Seeds of Doubt

The seedlings were meant to grow into the workhorses of Orange County’s newly planted tree population when they arrived from Australia more than a century ago.

The stately eucalyptus would take root and shoot rapidly upward--with some reaching heights of 200 feet within decades--and break the desert winds for the nascent citrus industry. Their limbs would offer shade from the sun and wood for railroad ties, furniture and fireplaces.

Little of that industrious promise was fulfilled.

Railroad companies learned the trunks did not grow straight enough for decent ties. Furniture makers were stumped by the brittle wood that split too easily to hold its shape.

As homes, offices and industry crowded in, more problems came to light as the easily felled branches of aging trees worried homeowners and insurance carriers. The trees grew so tall that they blocked prime views. They flamed up like torches in fires, taking whole communities with them; fire experts blame them for contributing to the 1996 Lemon Heights fire, the deadly 1991 Oakland Hills fire and repeated blazes in Topanga Canyon and Malibu.

Now, communities all over Southern California are contemplating the future of their eucalyptus trees, as public works officials move to bring some of them down for public safety.

David Niederhaus, general services director for Newport Beach, discovered in March that about 50 of the city’s towering blue gum eucalyptus trees were suffering diseases that strike the species after they pass their 70th year.

Ten trees were removed and 40 are being monitored.

“The whole group has to come out,” Niederhaus said. “They’ve reached their life span, and they are in a very congested residential area. One fell over and took off the corner of a house. That’s what happens when you take a large, stately tree and put it in a cityscape. It’s not the tree’s fault.”

At least four automobiles have been crushed by falling limbs over the last three years in Newport Beach alone. “It’s a liability concern for any city,” Niederhaus said.

In Simi Valley, public works crews tried to take down 35 eucalyptus trees because of root rot and termites, but they ran into a wall of protest. They ended up doing a tree-by-tree evaluation and cutting down only 17. The trees were historic, residents protested; they had been planted in the 1920s as windbreaks for citrus groves and deserved to stay.

Ray Treder, deputy public works engineer in Simi Valley, said the trees may be part of agricultural history, but they cannot thrive as urbanization springs up around them.

“Development encroaches on their territory, and they are not terribly compatible,” he said. “These are remnants from the 1930s and 1940s, and people try to save them when tracts and commercial centers develop around them. They lose irrigation. They get too much fill on the roots or the roots become exposed. It’s very stressful to the trees.”

Lake Forest had to impose eucalyptus-trimming moratoriums between April and October to discourage the Australian longhorn borer beetle from thriving on dead vegetation, and Woodland Hills feuded with a local golf course for weeks in February over who would remove fallen eucalyptus branches from the rooftops of residences.

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That doesn’t stop people from falling in love with the eucalyptus.

One Newport Beach homeowner became so attached to her trees she chained herself, her dog and five friends to the trunks when the city tried to cut them down in 1988. Tustin named the red flowering eucalyptus the city’s official tree in 1969 to honor three that have lived since Columbus Tustin planted them in 1870.

William C. Walker of San Francisco imported the first eucalyptus seedlings to the United States in 1859, Tustin historian Carol H. Jordan said.

They made their way south when windbreaks were needed for orange groves in the 1870s.

Orange County historian Jim Sleeper traced some early groves to George Irvine, who bought a shipment of 12,000 seedlings for his Irvine ranch in 1888.

“There are people who really like them and people who really hate them,” said Charlie Everett, a Fullerton resident of more than 70 years and the editor of Tree Talk, the newsletter for the Orange County Tree Society.

“It’s an evolutionary thing,” Everett said. “When there was lots of open space, the eucalyptus grew quickly and did a good job. Now we need trees that do a different job. We don’t want something too tall because it blocks people’s views. We don’t want trees that drop berries and things. As times change, the ‘tree of the month’ changes. The question now is, are the trees safe for the community?”

They can be, said Gary Glotfelty, the wild land fire defense planner for the Orange County Fire Authority. If trees are planted a suitable distance from others and dutifully maintained, they would be fine.

The problem is that they usually are not well maintained. And when dry limbs fall on top of dead leaves and a spark flies in the wind, they can become disasters.

“It’s been recognized by the various fire departments as a high-risk tree,” he said. “In Orange County, they are the most flammable tree. It burns so hot that when a grove catches, it creates so much heat and energy it moves to nearby houses and it’s hard to control. . . . It is a beautiful tree and it makes excellent firewood.”

Glotfelty and others in the Fire Authority are cutting down about 75 eucalyptus trees each year from Peters Canyon, a wilderness park in east Orange County adjacent to a residential area. Because of a history of wildfires, the trees have been deemed too dangerous to be allowed to flourish.

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Since the Malibu brush fire of 1993, the Los Angeles County Fire Department has required residents of wild land areas in Topanga and Malibu to trim low branches of fast-burning trees such as the eucalyptus or face fines. Some residents who loved the trees in their shaggy natural state fought with the fire authorities over the trimming.

But it was the brittle tree’s tendency to drop branches that led to the DanaWoods Homeowners Assn. decision to remove hundreds of them from its Dana Point development last week, infuriating many homeowners. Falling limbs are creating hazards and threatening the association’s insurance coverage, the directors said. Residents went to court, obtaining a temporary restraining order against the cutting.

Falling limbs have hurt and even killed people over the years. In February, two Pomona College students were crushed under a eucalyptus while driving through an El Nino storm.

But those accidents are relatively few and are far outweighed by the many benefits of the tree, eucalyptus lovers say.

Bonnie McKenna, a DanaWoods homeowner, said the vast groves have created a beautiful ecosystem around the home she loves.

“There are lots of owls around,” said McKenna, who is helping wage a legal fight to keep the trees. “We did have a tree down with El Nino, but that’s no reason to go through a wholesale deforestation plan.”

Nann Von Oppenheim of Newport Beach felt even more strongly about her two 100-year-old eucalyptus trees when she chained herself to one after the city tried to remove them because they were buckling the sidewalk in 1988.

She was so upset at the prospect that she spent tens of thousands of dollars in a successful legal fight. She considered the expense justified because the canopy of leaves over her second-floor deck helped her cope with a growing pile of personal problems.

“I’m not a crusader, but I know what feeds my soul,” said Von Oppenheim, a 69-year-old interior designer. “Without this house and the trees and the boats in the water, I would just die.”