[ Lost in the Landscape ]

keeping your dead tree healthy

There’s this dead tree out­side my week­day office. A crew has been work­ing on it for the last two weeks.

It’s one of three very dead trees that make up an 1986 instal­la­tion by Terry Allen. Set in an area of the UCSD cam­pus that’s seen many of the cam­pus’ sig­na­ture euca­lyp­tus cut down to make way for build­ings, they’re in part sup­posed to embody trees that were lost to the chain­saw of progress. The writeup at the Stu­art Col­lec­tion web­site has lots of things to say about the project, includ­ing: “Although they osten­si­bly rep­re­sent dis­place­ment or loss, these trees offer a kind of com­pen­sa­tion: one emits a series of recorded songs and the other a lively sequence of poems and sto­ries cre­ated and arranged specif­i­cally for this project.”

Yes. Two of the artist’s trees make noise. Loud, annoy­ing noise. So in effect this artists has taken a tree–something that to me rep­re­sents the pos­si­bil­ity of the quiet that you find in a grove–and replaces it with devices with speak­ers in them that pol­lute the thin grove with poetry and loud music. By ban­ish­ing what’s left of the quiet it’s the aural equiv­a­lent of clearcut­ting what’s left of the trees. You call that compensation?

I do not love this work.

The trees in the project started out their lives in the adja­cent groves but were removed. They were then dis­sem­bled and soaked in wood preser­v­a­tive. Once thor­oughly embalmed, the trees were reassem­bled and sheets of lead nailed all over their outer sur­faces. Over the course of 25 years the one mute tree–the one with the scis­sor lift next to it in the first phot above–developed the sort of white and yel­low oxi­da­tion that lead can acquire over time. Oxi­dized lead makes up the artist’s pig­ment lead yel­low, and sul­fides of lead can turn the lead white.

I guess the nat­ural processes went against the artist’s inten­tions of hav­ing a dark ghost of a tree the color of raw lead. The two work­ers have been pound­ing and clean­ing and maybe even replac­ing some of the lead plat­ing. The tree is start­ing to look really dead again.

My final thoughts? I don’t think this artist really gets nature. Nat­ural processes are being denied. And now, you can’t hear the for­est for the trees.

July 24 2011 | Categories: art • landscape • places | Tags: natural cycles • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 15 Comments »

one way to photograph a tree

Pho­tograph­ing a tree can present some chal­lenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best light­ing con­di­tions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the back­ground behind the tree may be an unsightly or incom­pre­hen­si­ble mess.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Last year I ran across the work of Korean pho­tog­ra­pher Myoung-Ho Lee, whose pho­tos of trees present an elegant–and spec­tac­u­larly not prac­ti­cal–solu­tion to this prob­lem of back­ground. He just brings a plain back­ground with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you fig­ure that the trees in the pho­tos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the back­ground sheet has to be.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Some of the pho­tos have just the tree iso­lated against the plain back­ground. Oth­ers show the tree and back­ground in the larger con­text of the land­scape where the tree is growing.

The results are pretty amaz­ing, and cre­ate pho­tos that are rich with sug­ges­tion and ideas about photography.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

You might be dri­ven to think about the fact that to pho­to­graph some­thing in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of select­ing the tree isn’t really dig­ging the thing up from nature, it’s still bring­ing some­thing from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography–and much of art–is find­ing some­thing inter­est­ing inter­est­ing in the world and bring­ing it into a gallery.

You also might think that look­ing at a pho­to­graph of some­thing might tell you some­thing about how the thing in the photo looks, but very lit­tle about its con­text or meaning.

And you might even think of Mar­cel Duchamp dis­play­ing a signed uri­nal in an exhi­bi­tion, with the basic premise that if an artist calls some­thing art, it’s art.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will prob­a­bly have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, how­ever, that these are some of the more strik­ing pho­tographs of trees that have ever been taken.

July 07 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Myoung-Ho Lee • trees | 12 Comments »

green immigrants

Here are a few more selec­tions that you might find inter­est­ing from Amer­i­can Per­cep­tions of Immi­grant and Inva­sive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, pub­lished in 2006.

Before Colum­bus brought seeds and cut­tings along on his sec­ond voy­age to the West Indies, North Amer­ica was home to less than 1 per­cent of the world’s total com­ple­ment of cere­als, starches, fruits, and vegetables.

Today, the only crops of sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial value native to the ter­ri­tory that became the United States are cran­berry, blue­berry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sun­flower, and tobacco–a fact that offers elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the great ser­vice that has been duly ren­dered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…

No Amer­i­can pub­lic ser­vant since [Thomas] Jef­fer­son deserves more credit for trans­form­ing the for­eign into the com­mon than David G. Fairchild. In his capac­ity as agri­cul­tural explorer in charge at the Sec­tion for For­eign Seed and Plant Intro­duc­tion from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and Cal­i­for­nia from Brazil and over­saw the intro­duc­tion of Italy’s seed­less grape and China’s dry land pis­ta­chio. His most notable con­tri­bu­tions, how­ever, were in the intro­duc­tion of the Chi­nese soy­bean and…the tree that became an essen­tial prop of Wash­ing­ton, D.C.‘s mon­u­men­tal land­scape, adorn­ing the Tidal Basin: the Japan­ese flow­er­ing cherry tree.

Fairchild’s encoun­ters with the infa­mous vine that “ate the South”…left him some­what chas­tened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while tour­ing Japan, where this wild, semi­woody peren­nial was fed to live­stock. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthu­si­ast” in Chip­ley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a for­age crop in the early 1900s, despite his neigh­bors’ dis­trust. “When­ever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pio­neer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a spe­cial feel­ing of pride in what might be called our Amer­i­can will­ing­ness to try some­thing new, whether it be a new for­age crop, a new food, or any one of a thou­sand new, machine-made gad­gets.” Fairchild, who con­fessed that “per­haps I have an undue pas­sion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its pro­cliv­ity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, how­ever he was express­ing his grow­ing reser­va­tions in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his prop­erty in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smoth­er­ing every­thing they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feel­ing that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”

Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selec­tion for the “My Favorite Tree” guest col­umn in the jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Forestry Asso­ci­a­tion (the nation’s old­est con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tion, founded in 1875). After men­tion­ing a string of exotic also-rans, but dis­card­ing them as unsat­is­fac­tory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of Cal­i­for­nia coastal red­woods (Sequoia sem­per­virens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besot­ted with exotic Asi­atic promise: “A feel­ing of utter paral­y­sis over­took me and the pas­sion for plant­ing trees, my puny lit­tle trees, any­where, became distasteful.”

The sto­ries in the book are great, and the social com­men­tary is com­pelling. Unfor­tu­nately, every now and then a botan­i­cal clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that fol­lows the quote on red­woods imme­di­ately above, where the author waxes, “Though the red­wood is only really found in Cal­i­for­nia (there is a tiny patch in the most south­west­erly cor­ner of Ore­gon), it is arguably more Amer­i­can than any other tree in the United States inso­far as it has no rel­a­tives, near or dis­tant, in any other coun­try.” Like, um, what about the Chi­nese dawn red­wood (Metase­quoia glyp­tostroboides)?

Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a wor­thy and thought­ful work on plants and the human con­di­tion, per­fect for late win­ter read­ing as you con­tem­plate the impend­ing bloom­ing of your cherry trees.

Although it’s pri­mar­ily about bio­log­i­cal immi­grants to North Amer­ica, Peter Coates points occa­sion­ally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:

The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a lead­ing British hor­ti­cul­tur­ist of the mid-nineteenth cen­tury. He pro­nounced them “the most beau­ti­ful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a manda­tory ingre­di­ent of the “polite” British land­scape enclosed within pri­vate estates. Loudon him­self was one of the trend­set­ters who insisted that, notwith­stand­ing the oak’s charms, “no res­i­dence in the mod­ern style can have a claim to be con­sid­ered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either for­eign ones, or improved vari­eties of indige­nous ones.

The most sought-after of these arbo­real exotics were hardy North Amer­i­cans. Britons were ruth­lessly con­de­scend­ing toward Amer­i­can artis­tic achieve­ments at this time. “In the four quar­ters of the globe,” Syd­ney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an Amer­i­can book?” or goes to an Amer­i­can play” or looks at an Amer­i­can pic­ture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an Amer­i­can tree?”

February 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • quotes | Tags: Add new tag • agriculture • books • David G. Fairchild • exotics • invasive plants • kudzu • native plants • Peter Coates • trees | 3 Comments »

deciding on a small tree

The record heat in Octo­ber and Novem­ber finally did in the Aus­tralian tree fern that I’d been nurs­ing. The plant grows in full sun in its native envi­ron­ment, and was sup­posed to be able to sur­vive full sun in coastal Cal­i­for­nia. But two months of the hottest and dri­est weather this past year took care of what lit­tle will to live the plant had left.

The fern served as a focal point in the gar­den, and its pass­ing left a big void and a sad stick of dead trunk. It doesn’t help that the neighbor’s bas­ket­ball back­board lines up almost per­fectly with the dead trunk.

We toyed briefly with train­ing a small vine up the dead trunk, cel­e­brat­ing life and death and renewal and all that, but we couldn’t think of some­thing that would look great as the main focal point of the space. So we were faced with com­ing up with a suit­able replacement.

We started with some basic requirements:

• The tree should max out in the 12–20 foot range and be not too broad–There’s a young tan­ger­ine tree nearby that we wouldn’t want to shade.
• Some plants imme­di­ately nearby would appre­ci­ate some shade, but oth­ers are quite happy with close to full sun; a tree that could be trained to have an open branch struc­ture would work well.
• Some­thing with a grace­ful nat­ural form would be terrific–no big green popsicle-looking shade trees, please.
• The plant should be pretty easy to find locally, and couldn’t cost too much.
• This being drought-prone Cal­i­for­nia, a tree that would be able to get by with much lower water require­ments than orig­i­nal the tree fern would be a must.
• The “look” of the tree would have to com­ple­ment Mediter­ranean, trop­i­cal or just plain odd-looking plants.
• Though not an absolute require­ment, a native plant would be nice.

The short list came down to four trees or large shrubs.

Ginkgo biloba
Pros: Both John and I have always loved gink­gos, par­tic­u­larly their dis­tinc­tive foliage and incen­di­ary yel­low autumn col­oration. And their his­tory of being a liv­ing fos­sil is cool. There are strains that range from lit­tle round shrubs to mas­sive shade trees, with a cou­ple options in the 12–20 foot range that could be trained with mul­ti­ple trunks. Though not desert plants, they can make do with fairly low amounts of water.

Cons: Avail­abil­ity, mostly. Local sources carry the itty bitty bonsai-friendly sub­jects or the big shade trees, noth­ing in between. The tree grows really slowly, so get­ting a spec­i­men of the small vari­eties would be a chal­lenge. The final look of the plant, too, might not be per­fect for the location.

Black pep­per­mint wil­low (a.k.a. Aus­tralian myr­tle wil­low), Ago­nis flex­u­osa ‘Jervis Bay After­dark’
Pros: Strik­ing dark dark dark pur­ple (almost black) leaves, and a neat weep­ing habit. The bark is shaggy and attrac­tive. Rapid growth to its tar­get size. Drought tolerant.

Cons: The plant seems to develop a dense shade-tree look as it matures–maybe too dense for the spot. The lit­er­a­ture says this form only gets to six­teen feet or so, but it’s only been around for a decade. Call me dis­trust­ful, but I’m just sus­pi­cious that it could be more main­te­nance than I want to sign up for to keep it small. Mature trunks seem large in scale to the plant. There’s a bam­boo nearby, and it might be just too much wispy, wil­lowy foliage.

[ Image from Metro Trees ]

Crape myr­tle, Lager­stroemia x fau­riei
Pros:Sev­eral clones are avail­able locally in boxed spec­i­men size for not too much money–instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion! Gor­geous sum­mer­time flow­ers. Inter­est­ing exfo­li­at­ing bark. The fau­riei hybrids resist mildew bet­ter than the pure species.

Cons: Their col­ors would look really sim­i­lar to a pair of nearby bougainvil­leas. The rigid forms of the trees would def­i­nitely pull the gar­den in a for­mal Mediter­ranean direction.

Dr. Hurd man­zanita, Arc­tostaphylos x ‘Dr. Hurd’
Pros: Per­fect even­tual size (ca. 15 feet). Fairly fast-growing for a man­zanita (though no speed demon). Dra­matic red-brown stems with large light green leaves. Drought-tolerant, but also more tol­er­ant of gar­den water than most man­zan­i­tas. Flow­ers in the winter.

Cons: Spo­radic avail­abil­ity locally, and pos­si­bly only in small sizes. I’m wor­ried that the spot might be just a lit­tle over-wet for even this manzanita.

[ Image from San Mar­cos Grow­ers, who grew my plant ]

So what was the deci­sion? I put a five-gallon man­zanita on order and it hit the nurs­ery a few days later. It’s more of a Char­lie Brown shrub at this point and will take some patience and a few years to get to its final size. If it sur­vives the amount of water it gets, if it attains the size I want, if it behaves well with its neigh­bors, it could be the per­fect plant for this loca­tion. Check back in five years and I’ll tell you how it’s worked out…

Coin­ci­den­tally Saturday’s Los Ange­les Times had a whole page spread on man­zan­i­tas a full eight days after I put mine in the ground. I felt so much ahead of the Times…

February 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Agonis flexuosa • Arctostaphylos x Dr. Hurd • crape myrtles • Ginkgo biloba • Lagerstroemia x fauriei • manzanitas • trees | 9 Comments »

treefall

I was head­ing back to my desk at work on Thurs­day and noticed a clus­ter of my cowork­ers look­ing out a win­dow. There’s a lit­tle access road right out­side. Usu­ally it doesn’t have a full-grown euca­lyp­tus tree fallen across it, but this day it did.

I don’t have my cam­era with me most of the time, but Declan had his. He was part of the vol­un­teer crew who wres­tled the tree to the curb, but he also man­aged take these shots.

[ View the entire set on Flikr ]

Not much later the building’s safety per­son had issued a warning:

Just a heads-up, lit­er­ally: high winds are blow­ing down euca­lyp­tus branches and trees around cam­pus. About an hour ago, an entire tree broke off and fell across the access road… (Very for­tu­nately, no peo­ple or vehi­cles were in its path.) Until the winds die down, please be sure to watch and lis­ten for break­ing branches and avoid walk­ing through the euca­lyp­tus groves.

The UCSD cam­pus is home to over 200 thou­sand of these trees in plant­i­ngs that date back a hun­dred years, back to a euca­lyp­tus mania when euca­lyp­tus were planted all over South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, includ­ing three mil­lion just a few miles up the coast in what’s now Ran­cho Santa Fe.

If you live in this part of the state you’ve prob­a­bly heard the sto­ries: that the trees are call wid­ow­mak­ers because they drop their branches if you look at them wrong, that they’re just giant non-native weeds that take up valu­able space…bad things like that.

I won­der if the bad rap on the first count is entirely deserved. For sure, some euca­lyp­tus are brit­tle, and there have been three times in the last year alone when I was within fifty feet or thirty sec­onds of being taken out by falling euca­lyp­tus. But with almost a quar­ter mil­lion of them on cam­pus and mil­lions of them in town it’s inevitable that a few of them keel over or fall apart. Are they that much worse than oaks or other trees that peo­ple plant by the millions?

I did a quick and totally infor­mal sur­vey of some head­lines, euca­lyp­tus ver­sus oaks. Maybe the eucs are totally bad news. May they’re not that much worse than other species. What­ever the case, they def­i­nitely can be gor­geous trees.

Shad­ows cast over tow­er­ing euca­lyp­tuses (Euca­lyp­turs kills woman in Old Town San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune–Jan­u­ary 8, 2003)

2 killed in ‘freak acci­dent’ : Falling oak crushes pickup on County Line Rd. (Oak tree, The Post and Courier (Charleston, N.C.)–April 16, 2008)

Tree check asked after acci­dent (Euca­lyp­tus kills woman in parked pickup truck, Evening Tri­bune (San Diego, CA)–December 25, 1987)

Man killed by falling tree (Oak tree falls onto pickup truck, News Sen­tinel, (Knoxville, TN) Decem­ber 28, 2008)

$160,000 awarded in Zoo death (Award given to fam­ily of girl killed by falling euca­lyp­tus, The San Diego Union–August 2, 1986)

Girl killed by falling tree at Boy Scout camp (Oak tree, Asso­ci­ated Press, via MSNBC–August 10, 2005)

Half of the inci­dents above involved pickup trucks. Weird. Maybe that’s the deadly com­bi­na­tion: pickup trucks and large trees. Like mobile homes and tornadoes…

January 31 2009 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • falling trees • oaks • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

talking trees

If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tues­day morn­ing I had my choice of places to view the tele­vised inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Work­ing as I do on the UCSD cam­pus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at cof­fee stands and indi­vid­ual lap­tops that were all play­ing the cer­e­monies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inau­gu­ra­tion broad­cast through the speak­ers of lead-plated euca­lyp­tus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stu­art Col­lec­tion.

Left: The tree in the instal­la­tion that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was con­structed from three euca­lyp­tus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new con­struc­tion. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preser­v­a­tive, reassem­bled, and then cov­ered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stu­art Collection’s descrip­tion offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove sev­eral times before notic­ing Allen’s two unob­tru­sive trees.  Not only do these trees rein­vest a nat­ural site with a lit­eral sense of magic but they implic­itly make con­nec­tions between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not sur­pris­ing that stu­dents have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geo­met­ric library the third tree of Allen’s instal­la­tion remains silent — per­haps another form of the tree of knowl­edge, per­haps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build build­ings, per­haps a dance form, or per­haps not­ing that one can acquire knowl­edge both through obser­va­tion of nature and through research.

Right: The tree in the instal­la­tion that recites poetry.

On Tues­day, the tree that ordi­nar­ily recites poetry and the one that typ­i­cally offers songs and music were ded­i­cated to an audio feed of the Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. The orga­niz­ers had high hopes, pre­dict­ing “hun­dreds of stu­dents” would show up for the event. But for the few min­utes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen peo­ple and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attend­ing with their own­ers, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, show­ing the nails hold­ing the lead plates, as well as the list of cred­its of the peo­ple who worked on the project.

Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The spe­cial pro­gram­ming wasn’t the eas­i­est sell that morn­ing. The inau­gu­ra­tion was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time pay­ing atten­tion the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talk­ing trees in a for­est weren’t enough to get peo­ple to stop.

January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

roadside flora

We’ve just returned from a cou­ple of days in L.A. The drive up and back isn’t one of the great scenic routes on earth, and for the most part it’s not par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing botanically.

The plant­i­ngs of trees along I-5 and the 405 over 150 miles mostly draw from tried and true Cal­i­for­nia plant sta­ples like palms and euca­lyp­tus, with stands of Ital­ian cypress and occa­sional pines con­cen­trated in the more res­i­den­tial areas. They’re attrac­tive enough and gen­er­ally drought-tolerant choices, but the rhythm of palm, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm, cypress, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm gets a lit­tle rep­e­ti­tious over the course of two and a half hours (if traf­fic is moving).

A new kind of tree has been appear­ing over the last half dozen years, how­ever. With the recent growth of cell phones, there’s been an explo­sion in how many cell tow­ers you see–More bars in more places trans­lates into more cell tow­ers in more places. The providers have occa­sion­ally tried to hide the tow­ers by try­ing to make them pass as trees–usually with pretty com­i­cal results.

To keep myself amused on the trip I shot a few pho­tos of road­side trees. See if you can spot the cell tow­ers in the grid below. (Answers are at the end of this post, but I don’t think you’ll need the answer key.)

Give up? The cell tow­ers are the far right in the top row (fake palm), the first in the third row (fake…er…what is that sup­posed to be? a red­wood? road­side in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia?) and far right in the third row (plain vanilla cell tower). At least the cell tower trees are drought-tolerant.

August 25 2008 | Categories: landscape design • places | Tags: cell phones • cell towers • drought-tolerant landscaping • Interstate 405 • Interstate 5 • Los Angeles • Orange County • roadside plantings • trees | 1 Comment »

shady deal

Few ideas are sim­pler: Plant a tree. Shade your house. Reduce your cool­ing expenses. Reduce global warming.

A cur­rent pro­gram that’s giv­ing away shade trees for free is com­ing out of the Cal­i­for­nia Cen­ter for Sus­tain­able Energy. Cus­tomers of San Diego Gas & Elec­tric in San Diego and Orange Coun­ties can get their choice of twenty kinds of trees in fif­teen gal­lon con­tain­ers. Each house­hold can claim as many as ten trees. Choices run from small, slow-growing crepe myr­tles to big Lon­don plane trees to native live oaks.

Even if you’re out of the tar­get audi­ence for the pro­gram, their site has a link page to a pile of shade tree and urban forestry sites with lots of infor­ma­tion. Their own site has a cou­ple of basic prin­ci­ples for decid­ing where to put a shade tree and what kind to use:

1. Plant only decid­u­ous trees on the south side of the build­ing to allow the sun to warm your home in the winter
2. Con­cen­trate plant­ing on the west side, that’s where the energy sav­ings are the greatest

A few years back there was a sim­i­lar give­away pro­gram, and houses in the neigh­bor­hood got fly­ered with offers for your choice of one of three tree species. For free. They’d even plant the tree for you.

The neigh­bor next door opted for one, a gold medal­lion tree, Cas­sia lep­to­phylla. It’s in bloom right now and is pretty attrac­tive. The plant is sup­posed to top out at thirty feet and spread twenty or thirty feet.

But now we come to the part of the post where we look the gift horse in the mouth.

My neigh­bor­hood is on the first rise of hills over the Pacific Ocean. Many of the houses here have views out over the ocean, Mis­sion Bay, down­town San Diego and even down to the hills of Tijuana in Mex­ico and the craggy Coro­n­ado Islands off the coast of Tijuana and Rosar­ito. (There’s some­thing really cool about stand­ing on your roof deck and being able to see another coun­try.) My view isn’t the most spec­tac­u­lar. Still, the glimpses of water and the land below give me a sense of place.

As for the cool­ing effects of the trees, the major­ity of the houses around here either don’t have air con­di­tion­ing or–like our neigh­bor with the tree–have it but never use it. If things get warm, you open a win­dow or door. Of course, a cou­ple miles inland things are dif­fer­ent, and a shade tree can save you lots in cooling.

So, to my neigh­bors, a plea: Go ahead and plant trees, but select the ones that are scaled for your house and the neighborhood.

But to this one par­tic­u­lar neigh­bor I offer a spe­cial exemp­tion. Please do plant a tree. Ivy. Shrub­bery. Anything!

August 01 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: California Center for Sustainable Energy • shade trees • trees • view neighborhoods | 2 Comments »