The Slow, Inevitable Death of San Francisco's Tree Plantations
2008-09-27 12:35:55 -0700, Tinman said
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Yesterday afternoon on a glorious, wind-still day, a large Monterey pine simply pitched over, smashing across the main path through Edgehill Mt Park and onto one of our primary planting areas.
This view looks uphill to the tree’s base, located about half way up the “upper slope”. The trunk runs downhill toward the camera. It stripped off large branches from adjacent trees and crushed the fence when it landed.
The crown splattered across the trail and part of last season’s plantings:
Fortunately, no one was injured by this — but they certainly could have been. Paul witnessed this from above on Edgehill Way where he was working at his nursery, and the tree simply gave way suddenly, quickly, and without warning. On a gorgeous day like yesterday, plenty of people could have been there.
What this event underscores is that the “forests” that newcomers and the naive think they see here in San Francisco are in fact nothing more than aging tree plantations. This particular tree was part of Adolph Sutro’s quixotic quest to make San Francisco look like the hills of his home region in Germany — and to scoop up some fat tax breaks then available as well as to create timber to feed the sawmill he constructed at the base of Golden Gate Heights.
These trees are now a century old and are nearing the end of their natural life spans. Even where they are not diseased or encumbered by thick wraps of ivy and cape ivy, these trees simply are dying a natural death.
As these trees come down, sunlight penetration to the understory is greatly improved, allowing a more complex and better-suited-to-our-climate plant community to emerge. It is actually a good thing that these trees die and fall; with each one that does, Sutro’s errors are corrected.
Nevertheless, there are a number (granted, a small number — but a very, very vocal number) of people in San Francisco who aggressively oppose cutting any of these trees. Paradoxically — and of course consistency is never part of their position — they turn around and savage the RPD whenever a tree does fall and cause damage — such as the horrific death of a dog walker at Stern Grove earlier this year. They damn RPD when it takes trees out — and when it doesn’t.
In any case, regardless of what humans think one way or another, the situation ultimately will be decided by immutable laws of gravity and organism senescence. We’ve just witnessed incontrovertible proof of this again at Edgehill.
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