Many Tree Debates Are Rooted in Age
As a chain saw made its first cut into a towering oak in Ojai, a protester shrieked, saying she could feel the tree’s pain. In Brentwood, activists danced and held candlelight vigils around a ficus -- one of four -- they had succeeded in saving from a sidewalk repair project.
And this winter in the Santa Clarita Valley, John Quigley sat in an oak tree known as Old Glory for 71 days to protect it from bulldozers.
Arboreal passion plays are being staged across California these days, a sign not just of the high emotions trees evoke but of a simple fact: In Los Angeles and other Southwestern cities, the tree population is turning from green to gray.
A crush of tree plantings during a post-World War II suburban explosion has resulted in a maturing urban forest, complete with pavement-ripping roots and view-blocking canopies.
“Trees were planted on all the new roads in L.A. back in the ‘40s,” said George Gonzalez, chief forester for the city’s Bureau of Street Services. “The life expectancy of a street tree is 50 to 60 years. Guess what? On average we have a forest that’s reaching maturity, if not mature.”
At the same time, experts observe, it is when trees are grown and at their grandest that ficus fans and eucalyptus enthusiasts come out to defend them. This, along with the push of development, helps to explain why so many tree disputes seem to be popping up in recent years.
“If you’re growing up in Southern California and you’re used to seeing a certain row of trees along a particular road, it’s a landmark of significance in your personal geography,” said Rosi Dagit, a biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. “So when a development occurs that changes that landscape, people get upset about it.”
Such was the case with Lois Medlock, who began taking her daughter to Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts at the Music Center not long after it opened in 1964. Every time she dropped her daughter off, she noticed the trees lining Grand Avenue. Over four decades, as her daughter grew, the trees grew too.
The once wispy saplings became towering jacarandas and ficus, with lush canopies that gave an indelible touch of nature to the concrete, light and artifice of a bustling city street.
So when the county recently ordered that the trees be removed to widen the sidewalk between the glimmering Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Medlock, 77, put up a fight.
To Medlock, the issue wasn’t just aesthetics, but how to preserve a civic memory.
“How do you look back if nothing is standing there?” said Medlock, who pleaded to city and county bureaucrats to spare the trees. But to no avail.
Contractors cut down 55 trees in March in what one protester described as a “massacre.” Defenders of trees often use such words to describe another felling in the urban forest.
Such was the case two years ago when protesters in downtown Ojai watched workers clip an oak that had begun pressing against the foundation of a nearby building.
“I totally felt it,” said Patricia Musser, who was then a 38-year-old belly dancer and who shrieked when a chain saw made its first cut. “I screamed because the tree had no voice.”
Nonnative Trees
The state’s urban forest, according to Gonzalez, took off with the arrival of Spanish settlers and in particular, the development of the missions two centuries ago. About 20 million trees have taken root in the Los Angeles Basin alone, he continued, most of which are not native to the region.
Nonetheless, some contend that Southern California’s tree population is paltry compared to those of other parts of the country.
“We do not have huge forests like they do back east, so people treasure the trees we have,” said Randall S. Stamen, a Riverside-based tree lawyer and author of a book called “California Arboriculture Law.” “They become deeply connected to them.”
Stamen said a combination of factors breeds a high level of litigiousness over trees in Southern California.
Because battles over trees tend to be based on emotions rather than business principles, he said, they can be as tricky to navigate as a family court feud.
It’s not unheard of, Stamen continued, for police to be called to mediate tree disputes and for children of warring neighbors to be barred from playing with one another. Cases where a tree is obstructing a neighbor’s view can be particularly vexing.
Neighbors of one Riverside woman, for example, cut down her ficus in 1994 while she was in the hospital undergoing surgery, Stamen said. In a San Diego case several years later, neighbors removed one woman’s fence, had her three huge eucalyptus trees cut down and hauled away and the fence replaced -- all during the eight hours she was away at work.
“I would never treat my neighbors the way some of these people do,” Stamen said. “It’s shocking.”
Oaks and ficus seem to stir some of the deepest emotions and have thus prompted some of the more unusual and ambitious rescue efforts. Quigley’s campaign to save Old Glory, for example, drew Native American groups, folk singers, Hollywood stars and countless families to the enormous oak. The tree has been lifted from the ground and boxed, ready to be moved and replanted in late May or June.
Concerned citizens, teachers and students in West Los Angeles launched a campaign earlier this year to save seven ficus at University High School that were slated for removal because some roots are causing a parking lot to buckle. They circulated petitions, found an arborist to weigh in on behalf of the trees and floated an alternative plan to address school officials’ concerns.
“The world is getting covered up with concrete,” said math teacher Terri Gray, who led the campaign to save the trees she has watched flourish since she began teaching at the school in 1970. “Remember that Joni Mitchell song?
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” sang Gray, recounting lyrics to “Big Yellow Taxi.” “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum. And they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘em.”
In a move that has both surprised and delighted the trees’ supporters, Los Angeles Unified School District officials have shelved -- at least for now -- plans to remove the trees. Taking a cue from Gray, the district is planning to trim some of the trees’ roots and install rubber sidewalks, which will make it easier to trim them later if need be.
New to the Cause
“They’ve made a tree hugger out of me,” said Geoffrey Smith, local district facilities director for the district. “We’re going to try an experiment.”
But not all tree disputes end so amicably, and some public officials say only traffic complaints generate more phone calls than problems about trees.
“We get a call about a tree every day,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who helped mediate the Brentwood ficus fracas. “It’s everything from a tree needs a trimming to, when it finally gets trimmed, people don’t like how it was trimmed.”
Miscikowski, a seasoned political aide turned politician, possesses a knowledge of trees that is more than bark-deep.
She can chat about the latest in street-tree planting techniques as easily as she can recount the damage done by the redgum lerp psyllids, pesky bugs that attack eucalyptus trees. Tree removals, according to Miscikowski, seem to prompt “the most public participation.”
“It definitely is one of the more highly engaged issues that people get involved in,” she said.
That the city, which is home to about 680,000 street trees, lacked a sidewalk repair program for more than 30 years has not helped matters.
More than 4,300 miles of sidewalk are in need of repair and a modest repair effort was launched just three years ago. So far, repairing 225 miles of sidewalk has led to the removal of 675 trees. The city has planted 2,700 new ones in their place.
But these are often saplings. They don’t command the same awe and affection as, say, the huge Lang Oak of Encino, which fell in a powerful El Nino storm in 1998. Experts estimated it to be 1,000 years old.
The Lang Oak was unarguably the grandest living reminder of a community whose name was derived from Valle de Los Encinos -- Valley of the Oaks. It’s the title that a Spanish expedition led by explorer Gaspar de Portola, who crossed the Sepulveda Pass in 1769, bestowed on the once oak-laden area.
“Without our tree, those of us who have lived here for some time are most unhappy,” resident Paula Molino said as her eyes welled with tears a few days after the Lang Oak fell. “We have lost our best friend.”
