years, only 150 of 2,500 eucalyptuses and other big trees have won stays of execution.

As for Sward, Greensite said, “I don’t understand his pathological fear of a species he has chosen to live under.”

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The Chain-Saw Solution

Sward says his worries crested during a windstorm in mid-May. Like divine intervention, a roustabout tree cutter knocked on his door looking for work. Sward hired him on the spot, eager to eliminate what he calls “a clear and present danger.”

Two big blue gums and a few saplings had been felled when city inspectors--alerted by an irate neighbor--halted the cutting. The city, Sward said, “threw the book at me.”

Although his original $5,000 fine was reduced to $500, there’s a catch: Sward must hire a registered arborist and plant native replacement trees to make up for what was cut. It will cost at least $7,000 to do that, Sward figures, though he is still negotiating.

Leslie Keedy, Santa Cruz’s tree chief, said Sward’s surviving eucalyptuses don’t represent a threat. They’re plenty healthy, but could use a good pruning, she said.

“He needs to work in the process, and he knows what the process is,” she added.

Although a city task force recently considered ending heritage protection for blue gums and a few other nonnative trees, the proposal is tied up in politics. For now, Keedy said, the chance of Sward being allowed to cut down the rest of his eucalyptuses is next to zero.

All of which has Santa Cruz’s tree-killing poet bewildered.

He doesn’t see the sense of it: These are his trees. This is his danger.

“There are people in Santa Cruz,” Sward said, “who believe the blue gum eucalyptus is more important than human life.”