True Dirt

a tree burns in oakland

or why some people think we need to be protected from our trees.

You may remember, Gentle Reader, that in our last episode it was revealed that a column I wrote for the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago raised the hackles of one reader and definitely got a rise out of this writer.

So let us turn now to the righteous complaints of one Elizabeth A. Baugh (strangely apt) of Brownsville, Texas who writes, "While I am sympathetic to Briggs Nisbet's desire to enhance her property, I was disconcerted to read her reaction to the City of Oakland's enforcement of landscaping regulations."

While I am sympathetic to Ms. Baugh's discomfiture about my reaction to Oakland's landscaping regulations I am truly puzzled that she thought I was writing about a desire to enhance my property. Not that it is my property. I only rent the garden, unfortunately. Which is why the landlord called The Tree Guy. But I digress.

Ms. Baugh goes on to tell us that while people in "...other parts of the United States..." may think us strange for having landscape regulations, Bay Areans know that it's all about the Oakland (not Berkeley) Hills Firestorm of 1991 in which at least 25 people died and nearly 3,000 homes burned--"....the vast majority single-family homes."

I know that people in other parts of the United States think we're strange but it's not for our landscape regulations. I do think there's something strange about that last bit about single-family homes. Are we to be more saddened that the burned homes were single-family homes instead of apartments? Or, is this a clue to the Great Fire-landscape regulations connection? In fact, a huge condo/apartment complex was the scene of most of the human deaths of the Oakland Hills fire. But I assume that Ms. Baugh is linking single-family homes to yards full of trees closer than 10 feet to the roofline.

The letter ends with these emphatic words. "The City of Oakland is correct to enforce regulations put in place to protect its citizens." There's something strangely familiar about that tone. Do the words "homeland security" come to your mind too?

So I come to the heart of this letter, and the burning question, "do trees cause fires? Or, more specifically, "did trees cause the Oakland Hills Fire?"

Before we can answer that question (and I feel a little research project coming on) I have to explain that I was, like Elizabeth A. Baugh, living in the Bay Area at the time of the horrific fire. And it was horrific. Nobody close to me died but someone very close to me lost his house and all his possessions. The house he built by hand over five long years. Possessions collected over a lifetime (and part of mine).

The fire raged for days, blackening the sky over San Francisco Bay and raining charred debris as far as 20 miles away. At the end of the first day I stood on Broadway at 51st Street in Oakland and stared at a wall of flames completely engulfing the 1000-foot high hills. The fire jumped an 8-lane highway and blew back up the hillsides, burning houses at the bottom and, strangely, sparing houses at the top.

Fire temperatures exceeded 2000 degrees. The flames melted steel and turned brick to ashes. At my friend's house, newly built to the latest fire and earthquake standards, the remaining ceiling sprinklers spewed water on smoldering ruins for two days because nobody could enter the area until it cooled down. The house was gone except for a piece of the kitchen counter which had an unopened (but defrosted) package of Foster Farms chicken breasts sitting on top.

When it was over, the hills overlooking north Oakland were black and empty, denuded of houses, apartments, cars, streetlights, and vegetation. Except for some scorched coast live oaks, and the biggest Eucalyptus trees. The ground was a thick layer of ashes.

Of course one of the first questions everybody wanted to know was how did it start and why. We knew some of the answer. It began on one of those dry, hot October days when the wind is blowing hard from the east--Santa Ana's they call them in Southern California. Rain doesn't fall between May and December in our "mediterranean" climate so Fall is full of dry tinder. A couple of carpenters were seen having a backyard barbeque on a building site the day before. The fire department put out a small hillside fire but didn't stay around to make sure it was dead. And then there were the trees--forests of huge eucalyptus trees that shed great swathes of their bark which collected in piles on the ground. Decades of hill dwellers had added their own vegetative excesses to the densely shrubbed slopes.

People began to call for the remaining trees to be cut down--all of them, no matter if they might still be alive. Somebody, something had to pay.

a tree grows in oakland

I have been very happy here at T.D. blogulating about my garden in what I assumed was near total obscurity, giving vent to my botanically related passions, and whiling away some boring hours in my virtual garden when I couldn't be in the real one. Then along comes the New York Time Magazine....

Long story short: two Sundays ago (5-16-04) a piece I wrote for the magazine appeared in the back page Lives column. The magazine's story editor, who must have engaged in some serious web sleuthing to find me, wanted something for their landscape architecture "special"; she particularly was interested in my adventures with The Tree Guy. I had four days to come up with the column. So began "A Tree Grows in Oakland" (which, unfortunately due to the NYT's business model, you can only read the first few lines of at their online archives--unless you want to pay for the rest of the 900 words).

The day after the NYT magazine appears I get a call from an Oakland city councilmember's staffer about my column. It seems they are fighting the City's tree ordinance and would I like to participate in some way. Would I. (I'll report on the meeting at City Hall later this week.)

Of course I also get calls and e-mail from friends, current and long-lost, including an ex-girlfriend of an ex-boyfriend--and an ex-boyfriend of a friend, etc. etc. Wondering if there could be more than one Briggs Nisbet in the world. I suspect not.

That's all very nice I think. Now I haven't totally wasted my life blogging about things that nobody ever reads (approximately my mother's opinion), and writing things that will never be published because I won't submit them anywhere. It only takes one NYT Magazine column and I'm A Writer.

So, life goes on, two weeks pass, and me and X (my partner and fellow blogulator) are visiting our friends Martha (an actual published novelist) and Rich of T.D. fame, and I see the Sunday NYT Magazine lying on their kitchen table. (Here I have to confess we don't actually get the Sunday Times--just the weekly). And it's open to the Letters page and under "A Tree Grows in Oakland" are two letters--from two actual readers. I am stunned. Lo and behold one of my letters is "pro" and the other is "con."

I read with fascination the "con" letter and here, Dear Reader, I must end and you must wait until the next entry to hear the rest of this story because it must lead, inevitably, to one of my rare rants....

the scarlet oak

mother's day visit

My mother's garden is nearing its half century. She has been tending it for most of those years. I remember when we moved into the house how large and exotic the yard seemed. Someone, probably the original owners, had carefully planned the two large patios, and laid out the paths from the side yard to the back. They had also planted things oddly out of place in this western landscape--a huge evergreen magnolia tree, a lilac bush, camellias, an apple tree, and a concord grape on a metal arbor. Also, a weeping cherry, an elm, and a mimosa or silk tree. Only the magnolia and the silk tree remain.

It all had a rather southern feel to me. I think less because I knew what a southern garden looked like than because of the paper mural that covered a wall of the living room of the house. My mother loved that wall paper. But then, she is a southern girl at heart. The mural was a source of embarrassment and even shame for me although I liked having a picture of a vast garden on our wall. However, the grey-green groves of rhododendron and palmettos and weeping willow trees by a meandering river couldn't make up for the looming white mansion with its columned portico. It probably wasn't Tara itself. But it might as well have been. A wall paper plantation was a suspicious oddity in this suburb of middle class "ranches" and fifties-style tract homes in the post civil rights era.

The plantation is still on the wall but the garden has changed dramatically. It no longer looks southern at all. The trees and shrubbery are not contained in their plots and have lost the shape they were put there to display. It's as if they have outgrown their gardener, found their own character and defied the design they had no part in planning.

Mother's roses are old, the canes gray. Her Victorian "knot" garden of clipped herbs now is more of a labyrinth, with bare spots in the hedges. My father's lawn is weary. He tells me he's through with trying to keep it green and wants to cover it with redwood bark. And the silk tree is dying.

It used to shade half the garden with its far reaching limbs of feathery green. Like great green wings, its boughs seemed to float above the patio, quelling the dry heat and bringing a deep and pleasant shade.

I stood under it today and could see mostly sky through its remaining branches, gradually lopped off as the rot claimed them. My mother said the tree man told her it had maybe a few more years before it would have to be taken out. She talked about planting a new tree near the old one, to start it before the silk tree died. But they haven't done that yet. And I am not sure they will.

Fickle Nature

Web search on "botanical forensics":

"Molecular analysis of trace botanical evidence is a developing forensic discipline. Traditionally, the morphology of plant debris has been examined for useful forensic data. "

No job openings: Senior Detective, Office of Plant Harm and Abuse.

Go figure.

Heaven or Las Vegas

Nature is fickle. Not cruel -- just uncertain.

This is what I want to know: Why do some plants pop out from under the dirt, grow quickly, throw out lots of leaves, and then burst into flower with nary a drop of fertilizer? Some struggle, appear late, are spindly, do nothing. Others: still born.

I bought four new roses this year. Two are doing beautifully. The other two might just be dead. All were handled, planted, fed exactly the same way. The rational horticulturalist in me says that it's just bad luck. But somewhere inside a voice says "It's your fault."

You could rake in the dough with a career in botanical forensics. Sadly, none in the yellow pages.

Silver lining: Every dead plant is an opportunity for further shopping.