MAGNOLIA TREES MAKE CRACKS THAT OFFEND HIS NATIVE INTELLIGENCE
By Joe Weinstein
[EDITOR'S NOTE: After reading Dave Wielenga's story about Mike Evans' upcoming how-and-why-to-replace-your-grass-lawn-with-California-native-plants presentation (Nov. 10 at 6:30 p.m. at Groundwater Treatment Plant at Redondo and Spring), reader Joe Weinstein began to reflect on his own native-plant garden---and got a little riled up.]
Eight years ago, before Long Beach Water Department incentives, my son and I simply began gradually replacing our Bixby Knolls front-yard lawn with California native plants—shrubs (mostly), a couple trees and grass bunches and flowers. It’s a task that’s pretty well done now.
Tree of Life nursery in San Juan Capistrano would have been a good plant supplier, but we used mostly the first of two equally distant—and good—alternatives: Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley and Rancho
Santa Ana in Claremont. The natives have been maturing, with all the advantages noted, and I’m very happy with them.
But I do have four cantankerous perspectives:
(1) Water Department has its heart in a good place, but a weak brain. The first incentive to water conservation is to price water (beyond a minimum “lifeline” amount per household size) realistically high, at cost of future replacement, so
that there is an AUTOMATIC pricing incentive, with or without extra incentive programs. Instead, they give us irrelevant and ineffectual restrictions about when we get to dump, anyhow, way too much water on lawns.
(2) In terms just of water usage, even a lawn is OK—as long as you’re willing to let it survive on rainwater and thereby dry out (but need no mowing) over summer.
(3) Unlike Evans we were unwilling to dump chemicals on our lawn to kill it. In a few places (not under well-established shrubs) it hangs on (as a kind of weed). Even so, maintenance of our native front yard mainly consists of raking up leaves of the city’s sidewalk-subverting non-native parkway magnolia.
(4) Maybe Water Department has a nice list of OK plants, but Public Works Department still has not altered its oh-so-mid-20th-century-eastern-city list of approved parkway trees. Why is no one on its case? Thanks to its stance, even though I’m willing to spend my own money to do it, I cannot cut down and replace their parkway magnolia with an urban-life-friendly species of native oak—even one of our California threatened species—because its approved list has no native oak on it.
3 Comments
Well I agree that Mangolias are pretty ridiculous, but I’m not so sure if an Oak tree would do well in a parkway due to its size. It’s a tricky balance between “native” and drought tolerant and size appropriate. I planted Gold Medallion trees in the parkway in front of my apartment. They were one of only about six trees that were on the list for narrow parkways.
Dave, Yes, narrow parkways may present a problem. Otherwise, oaks -including natives – could make more sense than many of those approved trees. In fact (despite the best efforts of PubWorks?) I found a couple reasonably mature and non-sidewalk-subverting parkway oaks on Chestnut St. 1 mile W. of my house.
I have a dream – one seemingly much more modest than the Rev. King’s. Rather than requiring a parkway tree to come from a seemingly arbitrary species list, someday even Long Beach Pub Works will instead go by a rule of reason and use published cogent quantified performance criteria. Given suitable criteria, it would be fine to tell us that automatically certain listed species will work, but at least the list wouldn’t serve to arbitrarily and unfairly exclude other species.
There’s hope, Joe, in a new committee recently organized at City Hall. It seems that every city department designed their own tree list for their own purposes since a tree that’s suitable for a city park (Parks, Rec and Marine) won’t necessarily work in a parkway (Public Works) due to growth habit, height, debris, water needs, etc. It’s lead to confusion for sure. The tree lists have been consolidated and are now being studied and ‘pruned’ with the help of arborists, landscaping folk and city staff. Sustainable City commissioners (I’m one) have been invited to participate too. I’m not sure of the committee’s schedule but a new tree list – one unified, detailed list for use across city departments, including suggested parkway trees- is definitely in the works.