Those quick establishing shots of palm trees at the start of a movie signal that you’re in a car, probably a convertible, in Southern California. The columnar rows of evenly spaced Washingtonia robusta towering 100 feet overhead as you zoom down the street are simply the most cinematic of the many tree types in the Southland. They sculpt streets into outdoor public rooms and tunnels of space aimed at infinity. Beverly Hills may have the hammerlock on these camera-ready palm-colonnaded roads, but on the other side of town, especially in Pasadena, some thoroughfares resemble open-air cathedrals, with lacy leaf canopies of camphors—their limbs dark and venous—forming vaults overhead with the filtering light. And in Santa Monica, more modest trees, like the flowering crape myrtle, scope down the immense skies to a more human scale.
Trees, collectively and individually, shape space. Trees are architecture.
Southland cities—let’s just lump them all together for brevity and call them Los Angeles (as in Los Angeles County)—were founded as gardens, with the promise of citrus and other fruit trees in every yard. The tree has long been a building block of the Los Angeles ideal. You can’t really call L.A. urbanism a philosophy; it grew from a simple premise: healthy living in the dry, sunny out-of-doors. A lemon or orange tree, or a single ginkgo or laurel, is more than an adjective modifying the house. An ebullient Chinese elm growing in apposition to a simple Craftsman establishes a direct relationship between hearth and nature. And when the trees are lined up along sidewalks adjacent to private front yards, they delineate a community of homes with a common green façade predicated on the simple premise of nature.
But over the past two decades, in a contemporary L.A. faced with the prospect of long-term drought, within a larger world confronting global warming, the tree has ceased to be just a symbol of nature and an agent of community. As beautiful as they are in all their variety, trees are no longer just decorative. City planners combating climate change have been going on the offensive, banking trees for ecological dividends, planting more native species, and creating habitat for birds, insects, and wildlife that can thrive in an urban setting. The tree has taken on an enhanced ecological role, providing shade, moisture, and lower temperatures, which collectively alleviate environmental stress. Increasingly, the stand-alone tree and even the rows of them along busy streets are now considered part of a larger urban forest—the sum total of all the trees working as an urban lung.
A century ago, cities and even suburbs didn’t really see the forest for the trees. Now, they are seeing the trees for the forest.
ARBOREAL PARADISE
Urban forestry has become a national movement embedded in the planning policies of many U.S. cities, and for very good reason: more than 130 million acres of trees are located within the country’s cities and towns.
A century ago, Angelenos with enough yard might cultivate a small orchard of fruit trees for canning and the breakfast table, but that long-ago purpose has been superseded by a more global environmental function promoted by city agencies. The decorative trees and green walls along streets are being held accountable to environmentally sustainable metrics. Spreadsheets now clock biomass, canopy coverage, species diversity, and age in the public-tree population, all aimed at a more comprehensive stewardship of the forest.
Most cities across the United States have some kind of department for trees, so Los Angeles isn’t unique. Many boast tree-lined boulevards of astounding beauty: the humidity of Miami, for example, has supported remarkable antebellum streetscapes dripping in Spanish moss. And of course, further back in time and an ocean away, cities planted rows of chestnuts (in France) and cypresses (in Italy) that grew into stately allées that are still standing. In many places and times, a tree has been not just a tree but part of a larger natural architecture shaping space into something suggesting nobility—fit for a king! But many cities in the Southland have aggressively expanded these more traditional arboreal ambitions.
Botanically speaking, Southland suburbs have been a privileged place where sun, soil, water, and aspiration have converged to create fertile ground for imported horticultural dreams. Within Los Angeles, two cities, Pasadena on the Eastside and Santa Monica on the Westside, stand out historically for independent initiatives focused on the creative, even civic use of the tree. When you cross the boundary from Los Angeles proper into either Santa Monica or Pasadena, you immediately sense you’re in a greener, softer, more humane and comfortable space where trees lift the character of the municipality.
Pasadena and Santa Monica were founded during the great suburbanization that began in the United States in the late 19th century. Architecturalizing trees into walls along roadways was a way of transposing notions of civic space—which dates back to Roman times—into suburbs, establishing geometrically defined public areas within the garden. Whether consciously or not, arborists who lined roadways with specimen trees were inventing a suburban version of city building. Trees could shape a public realm for the motorist or the pedestrian out for a stroll with a dog. As an invention, the accomplishment has been either overlooked, uncelebrated, or taken for granted.
Now approaching a century in age, the horticultural history that roots the tree in local culture puts into question its continuity. As Matthew Wells, Santa Monica’s public landscape manager, points out, some species were planted 80 years ago, and entire streets and even neighborhoods are now edging into a period of horticultural transition. Should the trees be replaced with the same species or changed out? Are those colonnades of Canary Island date palms along Alta, Marguerita, and Georgina Avenues in Santa Monica, which reign with such aloof majesty, really the most effective use of the limited ground next to sidewalks, since they provide little ecological benefit? Do the luxurious but thirsty magnolias that, with their dark, thick leaves and white flowers, line Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena really make the best use of diminishing water resources? (Long ago, they supplanted the orange groves after which the street was named.)
There was no one Johnny Appleseed who came through the Southland with a messianic bag of seeds. There was, however, the general idea that with its benign climate, clement weather, generous open spaces, and imported water, Los Angeles was Edenic and a natural habitat for trees. Pasadena developed the Arroyo Culture, a local twist on the Arts and Crafts movement, which grew from the native oaks, sycamores, and other species populating the Arroyo Seco—the dry ravine that runs through the city and its surrounding hills and plains. The oak tree became a popular subject in plein air paintings and stained glass windows. The introduction of irrigation expanded this palette of trees.
During the late 19th century, Abbot Kinney, best known as the developer of nearby Venice, played an important role in the creation of the Santa Monica treescape. His efforts began with an experimental forest that he engineered in Rustic Canyon and along parts of Wilshire Boulevard. Trees later became a visual theme that distinguished neighborhoods. City arborists (as they were called), supplied by new globe-trotting nurseries, specified trees for long stretches of streetscape that to this day give the roads spatial definition and character. The arborists simply wrote names of trees on street maps, creating a citywide arboretum that still grows. (The 1956 book Trees of Santa Monica, by George T. Hastings, lists many of the trees’ source areas around the world.)
Today, long rows of mighty incense cedars partition often modest houses from traffic along a 10-block stretch of Washington Avenue. African coral trees run down the median on San Vicente Boulevard, twisting and turning through space like cantilevered statuary. La Mesa Drive, which turns off San Vicente, is haunted by unruly Moreton Bay fig trees, their roots erupting through the ground and their limbs winding wildly through the air. A remarkable arcade of Washingtonia robusta (a.k.a. Mexican fan palms) overlooks the Pacific in Palisades Park like a linear temple of nature.
A TREE GROWS IN SANTA MONICA
The Canary Island date palms in the Palisades Tract of Santa Monica, near the ocean, like similar palms in Beverly Hills, Pasadena, and older districts of Los Angeles, represent the challenges facing urban foresters. The trees have a finite lifespan, and the Canary palms have also been prone to disease (fusarium wilt). Grace Phillips, a landscape designer who for many years chaired Santa Monica’s Urban Forest Task Force, remembers tense community meetings in which citizens expressed a desire to preserve these living monuments. The palms have been standing for longer than almost anyone now alive, and they establish the character and architecture on their streets. L.A.’s big sky flattens the landscape and bleeds the sense of neighborhood, while the colonnades establish a sense of place, belting together what would otherwise be the anomie created by too much open space. The trees stake out territory.
Palm restoration would seem to be a no-brainer, but when planted in a monoculture—streets with a single species designation—trees are vulnerable to diseases that spread from one to the next. Mixing species reduces this risk and increases the chances of long-term viability, even if it also reduces the architectural impact of a certain kind of tree with a certain presence.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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What has changed since the original street plantings in Santa Monica and Pasadena is a new omniscience: the computer and even drone technology have given planners the ability to see all the trees in the urban forest as a whole, both on private property and along public rights-of-way. Data now flow into spreadsheets and databases. Intuition and the cultivated eye have been joined, if not overtaken, by hard numbers. The urban forest has become a datascape as well as a treescape. Planners now have the ability to make the urban forest performative per the environmental criteria driving land use in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and elsewhere.
Accordingly, the discussion has shifted from what a tree can be just by proudly standing there to what it can do. A predominantly aesthetic point of view, with a vague affinity to nature and the civic realm, has been transformed into a more comprehensive view that includes “tree equity” and other social dimensions of the environment. Phillips says computer-based mapping reveals that less-affluent areas have a lower ratio of trees per acre and therefore receive fewer environmental benefits, like shade and cleaner air, which could have an impact on public health. Planners can, over time, adjust plantings to be more equitable, calculating, too, for levels of water consumption.
In 2011, Santa Monica issued an Urban Forest Master Plan, which spells out the ways trees improve human health, economic development, air quality, public safety, and environmental resilience. Wells explains that research revealed that the collective tree canopy on private property is getting smaller because of house additions encroaching on surrounding yards. In short, demands on the space occupied by a tree compete with one another. A tree with a spreading canopy capable of vaulting the street might also spread in the other direction, across a front yard, and block sunlight from reaching solar panels, turning the apparently benign choice of a tree into a public-private issue. The power of the city to control the urban forest is limited to medians and the narrow public right-of-way between the paved street and the property line.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PASADENA
More than a century ago, when Americans first ventured to Southern California by train, it was basically a desert, with few native trees and little water but great potential as a garden city. Many of the newcomers brought with them notions of trees from their geographic backgrounds, a sense of entitlement perhaps unjustified by the existing ecosystem.
Especially in the more affluent suburbs, trees followed. Imported water eventually made possible a wide world of immigrant trees in Pasadena, a wintering destination for wealthy midwesterners. With a warmer sun than in Santa Monica and less salty air, the planted trees in Pasadena exulted along its streets and in its yards, joining the already robust population of live oaks. Palms of all varieties and heights now line streets that are themselves crossed by other streets lined with other palms or other species. Lush magnolias abound in the posher neighborhoods. Even scrappy eucalyptuses, imported from Australia, have an honored place, lending an informality to their respective neighborhoods. A private civic group, Pasadena Beautiful, was founded in 1960 to maintain and enhance the city’s arboreal traditions.
Pasadena, with its connections to eastern wealth, has a long history of estates, especially around the Arroyo, in the city’s west, and in the southeast part of the city, near the Huntington Library, with its vast gardens of specimen trees. In these estates, the landscaping migrates from the street into the acreage around mansions, abandoning the matrix in favor of English-style gardens rolling across the hillscape. The public realm gives way to the private, ignoring the issue of how landscaping can define the public realm. Here, the sense of community cedes to private enclaves in a parklike environment inaccessible to the public.
In a similar way, in today’s environmentally progressive times, a growing emphasis on the urban forest shifts the focus from the street to the entire field, even when the field is subdivided into suburban lots rather than estates. Trees that turn streets into linear rooms or vaulted cathedrals or motor piazzas have a presence outside the ken of performative metrics on spreadsheets.
Still, planners know the difference, even if there isn’t a row or column devoted to the unquantifiable issue of “civic presence.” Michael King, a certified arborist and a forestry program coordinator in Pasadena’s Department of Public Works, points to the areas in Pasadena with a greater density of green corridors, even to a locally famous street known as Christmas Tree Lane (a.k.a. Santa Rosa Avenue), just over Pasadena’s border in Altadena.
Somehow this street became lined for 7/10 of a mile, or about seven blocks, with long rows of deodar cedars, a tree of outrageous and eccentric beauty that might be taken straight from a magical street conjured by Dr. Seuss on a make-believe eighth day of the week. None of the houses themselves are grand. The modesty of the houses notwithstanding, the architectural grandeur of the trees out front leaves an indelible impression on the imagination, binding the neighborhood into a tight and proud visual community.
Christmas Tree Lane does not argue against the urban forest, of which it is now inextricably, functionally, and justifiably a part. It does strongly argue, however, for continuing to see the trees for the forest in what is now a changed, larger, and much improved environmental picture. Lit during the Christmas season, the cedars have attracted throngs since the 1920s. The double rows of trees are both a façade of the city and a façade of the forest. The environment benefits, and people really like it.•
Joseph Giovannini, a Harvard-trained architect, was born in Lincoln Heights, a short mile from the LA River.
