City of Trees
ABOUT THE BOOK
How do we take in the beauty of our planet while processing the losses? What trees can survive in the city? Which animals can survive in the wild? How do any of us—humans, animals, trees—find a forest we can call home?
In these moving, thought-provoking essays Sophie Cunningham considers the meaning of trees and our love of them. She chronicles the deaths of both her fathers, and the survival of P-22, a mountain lion in Griffith Park, Los Angeles; contemplates the loneliness of Ranee, the first elephant in Australia; celebrates the iconic eucalyptus and explores its international status as an invasive species.
City of Trees is a powerful collection of nature, travel and memoir writing set in the context of global climate change. It meanders through, circles around and sometimes faces head on the most pressing issues of the day. It never loses sight of the trees.
[The moon is]
like silver
Sappho
FRAGMENT 112
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
COAST LIVE OAK (Quercus agrifolia)
THE FALL
GIANT SEQUOIA (Sequoiadendron giganteum)
STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE
GINKGO (Ginkgo biloba)
TOURISTS GO HOME
EUCALYPTUS
ESCAPE TO ALCATRAZ
MORETON BAY FIG (Ficus macrophylla)
I DON’T BLAME THE TREES
MEXICAN FAN PALM (Washingtonia robusta)
IN THE LONG RUN THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS
YELLOWWOOD (Cladrastis kentukea)
FORT. DA!
OLIVE TREE (Olea europaea)
BIYALA STORIES
COOLIBAH (Eucalyptus microtheca, E. coolabah)
HISTORY ON UNTHINKING FEET
367 COLLINS STREET (Falco peregrinus)
THE AGE OF LONELINESS
MOUNTAIN ASH (Eucalyptus regnans)
Extract from_Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Also By
About the Author
Copyright page
COAST LIVE OAK
(Quercus agrifolia)
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green
WALT WHITMAN
WRITERS love to wrestle with trees, so rich are their metaphoric possibilities, so soothing is the light that filters through their leaves. I once stood in a grove of horse chestnuts in Kew Gardens as pollen rained down through shafts of sunlight and thought to myself: ah, this is what Philip Pullman calls Dust. Then I lay down under one particular chestnut, or rather within it, for its low boughs rested on the ground and enclosed the space and therefore me entirely, and took a nap. Trees are not good for productivity. They encourage sloth. (Also sloths, which have arms that are longer than their legs and curved feet, both features being really useful if you live in a tree.) Visiting some of the remoter trees takes time—you have to get on planes, hire cars, walk for kilometres. But I begin. I photograph trees. I walk among them. I draw them. I write about them.
The production of your average physical book takes months, which is plenty of time for an entire ecosystem to be destroyed. That knowledge should make me move faster but the effect has been quite the opposite. My photos are posted over years. I walk slowly. I write slowly. I have to teach myself how to draw. The unravelling of millions of years of evolution takes some time to wrap your head around, especially if, like me, you’re still trying to come to terms with what came first: the splendour of it all.
In early 2016 I began to study painting at the Sharon Art Studio in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. On the first day of class I posted a picture of a coast live oak that grows near there. Such was the general enthusiasm for it among my friends that I decided to commit to an Instagram feed on which I posted a picture of a tree daily: @sophtreeofday. I’ve only missed a couple of days since then, which means that every day I stop and look at trees and try to figure out exactly what I’m looking at.
What species is it? Should I even call it ‘it’? Did it grow of its own accord or was it planted there?
I talk to them sometimes. Nap under them; and yes, I hug them.
Humans and trees share an ability to communicate. Trees release hormones and pheromones. So do we. We speak words, they pass sugars to each other using fungal filaments. You can read relationship in the way they grow and sway together, the way they weave around each other, the way their roots reach out to each other, the way their crowns meet overhead. The way they crowd each other out at times, and make it hard for the generations that come after them to get ahead. Some trees, like the coast live oak, like to live with a cohort and are more likely to die when separated. Other trees would rather not compete for resources and need personal space.
People like to talk about trees and to trees. Trees in cities. Trees in national parks. Since 2015 it’s been possible to email thousands of Melbourne’s trees directly, and more than four thousand people have taken advantage of this opportunity.1 ‘Dear Tree—If you are that big round beautiful low hanging tree I think you are my favourite tree. Such beauty on such an ugly road. Keep up the good work.’ That email was sent to a golden elm on the corner of Alexandra Avenue and Punt Road and is not atypical. I don’t email trees but over the last few years I’ve had long conversations with strangers about them, usually when I’m walking through parks.
The pleasure of tree talk is tempered by the fact that most days I read about, or hear about, entire populations of trees becoming endangered. We’re losing trees by approximately 15 billion a year worldwide. The cedars of Lebanon are in danger from climate change. A borer is destroying North America’s mountain ash, much as the elm beetle took the northern hemisphere’s elms, and blight took its chestnuts. In Rome more than one-third of large old holm oaks (Quercus ilex) are planned for removal because of human safety concerns. Almost all the baobabs from Africa, many of them over two thousand years old, have died. Since 2010, sixty-six million trees have died in California’s Sierra Nevada—contributing to catastrophic wildfire conditions. Drought has weakened trees, made them less resistant to disease or insect infestation. Within fifty to a hundred years Australia will have lost tens of millions of its large old trees. Not all of these can be replanted and those that are will take decades, if not centuries, to get to the point where they offer all the infrastructure support an old tree can provide. In tropical rainforests around the world repeated fires have killed around seventy-five per cent of large old trees and numerous intermediate-sized ones.2
There are parts of Europe where forests are beginning to grow again; and as the permafrost thaws and ice melts it’s possible that trees will be able to colonise land further to the north and south. But historically these ebbs and flows of the climate and related ice ages have unfolded over thousands of years. Climate change is pushing this change forward in a blur of speed, making it more difficult for organisms to adapt.
I too am having trouble adapting.
A tree is never just a tree. It speaks of the history of the place where it has grown or been planted: the hills that were dynamited, the creeks that were concreted, the water that has been drained to give it a place to root. Trees speak of the displacement of first nations. Of the endless lust of governments (small and large) to control places and the ways in which trees should or should not grow, the ways in which humans should or should not live.
Is a particular tree local (indigenous, native) or is it from somewhere else (exotic, invasive, introduced, a weed)? Do they belong? It’s not such a complicated question whe
n it comes to the oak that was my first #treeoftheday. Coast live oaks are unusual because they can handle sand dunes and relish the fog that rolls in off the Pacific; it hangs thick in this part of the city, especially in summer. The tree is close to one of the few remnants of oak woodlands left in San Francisco—woodlands that predate Golden Gate Park, which was developed back in 1871. Like the remnant moonah (Melaleuca lanceolata) on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, these trees are dark and sinewy, they twist and turn as they dodge the winds and move towards the light. They have small leaves that knit tightly together; a delicate lacework that filters the sun.
Oaks are scattered throughout northern California, though their numbers are severely reduced. It is almost impossible now to imagine that Oakland was so called because it was thickly forested. Indeed, when I saw a photo in the Oakland Museum illustrating this fact, the dissonance between Oakland then and Oakland now was such that I didn’t believe the image. I wondered if it was an artwork, a fantasy, a reimagined world.
The removal of all the original oaks in the area took a few decades. At the same time, oaks were planted in the parks that were being built in both Oakland and San Francisco. (Being a native tree was a dangerous thing back then, much as being a tree that has migrated from elsewhere is now. It’s hard for a tree to get it right.) Most of the people who had lived among these oaks, the Ohlone, had died under what the Spanish missionaries thought of as God’s watchful eye.
You can find some magnificent coast live oak trees on the writer Jack London’s estate, including one that is estimated to be between two and four hundred years old. Dying is a gradual process for a tree and untidy at times. Limbs fall; councils and insurance companies panic. The tree was to be cut down. Ann Swoveland, an elder from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, blessed the tree that had provided generations of her people with acorns and inspired Jack London’s writing. ‘It’s a beautiful tree,’ she said. ‘If it could talk, I’m sure it would tell many stories. We honor you.’3
____________________
1 melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au
2 ‘Global Decline in Large Old Trees’, David B. Lindenmayer, William F. Laurance, Jerry F. Franklin,sciencemag.com, December 6, 2012.
3 ‘Jack London’s ill oak tree gets native blessing’, Matt Brown, Press Democrat, August 10, 2013.
THE FALL
VIRGINIA and I have been married many times over, always to one another. The first time was in Brooklyn City Hall on an icy morning on February 12, 2015. As a young girl I was a romantic about marriage—I still remember the velvet and lace dress I wore to my parents’ wedding—but by adulthood I was less so. We were both of us ambivalent about the meaning of the institution of marriage, as well as about marrying in a country not our own when our homeland would not recognise that marriage. We’d been together some thirteen years then and did not doubt our devotion. But still. Marriage.
So we stood in front of Waldo Ramirez, a very nice man in a pink shirt, who took us through our vows with touching respect and sincerity. Our friend and relative Rachel stood by as our witness, filming us for posterity on her iPhone. We ate breakfast bagels on the subway, went home, and got on with our working day. Low-key as the wedding was, ambivalent as we were, it had a powerful effect. It reinforced our commitment to each other. It changed people’s reactions to us. In my experience people are less homophobic if they can find a way into understanding your relationship, and in America our being married gave people that way in. Once I was married I started to understand just what was being denied to all people in same-sex relationships, to anyone who is told by the state that they are not due the full opportunities and protections of the law. I was grateful to the United States for giving me that right.
I first visited that country in 1967, too young to remember much more than helium balloons in the shape of Mickey Mouse; Cocoa Krispies in a breakfast diner; modular furniture in a daycare centre in Boston. My most recent trip was in the second year of the Trump presidency, 2018. In 2015 and 2016 I lived in the Mission district of San Francisco, around the corner from Balmy Alley, a laneway famous for its murals. One particularly striking mural, by Janet Braun-Reinitz, depicts some of the horror of the AIDS epidemic and incorporates a line from the Yeats poem ‘The Second Coming’. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. It’s impossible not to see the truth in this. The centre is failing, and we’re left to maintain traction in the chaos. Or perhaps the situation is this: we’re falling off a cliff in slow motion. Me, I grab at the trees I see on the way down in an effort to break the fall. I look at what I see around me as I tumble, for I want to remember it all—the landscapes, the animals that may not survive the impact.
When I moved to San Francisco I knew the whole Summer of Love vibe was over. Joan Didion had told me so in her essay, named for the same Yeats poem as Braun-Reinitz’s: ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’. The San Francisco she described in 1967 ‘was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled’.1 She stepped over starving, tripping children in the Haight.
Fifty years later I zigzag to avoid stepping in human shit, walk through tent cities, see people dozing off with needles hanging out of their arms, sit on the bus next to people: smoking ice, cursing faggots, screaming at each other, smashing their phones and falling apart in all the ways a human possibly can. I walk under the 101 and give thanks that the rottweilers barking at me are tethered near their owners’ tents. I catch a glimpse of a pretty teenage girl in a tent on Folsom Street brushing her hair and my heart rises to my throat: what will happen to her? I learn that waking up to gunshots is an injection of adrenaline direct to the heart.
It’s not all bad—it never is. The tacos and chilaquilas in this town are so good they can move a person to tears. We walk to Japan Town on the weekends for a hot or cold Japanese bath, a movie. We visit the Saint John Coltrane Church and listen to ‘A Love Supreme’. We eat really good bread from Tartine and The Mill, and shop at the almost fifty-year-old Rainbow Food Co-op.
The city’s history of social progressiveness is not just hype: San Francisco has been home to bohemians, LGBTQI folk, artists, immigrants and activists for more than a hundred years. But here are some fun facts. New York has the largest population of homeless people, but the homeless of Los Angeles have the least access to shelter. San Francisco has the largest number of ultrarich (people worth more than 30 million dollars) in the country, while the state of California has the worst poverty rate in America. Confusingly, San Francisco’s complex history includes unionised workers, radical activism and more infrastructure for supporting the disenfranchised than exists elsewhere. It’s a relatively small place: only 884,000 inhabitants who live in low-density housing on a peninsula of 120 square kilometres. For all these reasons the gulf between rich and poor is particularly visible and particularly intense and the pressure on the city’s real estate is ferocious. When I moved to the Mission the Latino population were being forced out by newcomers like me who were able to pay higher rates. ‘It’s a war zone here,’ said Mission resident Paula Tejeda2 when she described the clash between older residents and newer ones.
Long-term residents, many of them poor, live alongside a vibrant bar and restaurant scene. The gang presence was an excuse for all kinds of police brutality, including an incident that hung like a pall over the district: the murder of the young Latino man Alex Nieto on Bernal Heights in 2014. People go up to Bernal Heights to hang out, to walk their dogs. Nieto was there one evening, sitting on a bench and eating a burrito. He was on his way to work—dressed for his job as a security guard at the El Toro nightclub, and carrying a licensed taser. During the day Nieto was a scholarship student at Community College San Francisco, studying for a criminal justice degree, and was a member of various community groups including the Mission Peace Collaborative. Some witn
esses say he was behaving erratically, others deny that was the case. Police were called by a dog walker who didn’t like the look of him. A report by the District Attorney showed that fifty-nine bullets were fired, fourteen or fifteen of which hit him. He was twenty-eight years old. The police who were responsible for that shooting were not indicted.
From a distance Bernal looks like something out of the opening credits of a television series. It’s a high, bare hill, with only a few trees on the top of it. There is something about the perspective up there that means you can see the details of individuals walking their dogs: the owner leaning into the wind, the dog leaning away from the leash. You can look across the Mission and down Broadway to San Francisco Bay. You can watch the fog (named Karl) do his crazy rush up and through the cleavage in Twin Peaks, snaking down through Noe Valley and the Castro and stopping a few streets away from where we lived in the flat lands. One morning, after being shimmied out of bed by a minor earthquake, I decided we needed an earthquake plan. I hung an embroidered bag on the door with two pairs of underpants, photocopies of our passports, a pair of scissors and a garbage bag. I kept meaning to add a water bottle to the kit but I never did. We decided that if we were apart when the earthquake hit we’d head to the top of Bernal Heights in the hope of meeting up. Bedrock.
On June 26, 2015, just after we moved to San Francisco, the Supreme Court made a ruling enshrining the fundamental right of same-sex couples to marry in all states in the US. The ruling coincided with San Francisco Pride. By way of celebration an established Latino gallery, Galeria de La Raza, installed a temporary mural, ‘Por Vida’, on the corner of Bryant and 24th streets. San Francisco is home to about three thousand murals and most of them are in the Mission. This particular work, by Manuel Paul, a Chicano artist from LA, celebrated gay pride in three panels: in the first, two men embrace; in the second, a trans man wears his surgical scars with pride; in the third, two women gaze into each other’s eyes. All the faces depicted were Latino or Latina. I walked past the mural most days. It was, over a period of some weeks, defaced three times. The gallery’s staff were repeatedly threatened by locals who objected to the mural. The issue was not just homophobia, but the belief that the focus on the right to sexual equality was related to the gentrification process. There was also an objection about the appropriation of traditional cholo art for a work about queer love. The gallery’s director, Ani Rivera, pointed out that queer Latinos have always lived in the Mission: ‘Some think this level of sexual liberty is associated with a level of—a sort of—privilege. They keep saying, “Go to the Castro.” Well, we’ve never been in the Castro…It’s not a new trend we’re starting. It’s part of that cultural history and legacy.’