Yellow New Zealand Christmas Tree in full bloom

I’m often asked about my favorite tree. Not the type of tree I love most, but my favorite individual tree in the entire city. This tree, at 1221 Stanyan Street in Cole Valley, is my personal number one. 

For starters, the tree is one of the city’s best specimens of New Zealand Christmas tree (Metrosideros excelsa), popular for its showy red bottlebrush flowers. And, indeed, all of the many hundreds of New Zealand Christmas trees on San Francisco’s streets have red flowers, except for one—at 1221 Stanyan Street. Every June, that tree pops with spectacular yellow flowers. And it’s at its peak right now, as I write this post on June 23 (almost six months from Christmas in New Zealand).

How did this tree end up with yellow flowers? The story goes back to Victor Reiter, San Francisco’s most famous plantsman from the 1930s until his death in 1986. (See p. 73 in my Trees of San Francisco book for more on Reiter.) In 1940, there was a natural mutation of the species on tiny Motiti Island in the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand, and in the late 1950s, Reiter was one of the first Californians to obtain a cutting (for the details on exactly how that happened, see the bottom of this article). As the Reiter family lived in several homes in a three-block stretch of Stanyan Street, they planted the curiosity in front of their 1221 Stanyan address—still occupied today by a family member. And more than 70 years later, the tree is thriving. It’s a beautiful mutant with an amazing history and pedigree—and my favorite tree in San Francisco.

[The paragraphs above are mostly copied from my book, so a few years old - but here’s a June 2019 postscript: I have a cousin who lives on the west side of Stanyan Street, and her back yard fronts onto the Reiter family garden. She took me into her back porch recently, and I saw another yellow specimen, even larger than the one at 1221 Stanyan, in the garden. There are other specimens of this variety of the tree (the scientific name of the yellow-blooming variety is Metrosideros excelsa ‘Aurea’) in off-street locations - there are a couple in the San Francisco Botanical Garden, at the entrance on the left; there are a couple near the entrance to Fort Mason - they alternate with red-blooming species, which is a cool effect, and I was recently informed that there are a few in Golden Gate Park near the horse stables. It would be nice if the nursery trade had more of them!]

[From an article written by Elizabeth McClintock in the July 1968 issue of California Horticultural Journal: “ A yellow flowered form of Metrosideros excelsa has occurred in the wild of New Zealand on Motiti Island, a small island a few miles from Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, on the northeastern coast of North Island. This form is cultivated in New Zealand (Duncan and Davies, 1965) under the name M. excelsa ‘Aurea’. It was introduced to cultivation in San Franciso by L. M. Tivol. About ten years ago a visitor to the San Francisco Business Men’s Garden Club told Mr. Tivol of seeing such a plant in the wild in New Zealand while he was on a fishing trip. Mr. Tivol expressed an interest in having the plant, and when the visitor returned to New Zealand he sent cuttings to Mr. Tivol. The cuttings were turned over to Victor Reiter who succeeded in rooting several. In 1961 Mr. Reiter exhibited a flowering specimen from his young tree at the California Horticultural Society. Mr. Reiter presented one of his trees to the Strybing Arboretum in 1964. At the present time (December 1968) this tree is about eight fee tall and in the summer of 1968 it flowered profusely.”

Street Tree SF and San Francisco tree species diversity

In November 2016. San Francisco passed Proposition E (now referred to as “Street Tree SF”), which moved responsibility for tree sidewalk tree maintenance from homeowners to the City of San Francisco, and created a fund of approximately $20 million per year to pay for tree maintenance.  Homeowners would no longer be responsible for pruning their trees, and would no longer have liability if the trees in front of their homes trees buckled sidewalks, or toppled onto neighbors’ cars or  homes.  

What many people didn’t realize when Street Tree SF passed, was that under the new regime, the City would also control what gets planted on City sidewalks.   In the “old days”, most San Francisco street tree plantings happened through Friends of the Urban Forest.  FUF guided homeowners to good choices for trees, and the City had a (short) list of prohibited trees, but the final decision was up to the homeowner.   If he or she wanted a tree that was unique or unusual, or even a tree that was terrible choice for the location, he or she got what they wanted.   

Under Street Tree SF, the City (actually, the Bureau of Urban Forestry of the Department of Public Works) has the final decision as to what trees get planted. FUF is continuing to do street tree plantings, and is continuing to handle most of the street tree plantings in the City, but the final decision now belongs to the City.   

I will admit that I wondered if the change from homeowner-driven decisions to City control would change the mix of trees that get planted in San Francisco.   If you change from a system where individual homeowners make the decision about what to plant (based on their own sometimes quirky reasons for what to put in the ground) to a system where a city department (even if it’s well-run and well-intentioned) makes the decisions, I wondered if we would end up with a lot less diversity in the mix of species that get planted.   

So – I asked Friends of the Urban Forest to share data with me.  I got a copy of the tree planting data from 2015 (a conventional year prior to Street Tree SF) and 2018 (the first full year after Street Tree SF, reflecting 100% City control over tree plantings).  And I pored over the results, looking for any trends that might arise from the big change in who controls what gets planted in San Francisco.   

Here is what I found.

 A total of 1121 trees were planted in 2015, and 1481 trees in 2018.   The total number of species planted actually increased from 74 species in 2015 to 75 in 2018. 

The number of unique species (trees where only one or two trees were planted in a year) went down from 29 in 2015 to 22 in 2018, but the total species number stayed the same - and there were some very interesting trees that got planted in 2018 – 7 coast banksias, 5 lilly-pilly trees, and 24 gold medallion (Cassia leptophylla) trees, for example.  So overall, we’re still seeing good species diversity in what is getting planted.

And the trees that were planted the most often in 2018 were trees that generally thrive in San Francisco - the #1 most planted tree was the small leaf tristania, #2 southern magnolia, #3 primrose tree, #4 brisbane box and #5 strawberry tree (Arbutus X marina). Not surprisingly, when experts make the decisions about plantings, the most commonly planted trees are good choices for our conditions and climate.  (To contrast, in 2015, the top ranked trees were #1 southern magnolia, #2 small leaf tristania ,#3 strawberry tree, #4 olive and #5 peppermint willow.)

Interestingly, two trees that used to be hugely popular in San Francisco have basically dropped off the map.   In the first edition of my Trees of San Francisco book in 2003, I got FUF data on the most commonly planted trees over the two decades from 1981 to 2001 – and the #1 and #2 most popular trees for those 20 yeras were the purple leaf plum and the flowering cherry.   But in 2018 only 8 cherries were planted, and zero plum trees!   Each tree lover will have his or her own point of view on that, but mine is that fewer plum trees is a good thing, especially if they’re replaced with species that will thrive, look good, and absorb more carbon than a plum. 

St. Francis Wood massacre

The St. Francis Woods neighborhood has always had professionally managed street trees -  when the neighborhood was laid out in the 1920s, the developer created a resident-funded homeowners association, and gave it control over the neighborhood’s street trees.  The result has (usually) been beautiful and consistently cared for trees in the neighborhood. 

So it was shocking to drive down Santa Clara Avenue and see dozens of eucalyptus trees topped so severely that not a leaf was left.  It’s the worst example of pruning I’ve ever  seen in San Francisco. I know that this neighborhood is unusual in the unusual local control it has had since the 1920s, but I have to believe that the city has the ability to levy fines for this abuse. 

Victor Reiter garden in bloom

 The Reiter family garden, wedged between Stanyan Street, Woodland Avenue and the Sutro Forest, was once a commercial nursery run by Victor Reiter, Jr., one of the founders of the California Horticultural Society and San Francisco‘s most famous grower, hybridizer and collector of plants and trees.  The garden is still in the family’s hands, with two of Reiter’s children still residing on the west side of Stanyan Street. Reiter was a collector of unusual trees and plants, and many of his specimens are still thriving in the garden.  The garden’s Campbell’s magnolia (a wedding present to Victor and his wife Carla from an English well wisher) is now in full bloom.  Hoheria, firewheel tree (Stenocarpus sinuatus), lilly pilly (Syzygium smithii) , northern ratas - all trees that are rare or nonexistent on San Francisco’s streets, can still be found in the garden, hints of Victor Reiter’s hand, long after his death in 1986. 

The garden is private, but you can catch a glimpse from the Sutro Forest trail that starts just a few feet above the corner of 17th and Stanyan streets - the garden is visible on the right after a short walk into the forest. 

Campbell’s Magnolia (Magnolia Campbellii ssp. mollicomata)

Hoheria populnea foliage

Lilly pilly (Syzygium smithii) fruit

Happy holidays - San Francisco Poinsettia (tree!)

On Bush near Webster 

Street Tree Numbers are Down - and there's a Reason

The Department of Public Works (DPW) Bureau of Urban Forestry recently announced that the number of street trees removed by the City in 2017 exceeded the number of trees planted - meaning the total number of street trees in San Francisco went down last year. That’s not a big surprise - with the passage of Prop E in 2016 (now called “Street Tree SF”), the City took back responsibility for all street trees in the city, and with a backlog of aging, sick or dead trees, most experts expected there to be an upward blip in removals.

However, there’s another structural reason that tree numbers may continue to decline, which I noticed when DPW tagged a number of trees in my neighborhood of Cole Valley for removal (one of the notices is in the photo to the left). If you look carefully at the notice in the photo, you’ll see that a total of 21 trees were tagged for removal, but (look at the bottom of the flier) only 12 permitted to be replaced. Why? In some cases, the existing trees were too close to underground utilities; in other cases too close to streetlamp poles. In yet other cases the trees were too close to other existing trees. DPW maintains a set of standards for planting street trees, and in some cases these rules have tightened over the years, so a tree basin that was plantable years ago may no longer work today.

What this means is that there is a structural factor that will result in fewer street trees, year after year. DPW’s rules for the placement of street trees are there for a good reason, and I’m not suggesting that they be changed.* However, we need to realize that as we lose street trees in the ordinary course of urban life - from age, or disease, or getting hit by a delivery truck, many of them won’t be replaceable.

What’s the solution? We need to accelerate plantings in places where no trees existed before. And now that the City is in charge of our street trees, that means getting more funding. We all need to push our supervisors for more funding for street tree planting - because if we don’t, you’ll start to see fewer and fewer trees in the neighborhoods.

________________________

* OK, I do have one quibble. The City disallows trees within a few feet of a streetlamp pole - because you don’t want a tree blocking light to the street. But there are plenty of small trees that would work in those spots, and never grow large enough to be a problem. Especially now that DPW controls things (including the species of trees that get planted), I think that’s a rule that could be relaxed.

TransBay Roof Park is SPECTACULAR!

Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis)

I got a tour of the park that is the roof of the new Transbay Transit Center last week - Adam Greenspan, the landscape architect who led the design of the park, was kind enough to give me a guided peek at what is about to open to the public this weekend.   It's hard to decide which superlative to use to describe the new park (many would apply), so I'm just going to say that it's *spectacular*.   I had known for some time that the designers of this park were curating interesting species from around the world, but you have to see this place to appreciate what a special amenity is about to be bestowed on San Francisco.  

I will leave it to others to comment on the landscape design of the park - I'll just describe the imagination and deep botanical knowledge that went into the collecting of the trees and plants you'll find here.   Greenspan has largely used trees and plants from Mediterranean regions of the world, taking advantage of plants that will do well in San Francisco's climate.   There are trees from California, of course - California buckeyes, Monterey cypress, and other trees commonly seen in San Francisco, but also a dozen or more California sycamores (Platanus racemosa), a coastal California tree which is almost never seen in San Francisco streets.

As you walk around the perimeter of the park, you come to a Chilean garden (with several monkey puzzles), a South African garden, an Australian garden (with some amazing Brachychitons - both B. acerifolia but also B. rupestris (Queensland bottle tree - with a huge, bulbous trunk), and two separate desert gardens on the west end of the park, with three striking dragon trees (Dracaena draco).

My personal favorite in the garden is a still small wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) - the tree that had been thought to have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years - known only from fossil records - until a few dozen of the species were discovered in a ravine near Sydney, Australia.  (Hello, Rec Park Department - we need a lot more of these in San Francisco parks!)  The wollemi pine is located in the roof's "ancient garden", with ginkgos, cycads and other plants that have graced the earth for millions of years.  

monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana)

But I think the most spectacular trees in the park are the palms - Greenspan loves palms, and it shows, especially with the majestic Chilean wine palm that is set in a central lawn of the park, not far from pindo palms, some nikau palms (native to New Zealand), various Trachycarpus species (not just our common windmill palm, T. fortunei), a few Brahea species, and on and on and on....  There are probably a dozen palm species here that are rarely or never seen in San Francisco.   

So run, don't walk, to see this park when it opens!   I just hope that we can keep the Transbay Roof Park in the shape it's in now - it's going to take a lot of work to keep this garden looking as good in 10 years as it does now.  I volunteer to be a maintenance docent!   

“Snow in Summer”!

Wow - was biking in Noe Valley today and saw this  amazing tree at 118-120 Jersey Street. We call it flaxleaf paperbark, but not hard to see why it’s called “snow in summer” in its native Australia!  Melaleuca linarifolia is the scientific name; it’s one of the most common species in the Melaleuca genus as San Francisco street trees. 

118-120 Jersey Street

Madeira Trees

Just got back from a week visiting the island of Madeira - a Portuguese island off the coast of Morocco, just north of the Canary Islands.  About 33 degrees latitude, so about the same as San Diego, and it also has a similar climate - coastal, not too hot, but warm enough to appear semitropical.  It used to be a big producer of sugar cane, and you still see sugar cane growing and being harvested in spots around the island, but the bigger crop now is bananas, which have become a big export crop.  And of course vineyards, for the world-famous madeira wine.

African tulip tree in Funchal's old town

Since the climate is similar to coastal California, I was curious to see what trees were used in Funchal (the capital and largest city - really the only city of any size on the island).   We were lucky to be able to stay at a hotel (Quinta da Casa Branca, if you ever go) that was formerly an estate owned by a guy who was obsessed about tropical trees - the entire 4 acre property was covered with spectacular and unusual tropical and semitropical trees, all of them with identifying plaques with scientific name, common name (in Portuguese and English) and location of origin.   OK, so that might have had something to do with our choice of hotel. 

Once we got out into the city, the most spectacular trees were the African tulip trees (Spathodea campanulata) - all of them in bloom (we were there in early April).  The tree is native to tropical Africa, and not all that well suited to our cooler Bay Area climate - not sure I have ever seen one in the Bay Area.   The trees are amazing in bloom - football-size clusters of intense red-orange trumpet-shaped flowers.   

Laurus novocanariensis - closeup of leaves and flowers

We spent one day hiking in out in the country, in the laurel forests of the island (also called laurissilva), a type of forest found in the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Canaries and the Azores - areas with high humidity and relatively stable, mild temperatures.   This type forest is a remnant of what once covered big parts of Europe before the ice age.  The forest had a species from the Laurus genus (the genus that gives us Laurus nobilis, the sweet bay tree that is used in Mediterranean cooking).  The Madeiran species is Laurus novocanariensis, which is endemic to Madeira and the Canary Islands (meaning it exists only there), and was just recently declared a separate species - it was previously thought to be a variety of Laurus azorica.  Apparently it hasn't been around long enough to develop a common name, so I'll dub it Madeira laurel.  (The hikes in Madeira  are amazing - they typically follow irrigation channels called "levadas" that follow the ridge lines of the mountains and bring water from the wetter northern side of the island to the drier south.)   

Dragon tree - Funchal botanical garden

We saw lots of examples of Dracaena draco, the Canary Islands dragon tree.   The tree is native to Madeira (and to the Canary Islands, Cape Verde and western Morocco), but we never saw any in the wild.  They were common in Funchal - perhaps evidence of some local pride in a native tree :-)   Unlike most trees, dragon trees are monocots, related to palms and grasses.  The largest example we saw was in Madeira's botanical garden (a real gem, by the way - not to be missed if you're visiting the island). 

Queensland kauri in Funchal

One of the big tree-surprises in Funchal was that the city's principal street was Agathis robusta - the Queensland kauri - a tree in the Araucaria family from northern Australia, closely related to Agathis australis, the more famous kauri from New Zealand.   The trees were very erect/fastigiate - perhaps a variety that's been bred for that quality?   I've never seen this species used as a street tree anywhere in the world, but they were very happy in Funchal.  Maybe something to experiment with in similar California conditions?  

And, of course, there were pride of Madeira (Echium candicans).  They weren't quite in season (surprisingly, since they're in full bloom in San Francisco).

Palm in Paris?

I know Trachycarpus fortunei (windmill palm) is one of the most cold-tolerant of palms, but I was still surprised to see a mature specimen in Paris, near Square Thomas Jefferson on the right bank of the Seine. 

Canary Islands dragon tree - rare sight in SF!

I can't remember seeing one of these before in San Francisco.  My husband took me this past weekend to his new favorite dog park (our dog Mather, named after the San Francisco Sierra camp, needed a run).  It's a flat area in Corona Heights Park that you can access either from State Street or from Flint Street.   (If you're approaching from Flint, walk past the tennis courts; if you came up the driveway from State Street, walk past the basketball courts.)  You'll come to a dog park adjacent to some community garden plots. - and in between the two, this Dracaena draco - the common name is Canary Islands dragon tree.  

The plant (not really a tree - it's a monocot with a tree-like growth habit) is native to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Cape Verde and western Morocco.  There's a beautiful example of this tree at the Hotel Coronado in San Diego; the two largest  in California are both in the Santa Barbara area - one at the Sotto il Monte Estate in Montesito, and the second at Mount Calvary Monastery behind the Santa Barbara Mission. in Santa Barbara.   But you don't see them often this far north.  I'll actually be in Madeira in two weeks, and will update this with new photos if I see some!

Spring must be here - Acacia baileyana in bloom

Bailey's acacia - southwest corner of Grattan and Shrader Streets in Cole Valley

I've been doing a "Cole Valley Tree of the Month" series for some time in the Cole Valley Facebook group, and when I walked by this tree yesterday at the corner of Grattan and Shrader Streets in Cole Valley, I grabbed my iPhone, shot this picture and made it the "Cole Valley tree of January" - only to be reminded that it happened to be the first of February!   It's just that I associate this tree - Bailey's acacia, or Acacia baileyana, with January blooms.   Bailey's acacia is the first tree to bloom in the spring (after 30 years in San Francisco, it still seems weird to me to call January “spring”), and the brilliant yellow flowers are eye-catching. The tree is native to Australia, where it’s called “Cootamundra wattle”, as it's native to Cootamundra, New South Wales, just west of Canberra.  (The town holds a 'Wattle Time' festival every year when the trees start to bloom.)  

Acacias do put out a good amount of pollen, but the pollen is only mildly allergenic, and it's heavy, which means it exists only in the immediate vicinity of the trees.   You're much more likely to suffer allergies from oaks, elms, pines, and and other wind-pollinated trees - the inconspicuous flowers of those trees don't get noticed, but they put out great quantities of lightweight pollen.   Trees with colorful flowers aren't as likely to cause allergic reactions since the pollen is heavy and sticky (it's designed to stick to insect pollinators, who are attracted by the flower's color).     

New Zealand Trip

Monterey cypress north of Auckland, New Zealand

Just got back from a 2 week trip to New Zealand - it's been my #1 "bucket list" place for a long time.   I was especially excited to see trees that are San Francisco street trees (New Zealand Christmas trees, giant dracaena, tea trees, etc.) in their native habitat.  

One thing I noticed was LOTS of Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) and Monterey pine (Pinus radiata, which the New Zealanders call "Radiata pine") in the countryside, used as windbreaks, shade for sheep and other livestock, accent trees, etc.  Which made big parts of the countryside look a lot like California!  There were also many stands of Monterey pine used used as lumber trees - without any evidence of pine canker that i could see.  

Northern hemisphere conifers (Douglas fir is a prominent example) have become naturalized in big parts of New Zealand, and have become invasive pests, taking over entire landscapes.  Interestingly, our Monterey pine and Monterey cypress are not invasive, because the cones of the tree typically only open and disburse their seeds where there is fire or extremely hot weather.   

New Zealand Christmas tree in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand

I spent three days hiking through native beech forest on the Routeburn Track on the South Island.  It was very cool to see forests composed almost entirely of  different species of Nothofagus (a cousin of our northern hemisphere beeches) because they were so new to me (the only Nothofagus I can remember seeing here in CA was a giant specimen at Filoli, south of San Francisco).  One cool tree I encountered along the way:  the tree fuchsia - Fuchsia excorticata, the world's largest fuchsia, with distinctive papery bark (and recognizable fuchsia flowers).   

Of course, I made a point to find New Zealand Christmas trees (Metrosideros excelsa) on the North Island, although sadly by the time we got there on January 2, they were almost all out of bloom (these native trees seemed to be strict about blooming at Christmas time).   They're called by the Mauri name "Pohutukawa" in New Zealand, and the New Zealanders were very surprised to find that they were popular street trees in San Francisco.  

Aerial roots on a New Zealand Christmas tree in Gisbourne, North Island, New Zealand

Sadly we didn’t get to see any Nikau palms (New Zealand's only native palm, and one of my favorites of the palms) in their glory - saw a few of them planted as street trees (!) in Whangarei in the north island, and every once in a while saw one in the kauri forest on the west side of the north island.  I was surprised to find that the best places to see them in New Zealand were on the west side of the cooler south island.

It was a great trip - New Zealand is a great place to visit for many reasons, and interesting trees is definitely one of them!    

Floss silk tree in the Mission

A Ceiba speciosa 'Majestic beauty' (floss silk tree) in bloom at the edge of the new park (used to be a parking lot) at Shotwell/17th/Folsom in the Mission.  The tree and others nearby were planted in 1997.   The species normally doesn’t do very well in San Francisco - it is much happier (and more common) in Southern California. 

SF Magazine Article

Great SF Magazine article by Lynn Rapoport, a tree wonk who's also a great freelance journalist.   She does a great job explaining why it's fun and satisfying to learn about our urban forest!

Ceanothus in bloom

Ceanothus seems to be in bloom all over the city as I write (early April 2017).   There are 50 or so speciesof Ceanothus, but very few that can be trained as a tree.  Ceanothus 'Ray Hartman" is one - it's a hybrid (cross) between two parent species: Ceanothus arboreus from Catalina Island in southern California, and the northern California Ceanothus griseus.  It’s the only Ceanothus planted as a street tree in San Francisco, and one of the very few California natives that you’ll see planted in sidewalk cuts on the street (along with Catalina ironwood).  

These trees in Cole Valley at the corner of Waller and Cole are some of the best in San Francisco.

(And I wish I knew who this "Ray Hartman" was/is - doesn't seem to be any info on the web about him.   Let me know if you know!

Corner of Waller Street and Cole Street in San Francisco

Azores Trees

Just got back from a week in the Azores - Sao Miguel and Terceira islands.   The Azores are Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean - 800 miles west of Portugal, and about 2000 miles east of Boston - volcanic islands, with a mild, San Francisco-like climate (coastal, rarely above 80 degrees fahrenheit, and rarely below 45 degrees).  

New Zealand Christmas tree - Ponta Delgada in Sao Miguel Island, Azores

It was interesting to see so many introduced trees in the Azores that are also popular as ornamentals here in San Francisco.   Metrosideros excelsa (New Zealand Christmas tree - see photo above) is often used in the Azores as an ornamental, but it has also naturalized in the forests of the islands (which I’ve never seen here in California).   The New Zealand Christmas tree in the photo above was a huge specimen in Ponta Delgada, the capital city of the Azores - so big that it had supports to hold up its limbs - if you look carefully you'll see the many vertical steel supports.    Trees from the Araucaria genus are everywhere as specimen trees -- especially Norfolk Island Pine trees (Araucaria heterophylla).  (The Norfolk Island Pine in the photo below was a young specimen just outside our hotel window in Angra de Heroismo, the largest city on Terceira Island- the hotel was in an early 1600s stone fort built by the Spanish during a 40 year period when they controlled the islands).   And Pittosporum undulatum (Victorian box) is everywhere as a naturalized tree - to the point where there were forests of the tree - it has become an ecological problem on the islands.

Norfolk Island Pine - Angra de Heroismo on Terceira Island

There are trees that are native to the Azores - in fact endemic to them (which means that they found in nature only in the Azores).  It was interesting to see native species that were closely related to trees I recognized, but which had developed into separate species as a result of the physical isolation of the islands.  Laurus azorica, for example, was obviously a close relative of the Grecian bay (Laurus nobilis) that is found on San Francisco streets.  

Because the Azores were isolated from Europe and North America for millions of years before the Portuguese arrived in the 1400s, the trees and plants evolved separately from their cousins in Europe and North America - which explains why there are so many unique species here. It also explains why introduced species from elsewhere are such a problem - the introduced species have no natural pests or diseases, and so they can out-compete the natives. Interestingly, Azores plants have been creating ecological troubles on other islands after being introduced - for example, the Azores’ evergreen fire tree (Myrica faya) is the main species to have regenerated on old lava flows in the islands. It was introduced to the Hawaiian islands, where it has threatened local flora there. (By the way, the Azores reminded me of the Hawaii islands with cooler weather - the island groups are both verdant, volcanic and isolated from other land masses.)

London plane trees (Platanus X acerifolia) line the roads everywhere in the Azores.   The trees below were on a back road on Terceira island.

By the way, I highly recommend a visit to Parque Terra Nostra, a botanical garden near Furnas on San Miguel Island. The buildings here date to the 1700s, when Thomas Hickling, a wealthy Boston trader, built a home and introduced a number of trees and plants from North America. Subsequent generations of Azorean owners expanded the collection. In addition to a garden filled with endemic and native Azorean plants, there are beautiful plants and trees from other Mediterranean and semitropical areas of the globe, including trees from the Araucaria and Metrosideros genera, eucaplytus, redwoods, tree ferns, various palm species, and huge rhododendrons, magnolias, hydrangeas and camellias.

My favorite tree in the garden (and it was a surprise to see it) was a Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). This is a tree botanists thought had been extinct for millions of years (they only knew it from fossil records) - until David Noble, an Australian hiker with some botanical knowledge, noticed some trees in a remote ravine in Wollemi Park, 200 miles from Sydney Australia. He brought some cuttings to scientists in Sydney, who concluded that Noble had discovered a “living fossil” - somehow, the 100 or so trees in that ravine had managed to survive - the last remaining specimens of their species. (Imagine if a hiker in a remote New Guinea valley had discovered a stegosaurus - it was like that for botanists.) Here’s a photo of me, next to the tree in the garden - not that it’s not very big, since no garden in the world has had one of these for more than 25 years!

Wollemi pine in Parque Terra Nostra

Yes On Prop E for Trees!

I've been a San Francisco tree advocate for a long time.   I serve on the City's Urban Forestry Council; authored Trees of San Francisco,  and have a 25+ years with Friends of the Urban Forest as volunteer and past board member and board president.   In all of my years of tree advocacy, there's never been anything on the election ballot as important to our city's urban forest as this November's Proposition E - and big kudos to Supervisor Scott Wiener for his leadership in bringing it to the ballot..   

The biggest problem with San Francisco's trees has always been the lack of care and maintenance.  We're doing a good job of planting trees, thanks to groups like Friends of the Urban Forest.  But we do a miserable job of caring for them.  The city makes residents pay for pruning their trees - but most residents either don't know that, or can't afford to pay for tree care.   The result is trees that are unhealthy, look terrible, and in many cases are dangerous.    

Prop E would shift all responsibility for tree care and sidewalk repairs to the City, where it belongs, ensuring that our trees receive regular, periodic pruning and care from trained professionals.   VOTE YES ON PROP E!   And be sure to like the Facebook Page for Prop E!

My Favorite Tree

I'm often asked about my favorite tree.  Not the type of tree I love most, but my favorite individual tree in San Francisco.   This tree, at 1221 Stanyan Street in Cole Valley, is my personal #1, and it's in full bloom right now (it's Memorial Day 2016 as I write; I took the photos below yesterday).

Yellow New Zealand Christmas Tree - 1221 Stanyan Street

This tree is one of the city’s best specimens of New Zealand Christmas tree (Metrosideros excelsa), popular for its showy red bottlebrush flowers. And, indeed, all of the many hundreds of New Zealand Christmas trees on San Francisco’s streets have red flowers, except for one—at 1221 Stanyan. Every year around this time, that tree pops with spectacular yellow flowers.

How did this tree end up with yellow flowers? The story goes back to Victor Reiter, San Francisco’s most famous plantsman from the 1940s until his death in 1986. In 1940, there was a natural mutation of the species on tiny Motiti Island in the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand, and Reiter was one of the first Californians to obtain a cutting. As the Reiter family lived in several homes in a three-block stretch of Stanyan Street, they planted the curiosity in front of their 1221 Stanyan address—still occupied today by a family member. And more than 70 years later, the tree is thriving. It’s a beautiful mutant with an amazing history and pedigree—and my favorite tree in San Francisco.

Bunya Bunya

This sign is in the park at the base of Hyde Street in Fisherman's wharf, where there's a grove of bunya-bunya trees.  Seed pods from bunya-bunyas can weigh up to 15 pounds (the record is a 17-pounder).   In early October, a seed pod from this grove fell and hit a tourist, causing some significant damage.  The trees are now fenced off.