A PRIL 1970.The Beatles announce their breakup. U.S. forces gather forthe invasion of Cambodia.By most measures, the world had seen better days.Using a slogan modified from John and Yoko — “Give Earth a Chance”— students at some 1,500 American schools prepare for a nationwideEnvironmental Teach-In, better known as the first Earth Day.

In Ventura County, 50 tree-huggers from Moorpark College lie in front of bulldozers onLos Angeles Avenue near Simi Valley. Even here, far away from Berkeley, “ecology-mindedstudents” (to use the words of the Los Angeles Times) could be found protesting the wideningof a tree-lined road.The police arrest 10. On April 22, the defendants are arraigned in juvenilecourt. By the end of the week, the trees are gone.

What had been lost? Ancient redwoods? Historic oaks? Not quite. The trees in questionwere Australian eucalyptus.

Since the 1850s, Californians had assisted a continuous introduction of eucalypts punc-tuated by two frenzied periods — one in the 1870s, the other from 1907 to 1913. Plantersbelieved variously that eucalypts would provide fuel, improve the weather, boost farm pro-ductivity, defeat malaria, preserve watersheds, and thwart a looming timber famine. First andforemost, however, Californians planted the trees to domesticate and beautify the landscape,to make it more green.

By the mid-20th century, the distinctive blue-green foliage of eucalyptus trees could beseen all over the state.The Australian genus was far more prevalent than the redwood, theofficial state tree, and scarcely less iconic.The immigrant plant had been naturalized in the

California’s love-hate relationship with eucalyptus trees

by Jared Farmer

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HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 19

refers to the shape of the blue gum’sflower cap (see drawing before page 1).Piles of detached caps can be foundbeneath any E. globulus, along withcopious leaf litter. The thin, sickle-shaped mature leaves have distinctivecoloring — somewhat green, almostblue, slightly gray.Their menthol smellis equally memorable.This evergreen— or ever-blue-green — species canalso be identified by its bark, which inthe summer and fall sheds in long rib-bons. The magnificent blue gum is

quite possibly the messiest tree on earth.More significantly, it is — with thepossible exception of redwoods — thefastest sprouting tree on earth.

In the 19th century, E. globulus hadanother perceived virtue. The fast-growing tree was also a “fever-reducer.”According to medical assumptions ofthe time, malaria and other maladiesresulted from so-called bad air — aninfecting vapor that transpired fromovergrown bottomlands. In multipleways, eucalypts acted as a prophylaxis.By soaking up water, they reduced thesize of miasmatic breeding grounds.More importantly, their pungent leavesand litter disinfected the soil and pre-vented unhealthful decomposition.Asthey “inhaled,” these trees absorbedthe bad air and exchanged it with“balsamic exhalations.”

In California, enthusiasm for the“fever-tree” peaked in the early 1870swith backing from health experts andrailroad managers.The sight of so manyhealthy-looking trees inevitably inspireddreams of profit. Soon the demand for

eucalyptus seeds had outpaced supply.Farmers in the interior valleys triedplanting on their “wastelands” — thedry or hilly or alkaline spots wheregrain and vegetables would not grow.Any profit from telegraph poles, rail-road ties, and firewood would be abonus. By the late 1870s, the overlap-ping medical and commercial fads inblue gums had transformed the lookof lowland California. In the words ofone grower, eucalyptus had becomethe “tree of trees — its banners arewaving around our state and over allour homes.”

E. globulus was not immune fromcriticism, however. In 1877, a SanFrancisco newspaper printed a satiri-cal editorial:

In Australia,where this thing growswild, the country is so healthy thatpeople have to go to New Zealandto commit suicide….This absurdvegetable is now growing all overthis State. One cannot get out ofits sight. It asserts itself in longtwin ranks, between which thetraveler must run a sort of moralgauntlet, and crops up everywherein independent ugliness. It defacesevery landscape with blotches ofblue, and embitters every breezewith suggestions of an old woman’smedicine chest. Let us have nomore of it.

Disenchantment only grew throughthe mid-1880s. As eucalypts reachedmaturity, planters reevaluated the ben-efits and costs of these huge, messy,water-loving plants that could suckwells dry and strangle nearby stone-fruit trees with their aggressive roots.To make matters worse, the wood didnot prove to be as enduring as adver-tised.Railroad ties cracked; poles rottedin the ground.

Yet even as farmers turned againstthe blue gum, urbanites — especially

cultural sense: Californians adopted thegenus as an honorary native. In certainareas of the state,meanwhile, the intro-duced plant became naturalized in thebiological sense: the eucalyptus treesbecame self-reproducing forests.In time,these two versions of naturalizationwould come into conflict.

This arboreal story begins in SanFrancisco after the Gold Rush. Theinstant city — constructed with wood,fenced with wood, heated with wood— was located on a peninsular sanddune.Local supplies of the magnificentCoast Live Oak and even its scrawnycousin, the Coastal Scrub Oak, rapidlydiminished. As early as 1860, a localcommentator lamented the loss of treesfrom the coastal hills and mountains.The oak lands of Oakland had been“thinned and mutilated,” leaving thefirewood supply “almost exhausted.”

Californians wanted more thanreplacement trees. From the begin-ning, the importation of non-nativeflora was driven as much by aestheticdesires as economic needs. Post–GoldRush Californians were not satisfiedwith the existing landscape. It lookedunfinished. A land blessed with somuch sunshine, warmth, and fertilitydemanded more greenery, flowers,and shade.Where nature erred, settlerscould repair.

Of the many trees tested by GoldenState arborists, Eucalyptus became aclear favorite. In the lowland regionsof California, the Australian genus ben-efited from ecological similarities anddissimilarities — a familiar two-season,fire-prone Mediterranean climate with-out all of the insects, birds, mammals,and diseases that fed on eucalypts DownUnder.As a result, the trees grew unusu-ally fast.

In the 19th century, Californiansoverwhelmingly grew just one of theroughly 800 Eucalyptus species, Tas-manian Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus).“Globulus” means “little button” and

From the beginning,the importation ofnon-native flora wasdriven as much byaesthetic desires aseconomic needs.

20 Spring/Summer 2007

those in the Bay Area — embraced itmore. San Francisco, which dreamedof becoming the Pacific equivalent ofNew York City, planted fast-growingseedlings (eucalypts as well as acacia,tamarisk, and Monterey Pine) to trans-form an expansive tract of shifting sandinto Golden Gate Park.

In the sunny Southland, too, thecultural elite favored trees, especiallyAustralian trees.Its colonies and ranchosoffered country living for city people.The exemplar was Pasadena, wherepeople created gardens with eucalyptsrather than forests of eucalypts. Just threeyears after moving to Pasadena in 1877,Jeanne Carr had a collection of 120

tree species at her arboretum (now thesite of the Norton Simon Museum).Carr favored E. ficifolia, an undersizedtree with oversized red flowers.

A new phase in the history ofCalifornia eucalypts began abruptlyin 1907, when the U.S. Forest Serviceraised an alarm about an impending“hardwood famine.” Unless scientificforesters intervened, the nation pos-sessed only “about a 15 years’ supply.”Oddly, this one statement in a seeming-ly obscure circular about the hardwoodsupply of the Appalachian Mountainshad a singular and phenomenal influ-ence on the California landscape. Inthe words of historian Stephen Pyne,

“The resulting bubble was perhapsrivaled only by the tulip mania thatswept 17th-century Holland.”

The “boom” of 1907–13 was qual-itatively different from the “craze” ofthe 1870s. Back then, horticulturistshoped to complement their small,diversified farms with beautifying andclimate-changing windbreaks. Bluegums provided a nice side profit asfuel wood, but their reason for exis-tence was essentially noncommercial.By contrast, the new blue gum prophetsdid not care about health or beauty orshade or essential oil or even firewood.Their sole concern was saleable lumber.Speculators, not farmers, led the way.

The promotional literature from theperiod makes for amusing reading today.Start-up companies lured investors withpromises such as “Forests Grown WhileYou Wait.” Investing in eucalypts waspurportedly as solid as the Rock ofGibraltar.The Miracle Tree (or Wonder-Tree or Tree of Hope or Tree of Ful-fillment) offered more potential wealthto California than the Gold Rush.

The end of the cult of the blue gumcan be dated to 1913. In the fall, theindustrial trade magazine The HardwoodRecord published a devastating reportwritten by H.D.Tiemann of the U.S.Department of Agriculture’s ForestProducts Laboratory. Tiemann saidflatly that the eucalyptus industry inCalifornia was based on fictions, delu-sions, and fallacies. Most Californiaeucalypts “cannot be regarded as lum-ber in any true sense,” he wrote. Hecalled it “near-lumber.”For commercialutilization, every kind of California-grown eucalypt was more or less bad,Tiemann said, but the worst of all wasthe species used most, E. globulus.

And so most of the millions ofeucalypts planted in the state between1907 and 1913 were never even cut.The tree farms were largely abandoned.Surprisingly, though, the end of theboom did not end large-scale euca-

Eucalyptus deanii from The Huntington’s Australian Garden. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

lyptus planting in California. Citrusranchers put in windbreaks to shieldtheir perishable crops from Santa Anawinds.During the heyday of the Sunkistorange, thousands of linear miles ofeucalyptus windbreaks could be seenin Southern California.

Gum trees also dominated the land-scaping of the region’s first two promi-nent urban parks: Balboa Park in SanDiego and Elysian Park in Los Angeles.The region’s two largest arboretumslater added to the consensus about theappropriateness of the introduced trees.In the 1950s, the L.A. County Arbor-etum added a world-class Australiansection to its collections. Nearby,TheHuntington formally opened itsAustralian Garden in 1964.

By the mid-20th century,California’seucalyptic landscape stretched fromRedding in the north to Yuma,Ariz.,in the south. Sunset magazine publi-cized three sections of highways — twofrom the 101, one from the 99 —where an automobilist could drive anentire day without ever losing sight ofa blue-green tree.

Throughout the state, the stands ofgums that lined the entrances to townsbecame landmarks of home. Unfor-tunately, landmark trees often stood inthe way of modern roads, which re-quired extra width for shoulders,medians, and passing lanes.Thousandsof tall eucalypts fell during the longprocess of turning the San Jose–LosAngeles section of El Camino Realinto the four-lane US 101. Hoping topostpone this outcome, supervisors inVentura County declared a section ofblue gums along the 101 a “culturallandmark” in 1968.

In certain locations, notably the SanFernando Valley, suburban homeownersrallied to the defense of endangeredgums. In the postwar period, the num-ber of eucalypts in Los Angeles Countyand neighboring Orange County felldramatically as subdivisions replaced

citrus orchards. The blue gum wind-breaks could not — like individualorange trees — be incorporated intotiny house lots.They had to be bull-dozed. Homeowners in Canoga Parkstaged a summer-long campaign in1971 to save 142 old gums that addedbeauty and shade to a local park.

In the 1970s,however,people’s ideasabout eucalypts began to change.Thesame ecological thinking that inspiredEarth Day activists later caused envi-ronmentalists to reevaluate the placeof non-native species. Native-plantenthusiasts enlarged their conceptionof “weed” to include shrubs and trees.By the 1990s, eucalypts had becomeecological pariahs in the Bay Area.Here the former tree farms had natu-ralized in the biological sense — they

had become wild forests.Because theseforests grew in and around denselypopulated areas, they presented a firehazard.The hazard became all too realduring the deadly Oakland–BerkeleyHills firestorm of 1991.

Almost simultaneously, a series ofinsect infestations caused massive die-offs of old eucalypts throughout thestate. Ecologists and land managersseized the moment to advocate selec-tive habitat restoration.They wanted tobring back pieces of the pre-settlementCalifornia landscape, a place marked bygrasses more than trees,by browns morethan greens — and absolutely not byblue-greens.

People who dare to defend Cali-fornia eucalypts with ecological sup-port have one charismatic ally: theMonarch butterfly. While Monarchsare not endangered, the genetic poolof long-distance migrators faces anuncertain future because of habitat loss.Migrating Monarchs overwinter in justtwo areas: the eucalyptus belt of coastalCalifornia and the forested volcanichighlands of central Mexico. Themountain destination is highly con-centrated, whereas the coastal habitat

An automobilistcould drive an entireday without ever los-ing sight of a blue-green tree.

Highway near El Toro, Orange County, California, ca. 1930. Photo by Hogg. Automobile Club ofSouthern California collection, Huntington Library.

22 Spring/Summer 2007

Foot in MouthTHE TOOTHPICK’S SURPRISING DEBT TO THE SHOE

by Henry Petroski

consists of hundreds of scattered sitesfrom Mendocino to Ensenada.

From the Monarch’s point of view,the introduction of eucalypts was awonderful boon. Unlike native pines,cypresses, and redwoods, eucalypts areflowering plants; better yet, they flowerin the winter, when the travel-wearybutterflies need nectar. Unlike theCalifornia Sycamore — the only nativetree south of Big Sur that might havehosted colonies — gum trees keeptheir leaves year-round, providing bet-ter sites for attachment and protection.

In retrospect, introducing gums tothe Golden State was a beautiful mis-take. In certain nature preserves and incertain fire-prone neighborhoods it isworth the effort to remove them or tothin their numbers. But in other places— especially highways, parks, and cam-puses — the non-native trees havebecome vital elements of the Californiascene.This is the only place outside ofAustralia where eucalypts — like themor not — remind people of home.Their loss would be our loss. !

Jared Farmer is the Mellon PostdoctoralFellow with the Huntington-USC Instituteon California and the West for 2005–07.This article is drawn from his book-in-progress, If Trees Could Speak: Peoplesand Plants in California.

T HE TOOTHPICK IS A SINGLE OBJECT made of a singlematerial with, presumably, a single purpose.Anthropologiststell us they have found fossilized teeth with grooves thatare inexplicable — unless we assume that people a couple

million years ago used something like a toothpick.There have beenexamples of this found in Africa,Australia, North America, and justabout every continent in the world. So tooth picking, according tothe anthropologists, must be among the oldest habits known to man.

Tooth picking was also common in the ancient world. People inAsia, Greece, and Rome carried toothpicks that we would associatetoday with jewelry items — made of metal and worn around theneck on a chain so they could always be well at hand.

One of the most common natural materials used for toothpickshas been the goose quill.The feathers of geese and other birds hadbeen more important for making writing quills, but with the adventof the steel pen, the quill was almost totally displaced by the 1860s.So people who raised lots of geese — especially in countries likeFrance — had to look for possible new uses for their feathers.

Quill toothpick production became partially mechanized in thelatter part of the 19th century. But how could you be sure you weregetting a toothpick that was clean enough to put in your mouth? Toensure this, a lot of “hygienic” quill toothpicks came to be individu-ally wrapped, as are many wooden toothpicks today. But even whenwrapped, quill toothpicks didn’t age well.They became brittle, ren-dering them virtually useless.

Then along came the wooden toothpick, sending the quill intocertain obsolescence. Some of the oldest wooden toothpicks comefrom Portugal, principally from the Mondego Valley, where there is stilla cottage industry of making them by hand from orangewood.Thetoothpick extended naturally to Brazil — once a Portuguese colony —especially to the state of Pernambuco, which had rich forest resources.It was here that the story of an American toothpick empire began.

Charles Forster (1826–1901) was born into a prominent familyfrom the Boston area.As a young man he began working for anuncle who owned an import-export business dealing in trade betweenNew England and Brazil.The younger Forster noticed that Brazilianscarved toothpicks by hand, but he thought the product could be mademore economically and efficiently by machine. His plan was to offerup a little competition: he would manufacture wooden toothpicksin New England and export them to Brazil. But Forster was not an