(Editor’s note: Barbara Marinacci is a board member of Palisades Beautiful, an organization founded in 1974 to beautify the community by arranging to plant parkway trees along the town’s residential streets (between the sidewalk and the curb). True, parkways belong to whoever owns the property the house sits on, but L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services is entitled to regulate whatever gets planted there, since it claims a right-of-way.) By BARBARA MARINACCI Special to the Palisadian-Post As the Palisades Beautiful Web site proclaims, ‘Our goal is to make the Palisades a healthier and more beautiful place to live. Trees provide cleaner air, improve property values, create homes for wildlife, mitigate sound pollution, and reduce global warming.’ Who can argue effectively against such worthy aims? Our group’s tree-loving members’few in number but hardworking and intrepid’reconnoiter neighborhoods around town, looking for the absence of parkway trees. Whenever and wherever a vacancy gets spotted, the site will be considered ripe for a future tree planting ‘ which can take place if the homeowner wishes to acquire a new tree (free for the asking) and notifies Palisades Beautiful. Most Pacific Palisades residents have noticed that the street where they live is adorned and shaded primarily by one particular type of tree. This custom of aiming for uniformity in street trees in towns and cities around the world goes far back in time. It’s an aesthetic issue: in both commercial and residential areas, streets look far more attractive and orderly when featuring only one species. So when you gaze up and down a row of specially chosen trees lined up along most Palisades streets, you’ll notice that tree homogeneity pleases and soothes the eye. With a miscellany of trees there’s a discordant mixture of different trunk sizes and shapes, highly variable limb-branching patterns, wide ranges in leaf shapes and hues, and maybe showy blossoms whose colors clash. The push to create street-tree standardization throughout much of the nation begins, historically and currently, whenever a city or township’s administration, or a citizens’ group, decides that it’s a good civic move, resulting in drawing up a list of different kinds of trees judged desirable for lining up along sidewalks or roadways. Sometimes people just pick their own favorites, or conveniently settle upon various tree species that are already majorities in place on certain streets. Thus in the mid-20th century, widespread efforts started in communities within Los Angeles and elsewhere in the county to create city systems of ‘designated street trees”officially prescribed trees for particular streets. Since Santa Monica launched doing this early, it served as a local model when designated street-tree plantings began taking place in Pacific Palisades in the mid-1970s, spearheaded by Palisades Beautiful, which worked to gain approval of its proposed selections by L.A.’s Street Tree Division. Before this, the town’s population of street trees was much smaller than now, and mostly helter-skelter. One of our town’s greatest claims to environmental glory is its handsome collection of street trees, many now in their prime. As for street-tree choices, there’s never a shortage. Our Southern California landscape has proved especially hospitable to all sorts of tree immigrants’thriving in people’s yards, in parks, along streets (whether they’re designated or not), or surviving out on their own, untended, often having sprouted from wayward seeds. Those likely to do best in Los Angeles nowadays, with the increasingly needed rationing of water, are drought-tolerant ones, indigenous either to California and the Southwest or to various Mediterranean-like climates elsewhere in the world. However, a large number of trees have ended up as unsuitable candidates for street living in Los Angeles. Selecting particular trees for designation works best, of course, when from long experience arborists know which species are most likely not only to thrive in the Southland, but also under particular circumstances. Some trees also just prove to be nuisances. In Los Angeles, Urban Forestry, a division within the Bureau of Street Services, makes such recommendations, helps to set up street-tree plantings, and then concerns itself with their overall wellbeing. Currently, 35 species are named as designated street trees in Pacific Palisades. Over time, the list inevitably has somewhat changed, as when a newly introduced street tree fails to thrive or another suffers from unanticipated problems as it ages ‘ each type then retiring, to make room for a different designation. Some previously healthy trees too can show vulnerabilities to microbial diseases, introduced by insects, transmitted by fungal spores, or coming from some pathogenic soil sickness that may defy both diagnosis and remedy. Occasionally a whole row of trees will succumb and die. Of course, not all Palisades streets can even accommodate parkway or sidewalk trees. Some are just too curvy and narrow. Also, newer sections of the Palisades may not have places for trees right next to the streets. For instance, in the 1970s and ’80s, the developer of the Highlands didn’t plan to put in parkways, and even sidewalks don’t contain tree wells or openings for trees. Yet this upscale settlement up in the Santa Monica Mountains still has abundant trees right next to its streets. Many are at the very edge of front yards or on banks above sidewalks, with long, leafy branches hanging over to provide cool shade. If you’re fairly well acquainted with trees, you’ll have no trouble identifying such beloved street trees prevalent in the Palisades as the jacaranda, magnolia, red-flowering eucalyptus, liquidambar, and California sycamore. You may be less familiar with other ones, like the camphor, chitalpa, Mexican palo verde, California pepper, Idaho locust, and Brisbane box. Some familiar-looking trees designated for streets elsewhere’ficus, ginkgo, pittosporum, carob, coral tree, deodar, and golden trumpet, to name just a few’somehow didn’t get adopted. If you need help identifying the type of tree that grows predominantly along your street, visit www.palisadesbeautiful.org and click on the link to ‘Official Street Tree Designations.’ For more information, just Google the tree’s name and this will lead you to various informative Web sites. Remember that Palisades Beautiful can only plant a designated street tree in your parkway, following the rules and guidelines of the Urban Forestry division. Our organization obtains nursery-grown trees through the generosity of the DWP’s Trees for a Green L.A., and the L.A. Conservation Corps delivers the trees for planting. We also pay for the cost of the plantings themselves, using funds generously donated over the years by individuals and charitable groups’most notably the Pacific Palisades Junior Women’s Club. If you’re interested in having a free street tree planted in your parkway, here’s what you can do: ’ Send an e-mail request directly to: palisadesbeautiful@verizon.net ’ Write a note to: Palisades Beautiful, P.O. Box 1072, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 ’ Or call June Payne (PB president) at (310) 454-1685 Be aware that the tree you’ll receive will be considered the property of the City of Los Angeles, even though it’s growing on land owned by you. Don’t expect, though, to ever get much hands-on help from Urban Forestry and Street Services, though you can ask them for advice. Like many City services, these two interconnected agencies are underfunded, understaffed and overworked. The tree-trimming schedule is so jammed up that they might visit your street with special equipment only every 12 years or so. But you will need to apply for a permit from Street Services if you intend to prune your parkway tree. (Topping trees, though, is an absolute no-no.) For a permit, contact Street Services: http://bss.lacity.org/Administration/service, or call (800) 996-2489. Along with a permit, they will supply pruning instructions and safety guidelines. Busy and stressed as they are, Street Services nevertheless will manage to handle emergency situations, as when entire trees or some of their limbs are so overgrown, brittle, or diseased that they have already been taken down by the wind, or else pose obviously imminent dangers to human safety. Also, you may have to ask Street Services to come and extract a dead parkway tree on your block.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
