GREEN – Tony Tomeo

p90120 p90120+ It seems that I have been negligent about writing about my colleague Brent Green and some of our crazy adventures in horticulture. I said I would do so when I started writing my articles here way back two Septembers ago. It is easy to get distracted from such topics, particularly since we do such different types of work. Brent is a renowned landscape designer and proprietor of GreenArt Landscape Design in Southern California. I am just a horticulturist and arborist who really should get back to growing horticultural commodities in Northern California. For all of our similarities, there just might be as many differences.

After posting that old video of the Birthday Trees yesterday https://tonytomeo.com/2019/01/19/birthday-trees/, I thought that I should also write more about what Brent does for the urban Forest of Los Angeles, which is probably more interesting than our crazy adventures. I really want to find the old news article about how he busted tree rustlers who were stealing mature Canary Island palms from the embankments of the Santa Monica Freeway, which is pictured above. It is still a sore subject because we know that it continues, and that the trees that were stolen were not returned as promised.

I could write a separate blog about the work that GreenArt does if I were more involved with it. I just do not enjoy design like Brent does. Actually, I am no good at it. I just work with the horticultural aspects of it, and growing material for it. In the future, I will probably be more involved with projects that are not directly affiliated with GreenArt, such as initiatives to maintain and protect trees in public spaces of Los Angeles.

For now I have only this brief and outdated video of the landscaping of Brent’s home, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2IwcuU3KEo .

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GREEN – Greening Residential Environments Empowering Neighborhoods – allocates resources, procured from both municipal funding and private donations, to the installation, maintenance and protection of trees in public spaces within the collective urban forest of Los Angeles, and to the enforcement of environmental justice.

How is that for a mission statement?

It is no coincidence that GREEN is also Brent’s last name. He is quite vain. Really though, it works.

Brent has been planting street trees since we were in school in the 1980s, and did his first big project of thirty trees in the median of San Vicente Boulevard on his thirtieth birthday in 1998. This January, twenty years later, he will be planting fifty more trees.

Here and there, I will be writing more articles about these projects. They are too involved to write just one article about. For now, I would like to mention the Facebook page for GREEN, at https://www.facebook.com/GREEN-1518459741733375/. I am sorry that I can not devote more attention to it. I really should be writing more articles about what GREEN does.

There is more to it than just planting. Trees also require staking. Street trees need pruning for clearance above the roadways that they shade. Some trees needed to be injected with systemic insecticide for homopteran insect infestation. When mature Canary Island date palms were being stolen from the embankment of the Santa Monica Freeway and sold into other neighborhoods, GREEN was there to stop it, and to get at least one of the trees returned (although the neighborhood is still waiting for other reparations). GREEN has organized neighborhood clean-ups and graffiti abatement.

GREEN is in Los Angeles, but could be duplicated in other municipalities that could use more trees, or that already have trees that need maintenance. So many trees in America have tree preservation ordinances, but some of the biggest cities need to enforce their ordinances more diligently.

If you continue to read my blog, you will be reading more about GREEN. Again, the Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/GREEN-1518459741733375/

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