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GREEN

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If my articles start to seem somewhat deficient, it is all Brent’s fault. Really. I will need to be spending more time with GREEN; Greening Residential Environments Empowering Neighborhoods. It is a much more important project than what I am doing because it involves planting more street trees and trees in public places in Los Angeles, maintaining trees of the urban forest, and enforcement of tree preservation ordinances within Los Angeles. Brent has been very active with GREEN since we were in school, and it has really make a big difference in the parts of Los Angeles that have benefited from it.

I will need to be writing for the website and other social media outlets for GREEN, and consulting with others doing the same. To make matters more confusing, I will be working on yet ANOTHER projects later in January as well, but I can explain that a bit later.

When I started my writing here, it was initially intended as an outlet for my weekly gardening column. After a while I started recycling articles from last year as well. The space in between is filled in with my ‘elaborations’, which are supposed to be related to horticulture, but are sometimes about other funny but unrelated topics.

I hope to continue in such a manner than no one notices that I am also working on other projects. In fact, I believe that the other projects might be interesting topics here, which means that the different projects may actually compliment each other. We will find out as we go along. I will post updates about GREEN, which will soon be known as something else. I am sorry that the Facebook Page for GREEN has been deleted while we develop a new one. Otherwise, I would post a link to it.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 7 Comments

Well, Well, Well!

P80106+Right next door to my downtown planter box, ( https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/my-tiny-downtown-garden/ ) just to the east on Nicholson Avenue, there is a tree well for a small London plane street tree that has not grown much in the past few years since it was installed. The poor tree is in a difficult situation. It probably does not mind getting bumped with car doors every once in a while, but bicycles getting chained to it have been abrasive to the bark of the main trunk. The location next to a Mike’s Bikes does not help. The staff at Mike’s Bikes has had limited success with promoting the use of a nearby bicycle rack instead, by displaying their own bicycles next to the tree.

The tree well collects a bit of trash that gets blown about by the wind. Weeds are sometimes able to grow up through the mulch of detritus. No one wants to pull the weeds or collect the trash because dogs do what dogs do on street trees. The crew that comes by to water young street trees through spring and summer occasionally stops to pull weeds and remove trash. As the tree eventually grows, they will cut more rings out of the grate to accommodate the expanding trunk. For now, the grate is only a few inches away from the trunk and the stake.

My planter box next door generates quite a bit of biomass. Some of it gets shared with neighboring planter boxes. The big houseleeks have really gotten around town. Two large specimens were installed into a pair of urns that flanked the front door of Mike’s Bikes, although only one remains. The nasturtiums that get so impressive through winter and into spring are even more prolific and generous with their seed. Cuttings of other minor succulents have been shared as well.

The tree well was a bit too vacant. We all know that the Public Works Crews take care of it, and no one want to tamper with that. Well, maybe. You know, houseleek and nasturtium can be so prolific. Nasturtium will drop their seed anywhere, and some unavoidably found their way into the tree well, where they grow right around the trunk. They do not go much farther without getting trampled back into bounds. A big cutting of houseleek seemed like it would be a good companion to the nasturtium, and adds a bit more substance. It grew like a weed last year before getting roasted and broken over summer. It is making a comeback now, with nasturtium seedlings appearing around the base. The Public Works Crews do not seem to mind them. Both the houseleek and the nasturtiums inhibit weed growth, and neither mind what dogs do to them. Well, well, well, the tree well gets a happy ending.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 2 Comments

Scofield Tree Update

P71212+KThe sad little Scofield Tree in Felton Covered Bridge Park did not do much this year. (https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/135014809/posts/322 and https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/felton-covered-bridge/) In fact, it grew only about five inches taller, so is now only about four feet tall. The damage from the weed whacker really set it back. Growth was healthy on the side shoots, but that growth will need to be tucked back to promote apical dominance. The good news is that the vigor and health of the foliage of the sideshoots indicated that root dispersion was likely adequate to sustain healthier and normal vigorous growth next year.

Although the sideshoots will get tucked back to limit their competition with vertical growth of the main trunk, the stubble will remain to promote caliper growth of the trunk.

The trunk will be bound like a tree in a nursery; and the bound trunk will be staked for stability. Binding outside of a production nursery may not seem to be horticulturally correct, but is necessary for a straight trunk. The staking is done more to protect the tree in such a high traffic area than to support the tree. It would be better for the tree to do without binding and staking so that it can learn to support its own weight. Once the straight section of trunk is taller than about six feet, the bindings will be loosened, and eventually eliminated as the trunk lignifies into form.

A bit of fertilizer will be added to the soil around the tree before the last rains of winter. This might seem like cheating, bur for right now, the tree is too small to be safe in such a high traffic area. It will also be irrigated occasionally after the rain stops. It does not get much water, but will get enough to keep it vascularly active through the growing season. Too much water promotes shallower roots, which might damage the nearby concrete curbs and asphalt pavement. Valley oaks naturally disperse their roots very deeply, so the curbs and pavement should be quite safe for a century or so.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 9 Comments

Red Flowering Gum

61123We all know about the bad reputation of eucalypti, especially the notorious blue gum. They are too big, too aggressive, too messy, too structurally deficient, and in groups, they are too combustible. However, there are several eucalypti that are not only appropriate for local home gardens, but because of their resiliency, drought tolerance and adaptability to the local environment, should be more popular than they are.

Red flowering gum, Eucalyptus ficifolia (which is now known as Corymbia ficifolia), rarely gets more than thirty feet tall and broad, with a stout branch structure. It is a good street tree because the roots are usually deep and complaisant. Constantly falling leaves and seed capsules are somewhat messy, but the mess is proportionate to the compact canopy, and is probably worth the spectacular summer and autumn bloom.

Fuzzy trusses of staminate flowers are usually some shade of red, but might be pink, salmon, reddish orange or pale white. Trees must be a few years old to bloom, so color might be a surprise when young trees bloom for the first time. Profusion of bloom can be variable from year to year, or from one portion of the canopy to another. Tree size and form are also variable. Some are vigorous while others are more compact.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 7 Comments

GREEN

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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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Cork Oak

71115Like redwoods, the cork oak, Quercus suber, is a ‘pyrophyte’, which means that it survives forest fires that burn off competing vegetation. The trunks and main limbs are insulated with a very thick bark. Only the foliage and smaller stems burn off. After a fire, the upper limbs of cork oak regenerate new foliage while other less fortunate plants start over from their roots or seed at ground level.

The thick bark is really what cork oak is grown for. It is used for corks, gaskets, flooring, notice boards, cricket ball cores and too many other products to list. It is also quite handsome on the stout trunks and limbs of landscape trees. If only the acorns were not so messy, cork oak would be a nice drought tolerant street tree with complaisant roots. The hazy evergreen leaves are about two inches long. Old trees eventually get almost fifty feet tall.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 4 Comments

Big Tree In A Small Town

P71005Trees get planted all the time. Apparently, nature does not do the job adequately. Trees get put into specific locations to provide shade, produce fruit, enhance a landscape, obscure a view, or for any of a vast number of reasons. It is amazing that they are as accommodating as they are. It is rather presumptuous for us to think that they actually want to live with us in our synthetic environments as much as we want to live with them.

The coastal redwood is the tallest tree in the world. It can live for thousands of years. An individual tree can produce enough lumber to build a small house. It is no wonder that they are so impressive to anyone who sees one for the first time.

Many towns within the natural range of the coastal redwood were established for the redwood lumber industry. Felton, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, is one of those towns. George Featherstone of Ottawa came to Felton in 1888, and was so impressed with the coastal redwood trees, that he planted one in the middle of town only a few years after his arrival. This tree was only a teenager when redwood harvesting increased to supply lumber to rebuild San Francisco after the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, and then to develop the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area.

More than a century later, the Featherstone Tree is still here, and is the biggest thing in the small downtown. The Community Deck was built around it by volunteers from the Community many years ago. It is not as tall as trees in the forest are, but only because it does not need to compete with them. It is shorter and stouter, and really seems to enjoy being the center of town. It is quite the celebrity.

Mr. Featherstone had no idea of how important the tree he planted would become. It would be nice if we all could do such nice things for our communities, but then the world would be much too shady.

P71005+(‘ninties’ means the 1890s.) This Redwood Tree was planted in the early ninties by one of Felton’s early settlers, George Featherstone, a man who knew the wonder and beauty of these trees. Born in Ottawa, Canada in 1872, he came to the San Lorenzo Valley on March 17, 1888. He died on September 27, 1947.

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California Sycamore

70913No other big tree has trunks as sculptural as those of the California sycamore, Platanus racemosa. They bend and groove so irregularly, seemingly without direction, that it is a wonder that old trees in the wild eventually get a hundred feet tall. Some trees have a few trunks. The mottled beige bark is quite striking both in the shade of the broad canopy, and while trees are bare in winter.

California sycamore is a surprisingly well behaved street tree, but only for a few decades or so. The roots are quite complaisant. The main problem is that the bulky trunk eventually gets wider than the parkstrip. Another problem is that such a big tree drops a huge volume of foliage in autumn, and then again in spring as anthracnose ruins much of the new foliage. The big palmate leaves are about eight inches wide, and covered with tomentum (fuzz) that is irritating to the skin.

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Street Wise About Street Trees

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There is no such thing as a perfect tree. All trees have foliage that one way or another, eventually falls to the ground. All trees have roots that might try to displace something that gets in their way. Many trees are messy in bloom. Some make messy fruit. Except for palms, all trees have branches that can be broken by wind. Just about any tree can be blown over if the wind is strong enough.

This is why the selection of trees that are appropriate to each particular application is so important. Finding trees that provide enough shade, obscure an unwanted view, or perform any specific function is one thing. Finding trees that behave while performing their assigned tasks is something else. There are always compromises. A certain degree of bad behavior will likely be tolerated.

Street trees for a parkstrip between the curb and sidewalk can be the most challenging trees to select. There are so many variables to consider. Many neighborhoods have saved us the trouble of selection by prescribing a specific tree, or maybe limiting the choices to only a few species, whether or not they are actually appropriate. Otherwise, we are on our own, to select whatever we like.

Microtrees might seem like good choices. They do not get big enough to damage a sidewalk, or make much mess. These are trees like crape myrtle, purple leaf plum and photinia (in tree form). These trees can be proportionate to narrow streets, but really do not shade much more than a single parking space. Because they are so low, they need serious pruning for adequate clearance.

Mid-sized and bigger trees like Chinese pistache, honeylocust maidenhair tree and some of the modern hybrid elms certainly cause more problems, but might be worth the bother. They shade curbside parking and part of the front yard nicely. Like small trees, they need to be pruned for clearance, especially over the roadway, but they eventually grow up high enough to be out of the way.

It seems that trees that exhibit some of the better characteristics for street trees are deficient in other ways. Australian willow has very complaisant roots, and is very resilient, but also branches low, and is not much to look at. Fern pine and several oaks are excellent street trees for decades, but eventually get big. Root barriers will delay, but not prevent roots from damaging sidewalks.