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Plants

Here Today. Gone Tomorrow?

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George Haas is the author and photographer of "Forcing Nature: Trees in Los Angeles," released by Bunker Hill Publishing.

The way we look at Los Angeles has changed, even if the effect is not yet visible. Maybe you noticed the City Council banned the palm tree. There was a three-day ruckus immediately following over the effect on the skyline, but then a craftily worded press release clarified the nature of the ban and laid the uproar to rest. I am paraphrasing here, “Los Angeles, you’ve misunderstood, you can still plant all the palm trees you want, we’re just not going to plant the Mexican fan palm anymore.”

It was Morse code for our civic leaders counting on the average Angeleno not knowing one palm tree from another. And that they wouldn’t understand that the Great Palm Corridors, which for so long have defined the image of Los Angeles to us and to the outside world, were a citywide project. Planted ahead of the ’32 Olympics (where they were sure to get a lot of press), they were an icon, a beacon, a For Sale sign to all of the American Dream seekers. Here is your tropical paradise somewhere (no one was going to buy into a desert nowhere). They’re counting on us not comprehending that there is no present-day individual or group of individuals who could create or maintain such a monument to our self-invention.

I ask you, do you think the outrage would have continued if everyone understood that the Mexican fan palm is the tall one that makes up all the Great Palm Corridors?

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I stop to look at a corridor of camphor trees in Montebello. Great, massive trunks with tortoiseshell bark, roots snaking everywhere, lining both sides of the street for two blocks. A woman rakes the leaves in her frontyard. I walk over to see if I can pick up a little history.

“These camphors are amazing,” I offer as an icebreaker. I am feeling confident, I usually get points for knowing Los Angeles’ earlier attempt at shade.

“I hate these trees,” she snaps back.

“Oh,” I soothe.

“All day long, all they do is dump, dump, dump, and I have to be out here raking.”

“Really?”

“The sun never gets through. You could kill yourself bringin’ in the groceries.”

“I see what you mean,” I say as I look down the block. There is no grass along the parkway or in the frontyards of any of the houses, the sidewalks are a series of peaks and valleys, and there is a constant, yet almost reassuring, flutter of falling leaves.

“How long have they been here?”

“I dunno. At least since I been here.” She tells me how her grandparents bought the place for $16,000 with GI benefits after the Big War. How she grew up here and never lived anywhere else. How her mother got the house after her grandmother passed. How she got it the same way.

I say, “You could always get mow, blow and go.”

She says, “You know what I can do with fifty bucks a month?”

I can remember a time in my life when fifty bucks would make or break my month. I enjoy that for a moment, then get caught up in the memory of a Chinese elm corridor in San Gabriel (some people call them “silver bark” elms), all twisty and marvelous, a product of no hard freeze and the seasonal cutbacks.

A woman waters her rose bushes. “Aren’t they something,” I say, nodding in the direction of the trees.

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“Messy though.” She looks around her neighborhood of mid-20th century single-story California ranch houses. “I wonder if they’ll keep them, you know all these homes around here are teardowns, they’re putting up these,” she points down the block to a brand-new two-story stucco Mediterranean built out to the setbacks.

“McMansions,” I say like everyone else would.

“They don’t seem to like having to keep up with the gardening.”

I look and sure enough, the front, back and side yards are all wall-to-wall concrete. The elms are missing from out front. What comes out of my mouth is, “Where do people get all that money?”

“No way to know, but they sure have it.” She tells me that her neighbor-down-the-street’s daughter works as a flight attendant on Tom Cruise’s private jet, which he apparently leases out when he is not using it, and could I guess how much it costs to fly from here to Hawaii?

What do I know. “Fifteen thousand” sounds like enough to me.

“One hundred thousand, one way,” she beams, almost as if she were getting that money.

“That’s not the worst part.”

The woman with the rake brings me back to Montebello.

“The city won’t let you cut them down. They won’t even let you prune them, and do they prune them? What do you think?”

I look up at the spreading branches she is pointing to, and to be honest, it does not look as if they’ve been touched in years. What I say is, “What price happiness? For fifty bucks a month, you’d never have to rake another leaf.”

She mulls over the prospects of happiness. “I liked it better when you could burn the leaves.”

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Precisely what effect a change will have is hard to predict. Maybe you noticed on the front page the other day, a group of scientists predicted that global warming has caused the entire southwestern portion of the United States to enter an era of permanent drought. The result: major water shortages in the urban areas and mass extinctions everywhere else (not us humans, mind you, just every other living thing). One day after that, a different group of scientists complained that their cataclysmic predictions had been so softened in a government report as to render them worthless.

One thing is for sure though, in a household where fifty bucks makes or breaks the bank, if the water bill climbs up past the gas and electric (as they did in Las Vegas), that household will not be watering. This part is straightforward. If you do not water a plant that needs watering, that plant will die. The city’s economic divide will show itself in living color, green in the areas where the residents have the green, and the many shades of dusty desert ochre in the areas where they do not.

So maybe the change to native species of live oak and sycamore, to trees that can grow here without watering, is not an unwanted change to the identity of Los Angeles. Maybe the loss of our tropical fantasy somewhere is not the return to the desert nowhere it once might have been. Los Angeles already is a wonderful place to live (maybe you noticed). Maybe it is the realization, put into action, that there is not enough water to go on living the way we have.

What better way, then, to begin anew than the Million Trees LA initiative? We should all get out there and plant a couple ourselves. Make sure they grow up right. (That way we’ll have something to look at outside our windows.)

Oh, but I do love the Great Mexican Fan Palm Corridors, and if they can be saved, I think we should. Pick a few really good ones (what am I saying, as many as we can) and keep them going. Start the Historic Registry and Preservation of Trees Department. Maybe we can get the schoolkids involved. Throw a couple of tarps under the fronds as the seeds are falling. Sprout them in classrooms in Dixie cups with a little bit of soil. Give the nursery industry a tax break for donating their old pots. Let them grow until they are big enough, and then let each child plant their own. Nothing gets someone involved in Los Angeles so much as a little piece of her or his own real estate. After all, the concepts of shade trees and palm corridors are not mutually exclusive.

And if they cannot be saved, celebrate them while they last. Next time you are driving by, take in how really something they are. Then, when they are gone, you will be able to say with a wide-open heart, “Goodbye Mexican Fan Palm Corridors, goodbye L.A. icon, how I loved having you.”

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