Ailing eucalyptus tree outside Laguna’s Urth Caffe to come down after years of attempts to save it

It looks like an ailing 50-foot eucalyptus tree outside Urth Caffe in Laguna Beach is about to come down after more than three years of attempts to save it.

The City Council voted unanimously last week to remove the tree on city staff’s recommendation due to the tree’s high-risk classification for possible branch or trunk failure. A schedule for the removal hasn’t been set.

“I’ve been on the council while this first came to us in 2015 and I think we’ve done as much as we can do,” Mayor Bob Whalen said. “The tree’s clearly moving into more distress and more poor health.”

Whalen said the tree should be replaced with the largest specimen possible for the location, in the middle of a sidewalk along Aster Street near North Coast Highway.

The cafe initially made a removal request to the city in 2015, citing the tree’s declining health and the possible risk to the public if parts of it fell.

At the time, the council was considering a tree removal policy that eventually required a thorough vetting of a tree’s health, such as an arborist’s analysis and an onsite meeting to gather public input.

Changes to simplify the policy were made this year.

Arborists in 2015 suggested the tree was at moderate to high risk of failure within three to 10 years and recommended its removal. The council directed staff in May 2016 to develop an action plan to try to preserve the tree.

That included injection of the insecticide imidacloprid into the tree to combat lerp psyllids, a type of insect that sucks nutrients from leaves and causes them to shed.

The city also installed a bulb-out, curb paint and street striping to prevent cars from hitting the tree, removed extra soil from the base of the tree to allow for more oxygen and deferred trimming the tree.

A staff report prepared for last week’s meeting said the actions helped improve the tree’s health, which remained fairly stable for two years.

However, “over the last year, we started to notice the tree condition was actually declining and we noticed there were severe die-backs throughout the tree’s canopy and about 50% to 60% of the foliage appears to be dead or dying,” according to Public Works Director Shohreh Dupuis.

The city reached out to Monarch Environmental to examine the tree, and it was subsequently classified as high-risk based on its poor health, structure, internal decay and possible consequences of its failure.

“The discovery of additional missing vascular tissue on the tension side of the trunk has me more concerned about the tree’s stability than ever,” Evin Lambert, an arborist for Monarch Environmental, said in a recent letter to the city.

Lambert said last week that mitigation options are still available but that they could significantly impact and kill the tree.

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