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Home , Eucalyptus

California’s love-hate relationship with eucalyptus by Jared Farmer

PRIL 1970. The Beatles announce their breakup. U.S. forces gather for the invasion of Cambodia. By most measures, the world had seen better days. Using a slogan modified from John and Yoko — “Give Earth a Chance” — students at some 1,500 American schools prepare for a nationwide Environmental Teach-In,better known as the first Earth Day. AIn Ventura County, 50 -huggers from Moorpark College lie in front of bulldozers on Los Angeles Avenue near Simi Valley. Even here, far away from Berkeley,“ecology-minded students” (to use the words of the Los Angeles Times) could be found protesting the widening of a tree-lined road.The police arrest 10. On April 22, the defendants are arraigned in juvenile court. By the end of the week, the trees are gone. What had been lost? Ancient redwoods? Historic ? Not quite. The trees in question were Australian eucalyptus. Since the 1850s, Californians had assisted a continuous introduction of punc- tuated by two frenzied periods — one in the 1870s, the other from 1907 to 1913. Planters believed variously that eucalypts would provide fuel, improve the weather, boost farm pro- ductivity,defeat , preserve watersheds, and thwart a looming timber famine. First and foremost, however, Californians planted the trees to domesticate and beautify the landscape, to make it more green. By the mid-20th century, the distinctive blue-green foliage of eucalyptus trees could be seen all over the state.The Australian was far more prevalent than the redwood, the official state tree, and scarcely less iconic.The immigrant had been naturalized in the n r u b k c a l B

a s i L cultural sense: Californians adopted the refers to the shape of the blue gum’s eucalyptus seeds had outpaced supply. genus as an honorary native. In certain cap (see drawing before page 1). Farmers in the interior valleys tried areas of the state, meanwhile, the intro- Piles of detached caps can be found planting on their “wastelands” — the duced plant became naturalized in the beneath any E. globulus, along with dry or hilly or alkaline spots where biological sense: the eucalyptus trees copious litter. The thin, sickle- grain and vegetables would not grow. became self-reproducing .In time, shaped mature have distinctive Any profit from telegraph poles, rail- these two versions of naturalization coloring — somewhat green, almost road ties, and would be a would come into conflict. blue,slightly gray.Their smell bonus. By the late 1870s, the overlap- This arboreal story begins in San is equally memorable. This ping medical and commercial fads in Francisco after the Gold Rush. The — or ever-blue-green — can blue gums had transformed the look instant city — constructed with , also be identified by its , which in of lowland . In the words of fenced with wood, heated with wood the summer and fall sheds in long rib- one grower, eucalyptus had become — was located on a peninsular sand bons. The magnificent blue gum is the “tree of trees — its banners are dune. Local supplies of the magnificent waving around our state and over all Coast Live and even its scrawny From the beginning, our homes.” cousin, the Coastal Scrub Oak, rapidly E. globulus was not immune from diminished. As early as 1860, a local the importation of criticism, however. In 1877, a San commentator lamented the loss of trees non-native flora was Francisco newspaper printed a satiri- from the coastal hills and mountains. driven as much by cal editorial: The oak lands of Oakland had been aesthetic desires as “thinned and mutilated,” leaving the In ,where this thing grows firewood supply “almost exhausted.” economic needs. wild, the country is so healthy that Californians wanted more than people have to go to New Zealand replacement trees. From the begin- quite possibly the messiest tree on earth. to commit suicide….This absurd ning, the importation of non-native More significantly, it is — with the vegetable is now growing all over flora was driven as much by aesthetic possible exception of redwoods — the this State. One cannot get out of desires as economic needs. Post–Gold fastest sprouting tree on earth. its sight. It asserts itself in long Rush Californians were not satisfied In the 19th century, E. globulus had twin ranks, between which the with the existing landscape. It looked another perceived virtue. The fast- traveler must run a sort of moral unfinished. A land blessed with so growing tree was also a “fever-reducer.” gauntlet, and crops up everywhere much sunshine, warmth, and fertility According to medical assumptions of in independent ugliness. It defaces demanded more greenery, , the time, malaria and other maladies every landscape with blotches of and shade.Where nature erred, settlers resulted from so-called bad air — an blue, and embitters every breeze could repair. infecting vapor that transpired from with suggestions of an old woman’s Of the many trees tested by Golden overgrown bottomlands. In multiple medicine chest. Let us have no State , Eucalyptus became a ways, eucalypts acted as a prophylaxis. more of it. clear favorite. In the lowland regions By soaking up , they reduced the of California, the Australian genus ben- size of miasmatic breeding grounds. Disenchantment only grew through efited from ecological similarities and More importantly,their pungent leaves the mid-1880s. As eucalypts reached dissimilarities — a familiar two-season, and litter disinfected the soil and pre- maturity,planters reevaluated the ben- fire-prone with- vented unhealthful decomposition.As efits and costs of these huge, messy, out all of the , birds, , they “inhaled,” these trees absorbed water-loving that could suck and diseases that fed on eucalypts Down the bad air and exchanged it with wells dry and strangle nearby stone- Under.As a result, the trees grew unusu- “balsamic exhalations.” fruit trees with their aggressive . ally fast. In California, enthusiasm for the To make matters worse, the wood did In the 19th century, Californians “fever-tree” peaked in the early 1870s not prove to be as enduring as adver- overwhelmingly grew just one of the with backing from health experts and tised. Railroad ties cracked; poles rotted roughly 800 Eucalyptus species, Tas- railroad managers.The sight of so many in the ground. manian Blue Gum (). healthy-looking trees inevitably inspired Yet even as farmers turned against “Globulus” means “little button” and dreams of profit. Soon the demand for the blue gum, urbanites — especially

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 19 “The resulting bubble was perhaps rivaled only by the tulip mania that swept 17th-century Holland.” The “boom”of 1907–13 was qual- itatively different from the “craze” of the 1870s. Back then, horticulturists hoped to complement their small, diversified farms with beautifying and climate-changing windbreaks. Blue gums provided a nice side profit as fuel wood, but their reason for exis- tence was essentially noncommercial. By contrast,the new blue gum prophets did not care about health or beauty or shade or or even firewood. Their sole concern was saleable . Speculators, not farmers, led the way. The promotional literature from the period makes for amusing reading today. Start-up companies lured investors with promises such as “Forests Grown While You Wait.” Investing in eucalypts was purportedly as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.The Miracle Tree (or Wonder- Tree or Tree of Hope or Tree of Ful- fillment) offered more potential wealth to California than the Gold Rush. The end of the cult of the blue gum can be dated to 1913. In the fall, the industrial trade magazine The Record published a devastating report Eucalyptus deanii from The Huntington’s Australian Garden. Photo by Lisa Blackburn. written by H.D.Tiemann of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s those in the Bay Area — embraced it tree species at her arboretum (now the Products Laboratory. Tiemann said more. San Francisco, which dreamed site of the Norton Simon Museum). flatly that the eucalyptus industry in of becoming the Pacific equivalent of Carr favored E. ficifolia, an undersized California was based on fictions, delu- New York City, planted fast-growing tree with oversized red flowers. sions, and fallacies. Most California seedlings (eucalypts as well as , A new phase in the history of eucalypts “cannot be regarded as lum- tamarisk, and Monterey ) to trans- California eucalypts began abruptly ber in any true sense,” he wrote. He form an expansive tract of shifting sand in 1907, when the U.S. Forest Service called it “near-lumber.”For commercial into Golden Gate Park. raised an alarm about an impending utilization, every kind of California- In the sunny Southland, too, the “hardwood famine.” Unless scientific grown was more or less bad, cultural elite favored trees, especially foresters intervened, the nation pos- Tiemann said, but the worst of all was Australian trees.Its colonies and ranchos sessed only “about a 15 years’ supply.” the species used most, E. globulus. offered country living for city people. Oddly, this one statement in a seeming- And so most of the millions of The exemplar was Pasadena, where ly obscure circular about the hardwood eucalypts planted in the state between people created gardens with eucalypts supply of the Appalachian Mountains 1907 and 1913 were never even cut. rather than forests of eucalypts.Just three had a singular and phenomenal influ- The tree farms were largely abandoned. years after moving to Pasadena in 1877, ence on the California landscape. In Surprisingly, though, the end of the Jeanne Carr had a collection of 120 the words of historian Stephen Pyne, boom did not end large-scale euca-

20 Spring/Summer 2007 lyptus planting in California. Citrus citrus orchards. The blue gum - had become wild forests.Because these ranchers put in windbreaks to shield breaks could not — like individual forests grew in and around densely their perishable crops from Santa Ana orange trees — be incorporated into populated areas, they presented a fire .During the heyday of the Sunkist tiny house lots. They had to be bull- hazard.The hazard became all too real orange, thousands of linear miles of dozed. Homeowners in Canoga Park during the deadly Oakland–Berkeley eucalyptus windbreaks could be seen staged a summer-long campaign in Hills of 1991. in Southern California. 1971 to save 142 old gums that added Almost simultaneously, a series of Gum trees also dominated the land- beauty and shade to a local park. infestations caused massive die- scaping of the region’s first two promi- offs of old eucalypts throughout the nent urban parks: Balboa Park in San state. Ecologists and land managers Diego and Elysian Park in Los Angeles. An automobilist seized the moment to advocate selec- The region’s two largest arboretums could drive an entire tive habitat restoration.They wanted to later added to the consensus about the day without ever los- bring back pieces of the pre-settlement appropriateness of the introduced trees. California landscape, a place marked by In the 1950s, the L.A. County Arbor- ing sight of a blue- grasses more than trees,by browns more etum added a world-class Australian green tree. than greens — and absolutely not by section to its collections. Nearby,The blue-greens. Huntington formally opened its People who dare to defend Cali- Australian Garden in 1964. In the 1970s, however, people’s ideas fornia eucalypts with ecological sup- By the mid-20th century,California’s about eucalypts began to change.The port have one charismatic ally: the eucalyptic landscape stretched from same ecological thinking that inspired . While Monarchs Redding in the north to Yuma,Ariz., Earth Day activists later caused envi- are not endangered, the genetic pool in the south. Sunset magazine publi- ronmentalists to reevaluate the place of long-distance migrators faces an cized three sections of highways — two of non-native species. Native-plant uncertain future because of habitat loss. from the 101, one from the 99 — enthusiasts enlarged their conception Migrating Monarchs overwinter in just where an automobilist could drive an of “weed” to include shrubs and trees. two areas: the eucalyptus belt of coastal entire day without ever losing sight of By the 1990s, eucalypts had become California and the forested volcanic a blue-green tree. ecological pariahs in the Bay Area. highlands of central Mexico. The Throughout the state, the stands of Here the former tree farms had natu- mountain destination is highly con- gums that lined the entrances to towns ralized in the biological sense — they centrated, whereas the coastal habitat became landmarks of home. Unfor- tunately,landmark trees often stood in Highway near El Toro, Orange County, California, ca. 1930. Photo by Hogg. Automobile Club of the way of modern roads, which re- Southern California collection, Huntington Library. quired extra width for shoulders, medians, and passing lanes.Thousands of tall eucalypts fell during the long process of turning the San Jose–Los Angeles section of El Camino Real into the four-lane US 101. Hoping to postpone this outcome, supervisors in Ventura County declared a section of blue gums along the 101 a “cultural landmark” in 1968. In certain locations, notably the San Fernando Valley,suburban homeowners rallied to the defense of endangered gums. In the postwar period, the num- ber of eucalypts in Los Angeles County and neighboring Orange County fell dramatically as subdivisions replaced consists of hundreds of scattered sites from Mendocino to Ensenada. Foot in Mouth From the Monarch’s point of view, the introduction of eucalypts was a THE TOOTHPICK’S SURPRISING DEBT TO THE SHOE wonderful boon. Unlike native , cypresses, and redwoods, eucalypts are by Henry Petroski flowering plants; better yet, they flower in the winter, when the travel-weary butterflies need . Unlike the California Sycamore — the only native tree south of Big Sur that might have HE TOOTHPICK IS A SINGLE OBJECT made of a single hosted colonies — gum trees keep material with, presumably,a single purpose.Anthropologists their leaves year-round, providing bet- tell us they have found fossilized teeth with grooves that ter sites for attachment and protection. are inexplicable — unless we assume that people a couple millionT years ago used something like a toothpick.There have been In retrospect, introducing gums to the Golden State was a beautiful mis- examples of this found in ,Australia, North America, and just take. In certain nature preserves and in about every continent in the world. So tooth picking, according to certain fire-prone neighborhoods it is the anthropologists, must be among the oldest habits known to man. worth the effort to remove them or to Tooth picking was also common in the ancient world. People in thin their numbers. But in other places Asia, , and Rome carried toothpicks that we would associate — especially highways, parks, and cam- today with jewelry items — made of metal and worn around the puses — the non-native trees have neck on a chain so they could always be well at hand. become vital elements of the California One of the most common natural materials used for toothpicks scene.This is the only place outside of has been the goose quill.The feathers of geese and other birds had Australia where eucalypts — like them been more important for making writing quills, but with the advent or not — remind people of home. of the steel pen, the quill was almost totally displaced by the 1860s. Their loss would be our loss. ! So people who raised lots of geese — especially in countries like France — had to look for possible new uses for their feathers. Quill toothpick production became partially mechanized in the latter part of the 19th century. But how could you be sure you were getting a toothpick that was clean enough to put in your mouth? To ensure this, a lot of “hygienic” quill toothpicks came to be individu- ally wrapped, as are many wooden toothpicks today. But even when wrapped, quill toothpicks didn’t age well.They became brittle, ren- dering them virtually useless. Then along came the wooden toothpick, sending the quill into certain obsolescence. Some of the oldest wooden toothpicks come from , principally from the Mondego Valley, where there is still a cottage industry of making them by hand from orangewood.The toothpick extended naturally to — once a Portuguese colony — especially to the state of Pernambuco, which had rich forest resources. It was here that the story of an American toothpick empire began. Charles Forster (1826–1901) was born into a prominent Jared Farmer is the Mellon Postdoctoral from the Boston area.As a young man he began working for an Fellow with the Huntington-USC Institute uncle who owned an import-export business dealing in trade between on California and the West for 2005–07. New and Brazil.The younger Forster noticed that Brazilians This article is drawn from his book-in- carved toothpicks by hand, but he thought the product could be made progress, If Trees Could Speak: Peoples more economically and efficiently by machine. His plan was to offer and Plants in California. up a little competition: he would manufacture wooden toothpicks in New England and export them to Brazil. But Forster was not an

22 Spring/Summer 2007