City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Landmark trees are trees that have been designated by the Board of Supervisors as ‘extra special’. It may be due to the rareness of the species, their size or age, or extraordinary structure, or ecological contribution. In addition, historical or cultural importance can qualify a tree for Landmark Status.2

  The fig was planted next to what was once a library but is now a hospital. Protected by its designation as a landmark tree, it looks after itself first, forgets its obligations, and sheds the occasional limb onto the occasional car. Cesar Chavez, after whom the street the fig lives on was named, was more civic-minded. He co-founded the United Farm Workers union, and radicalised and supported many Latino workers in the 1960s and 1970s. His work continues to be celebrated and his portrait still adorns many of the area’s murals; a parade is held in his honour each year.

  The heritage Moreton Bay fig is an outlier in the district as most of the trees planted through the Mission are known as ficus (a genus that includes the Moreton Bay). Ficus microcarpa were originally distributed throughout Asia and into some Australian islands. Their range has extended and now includes 24th Street between Potrero and Mission. They’re pale skinned with vivid small green leaves, multi-limbed, fractal; they make the street distinctive. I realised that these trees were a source of contention when I was volunteering for an organisation that has its shopfront on 24th, the muralists Precita Eyes. The founder, Susan Cervantes, was agitated because a shopkeeper over the road was removing the ficus in front of their shop. The issue was, as it usually is, money. In the early 2000s the city introduced a street-tree policy that makes adjacent property owners responsible for maintaining the street trees as well as the sidewalk—whether or not the owners planted the tree, whether or not they want the tree, and whether or not they have the financial resources to care for the tree.

  The Ficus microcarpa were planted before this law was introduced, back in the 1980s. ‘They’re great canopy trees,’ said Doug Wildman, program director of Friends of the Urban Forest, ‘and they’re evergreens, so their leaves act as sponges, absorbing water and delaying a ton of storm water from running off into drains and causing floods. They were the “ideal” tree of the day.’

  The eighties are over, the trees are almost forty years old and their roots cause sidewalk damage. Many of them are dying of a fungal disease caused by root pruning undertaken to try to stop that damage. Ficus microcarpa are no longer tree of the day.

  The Mission is the oldest settlement in San Francisco. It grew up around Mission Dolores, built in 1776, one of a chain of missions the Spanish established along the west coast. The location was chosen, on the principle of taking your business to the customer, because it was close to a Native American village. I used to like visiting Mission Dolores because scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo were filmed there. I also admired its fat Canary Island date palms. But the romantic appeal of the place evaporated for me once I learned that it had been a killing field. Dolores, the Spanish word for sorrows, proved apt by the end of 1800: there were only forty-seven Yelamu people left living there, and an estimated five thousand people buried in the cemetery and surrounding lands. At the time, the Mission’s baptismal book did its best to strike a triumphant tone:

  On this day of the Feast of Corpus Christi, 1800, the conversions of heathens on this side of the bay is concluded (for the greater honor and glory of God), as today the last one was baptized…

  When Americans took over from the Spanish in 1848 there were two Yelamu left, an old man and his son. Their last descendants died in the 1920s.3

  In the days when Mission Dolores was doing its ‘good’ work, much of the Mission district was an interconnection of creeks (now running underground) and wetlands (now filled in) interspersed with sand dunes. There were not many trees. In The Trees of San Francisco Mike Sullivan says the Spanish described the area as ‘the very worst place [for settlement] in California…since the peninsula afforded neither timber, wood nor water, nothing but sand, brambles and raging winds.’4 Occasionally the original landscape asserts its presence. During the earthquake of 1906 soil liquefied, Mission Creek rose up, Lake Dolores re-emerged, and in one hotel alone—on the corner of Valencia and 18th—forty people drowned. I understand that the cause was liquefaction, a process common when developments have been built on reclaimed wetland; but still, it’s hard not to see the old creek’s rising up to swallow the building and the settlers as a form of revenge.

  ____________________

  1 ‘Remembering Aboriginal Fitzroy’, Alick Jackomos, quoted inaboriginalhistoryofyarra.com.au

  2 www.sfdpw.org/significant-and-landmark-trees

  3 Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, Gary Kamiya, Bloomsbury USA, 2013.

  4 The Trees of San Francisco, Mike Sullivan, Wilderness Press, 2013.

  I DON’T BLAME THE TREES

  YOU can see Angel Island from the east side of Alcatraz. There is only five kilometres distance between the two islands, though the currents that separate them can be fierce. Like Alcatraz, Angel Island has a complex history. The Spanish first pulled up there in 1775. Soon afterwards the Miwok people, who’d fished and hunted there for two thousand years, were driven into Mission Dolores or left the area. In 1808 Russian sea otter hunting expeditions set up a storehouse on the island. In the 1830s it was used for cattle. The army used it as a base after 1863. In 1892 a quarantine station was built, and that station was used into the 1950s.

  When I first walked there I was struck by how familiar the architecture felt, as did the isolation of its beach coves. The presence of eucalypts, their fragrance, added to my sense that I knew this place. These trees do that: insinuate themselves into your very being. As I walked, I remembered, or re-remembered, that in 1968 my mother, brother and I were in quarantine at North Head, Sydney, after a trip to the United States ended unexpectedly with my parents’ separation. My brother, then a baby, had not yet been vaccinated against smallpox and we were among many to be caught in the gap between the new global world of plane travel and a hidebound bureaucracy. The increase in air travel had led to heightened vigilance regarding vaccination status, and the largest number of detentions from 1951–83 were to do with whether travellers had been vaccinated against smallpox. We were among eighty-three similarly placed.1 It was a distressing and difficult time for my mother, one made worse by our detention. My first father, Peter, once told me that there was outrage that we were detained; that our name (then Nicholls) was mentioned in the Senate. I’m too aware of the grim irony in this scenario: public outrage that we, a white Australian family of three, might have been forcibly held in detention for two weeks.

  People had been detained at North Head over a period of 150 years. Smallpox, typhoid, influenza and plague outbreaks were sometimes the reason for this, though detainees also included migrants from what we now call the UK, from China, Indochina, Vietnam and Timor. At times evacuees from disasters such as Cyclone Tracy found themselves living in the station.

  Memories of that time flicker occasionally, like decomposing photographs or old sound recordings. I see rabbits dash across lawns at night, I hear a nurse earnestly telling me to eat carrots, like the rabbits did, so I could see better when I peered into the darkness. I can smell, I can hear, the ocean. I seem to remember making sandcastles on a tiny beach cove while a nurse looked on in her starched uniform, though I wonder now how I could have remembered the starch. It seems to be far too writerly a detail for a four-year-old to focus on. Perhaps most of what I remember of that time is simply some kind of bolstering, a starching, of the truth. I went on a tour to visit the centre not so long ago, though eschewed the ghost tour. As I walked through the old buildings, I remembered living in one of the weatherboard and corrugated-iron huts; being bathed in the hospital-green bathtubs. Again, I suspect that was my imagination working overtime.

  The dormitories on Angel Island are desolate. Run down. During San Francisco’s foggy, windy summers they would have been damp and cold. Nonetheless, they c
an stand comparison with Sydney’s quarantine station, which has received the kind of rebranding that seeks to erase the past. The station on Angel Island feels like what it once was: an immigration camp. Chinese immigrants arriving during the gold rush of 1848 encountered hostility, particularly from the unions. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 to deny them citizenship, and this exclusionary state of affairs continued, in various ways, until 1940. From 1910–40 Chinese immigrants were held on Angel Island for months, sometimes years. Over that time they were interrogated in the hope that they would trip up in their stories somehow and thus could be deported home. When you walk around the dorms you see Chinese characters carved into the walls, the remains of some two hundred poems. The paint and putty the guards used to cover up the poetry simply highlight the dints and draw attention to the fact that these walls can talk. As an article in the New York Times noted:

  The formal qualities of the poetry—which was written, for the most part, by men and women who had no more than an elementary education—tend to get lost in English translation, but its emotional force comes through. One poem reads, ‘With a hundred kinds of oppressive laws, they mistreat us Chinese. / It is still not enough after being interrogated and investigated several times; / We also have to have our chests examined while naked.’2

  During World War II, Japanese Americans were interned there, among other places. Many of them had lived in America for more generations than their white neighbours. Take Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant and gardener, who was the official caretaker of the Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park from 1895 until his death in 1925. He pruned trees and shrubs into the shape of clouds and birds, and the tea gardens he looked after were the oldest in the country. After he died his daughter, Takano Hagiwara, and her children became the proprietors of the garden, which they in turn worked, until the US declared war on Japan and moved the family to an internment camp. At the war’s end they were neither allowed back nor offered reimbursement. The garden itself suffered and many rare plants were left to die.

  The fierce debate about whether to remove the eucalypts from Angel Island, and the best way to do so, went on for some years towards the end of the twentieth century. The debate was (still is) loaded with words and phrases like ‘native’, ‘refugee’, ‘immigrant’, ‘invader’, and phrases like ‘ethnic cleansing’3—even though, as the San Diego County’s chief entomologist in the 1990s pointed out—California’s humans were ‘not natives either’. After a battle that lasted six years it was agreed that eighty out of eighty-six acres of eucalypts were to be removed and herbicides used on the tree stumps. One of the reasons the debate about eucalypts had become so contentious was the concern that the trees contributed to wildfire. It was argued that averting fire was worth the risk of environmental damage caused by poison. It made no difference in this case and in 2008, ten years after the removal of the eucalypts, almost half of Angel Island was engulfed by a massive brush fire that burned so brightly it could be seen from miles, from counties, away.

  Did it matter if those trees, more than a century old, died? They were not, after all, from that place. It’s a hard question to consider when almost all of us now—flora, fauna and humans—are from somewhere else.

  In the early 1900s the graves of San Francisco were opened, the remains exhumed and relocated to the south of the city. In May 2016 a casket that had been missed was found under a garage floor. In it was the body of a young girl.

  Nobody knows her name or how she died. She lay under a San Francisco home’s concrete garage floor for decades until two weeks ago, when workers doing remodelling struck her lead-and-bronze coffin with their shovels…She looks, through the two glass windows of the coffin, like a young girl and not like the 145-year-old remains of one…Lying beside her are eucalyptus leaves.4

  The owner of the premises on which the coffin was found was told that the body was on her private property, and thus owned by her. Furthermore the owner was not allowed to rebury the coffin, as she didn’t have a death certificate. The owner, who marketed cookies for a living and did not have the money to maintain the girl-now-artefact, stated: ‘I understand if a tree is on your property, that’s your responsibility. But this is different. The city decided to move all these bodies 100 years ago, and they should stand behind their decision.’

  These days eucalypts define San Francisco’s landscape much as the palm defines Los Angeles. The writer Jack London planted a hundred thousand Tasmanian blue gums (E. globulus) on his estate at the beginning of the twentieth century in the hope of cashing in on the increased demand for lumber after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. That estate is now a state park. It boasts oak woodlands, as well as stands of the blue gums that survived his enraged culling when it transpired that, ‘despite his careful research with scientists at University of California in Davis and diligent plans’, the crops were not usable for building, for paper, or ‘for much of anything’.5 A fact, of sorts, that had been established some thirty years earlier.

  Jack London was not the only one to experience enthusiasm then regret. Overblown claims combined with ignorance of how best to prepare the wood for lumber meant that the eucalyptus bubble first burst in the 1880s, then slowly expanded again before finally popping for good in 1916.

  The Californian gold rush, with its demands for construction materials and fuel, had put pressure on wood supplies. Deforestation had become a serious concern. This coincided with the Golden Gate Nursery in San Francisco stocking Tasmanian blue gum seedlings—no doubt in response to the passionate advocacy of Victoria’s first state botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller. His passion for Eucalyptus (he eventually published the ten-volume Eucalyptographia) was particularly focused on the blue gum (which was not, despite its name, to be found only in Tasmania). Mueller, and governments and individuals around the world who listened to him, came to believe blue gums cured malaria, which was not true (and that its oil was an antiseptic, which was). They could, however, help drain swamps, and that may have been the source of the malaria rumours. They grew quickly and were believed to be a good building material—which was also true if they were allowed to mature, but not if they were harvested after only ten or twenty years.

  In a state built on a gamble, Eucalyptus became subject to a rush of its own. In the late 1800s millions of blue gums were planted throughout the Bay Area. Frank C. Havens, an Oakland developer, planted eight million of them in a twenty-two kilometre strip from Berkeley through Oakland. In 1868 the California Tree Culture Act was created to encourage people to replace the oak trees and redwoods that had been cut down. The modish blue gums were there to fill the breach; but it soon became apparent that they took too much water out of the soil and had been planted so as to create a monoculture that resulted in piles of shed bark and limbs.

  Despite its deficiencies as a building material, the young eucalypt remained useful for windbreaks and fuel. And despite breaking the hearts of some entrepreneurs, the blue gums flourished and self-propagated to become forests—or, to use the loaded biological language of the day, went native. Better than that, according to Abbot Kinney back in 1895, California had taken a tree that was ‘scrawny’ in its homeland and improved it, practically creating a new genus. That was another exaggeration of course, though Kinney was right that California’s eucalypts are often larger and broader than in Australia. Eucalyptus were at home in California and, conversely, made Californians (themselves an assortment of non-natives) feel that they were home. One or two generations of Californians thought the trees were natives. ‘“Say,” an American serviceman had reportedly drawled in Sydney during World War II, “you got some of our eucalypts here.”’6

  When I first arrived in San Francisco I saw blue gums everywhere I looked. On Alcatraz, in Golden Gate Park, in the former military complex, the Presidio, down by the Golden Gate Bridge. That was where there were a series of art installations by environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, many of them using the blue gum. One of these installations, Wood Fa
ll, is a path of zigzagging tree trunks that snake for hundreds of metres along one of the city’s oldest footpaths, known as Lover’s Lane, and is made entirely from fallen eucalypts planted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Goldsworthy described the work as ‘drawing the place’.

  I felt a certain proprietorial pride in the trees that I thought of as ‘ours’ or even ‘mine’, so it took me a while to notice the signs that some Californians had fallen out of love with the tree once thought of as a miracle. Then I read a newspaper article that described activists pressing their naked bodies against one of the tallest stands of hardwoods left in California. They were drawing attention to the fact that these trees, blue gums in the Eucalyptus Grove along Strawberry Creek on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, were slated for removal. Ageing hippies, activism, nudism. The story cheered me. It kept alive my hope that people still cared about things environmental. I applied for a fellowship to write about Eucalyptus asking the following questions: What is it about the eucalypt that inflames both hatred and devotion? How do we save the eucalypt from becoming the fall guy for the delusions of capitalism and the desire for expansion? What does it mean to be ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ in a global world?

  The questions were either over- or underwhelming. Perhaps both. I did not get the fellowship but by that point I was too obsessed with the blue gum—it does that to people—to stop researching. I read newspapers and found stories of trees being removed from public land in the dead of night, reducing those who love them to endless days in court. I learned that in 1984, five million dollars was set aside to systematically remove ‘exotic plant species capable of naturalising’ to allow for the return of native flora and fauna. The US Forest Service listed eucalypts as hazardous because they shed bark and limbs (though they’ve also said that it’s better to leave trees in place, non-native or otherwise, rather than pursue deforestation as a form of fire management).