September 11, 2002
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by katharine mieszkowski The Lorax There are mysteries growing all over San Francisco.—There's one on Telegraph Hill at 566 Filbert near Grant, one in Noe Valley at 165 Jersey near Sanchez, and the Mission District has sprouted a whole mess of them. —But the true stumpers are in Pacific Heights at 2760 Sacramento and in the Richmond at 770 Third Ave. These two enigmas vex even the city's most experienced sleuths. They stand right out there, naked in daylight, but they still won't come clean and give up their identities. Mike Sullivan is the chief detective dedicated to cracking these cases. He's the Lorax who maintains the "mystery tree" list on SFTrees (www.sftrees.com), a Web site devoted to cataloging and classifying San Francisco's leafy inhabitants. It's the kind of place where the common Brisbane box's lack of "olfactory charm" can be tut-tutted about and data from a new study in the Journal of Arboriculture about street trees makes news. A 43-year-old corporate lawyer who lives in the Haight, Sullivan has become something of a microcelebrity online for one of his other obsessions. Among Harold and Maude fans, he is known as the keeper of the film's definitive Web site (www.geocities.com/rainforest/5862/harold.htm), which includes the locations around the Bay Area where key scenes were shot. When the Trust for Public Land bought the cliff in the Presidio where the last scene of the movie takes place, Sullivan called them up to inform them that they were now in possession of hallowed Harold ground. Will his next Web site be dedicated to the trees of Harold and Maude? "Compared to other cities, San Francisco is really tree-challenged," Sullivan says on a stroll through the Mission, one of the city's best neighborhoods for tree-watching. First, there are the logistical challenges. San Francisco's density makes it hard to plant trees, since sidewalks often extend up to the front door, and creating basins for them means cutting through concrete while trying to avoid underground gas lines, wires, and pipes. The city used to take care of this, but in 1981 the Department of Public Works slashed its tree-planting funds, electing to cultivate trees only on main thoroughfares. In response, the nonprofit Friends of the Urban Forest formed and has since planted some 33,000 trees, about one-third of all street trees in San Francisco. Over the years the city has helped out the community effort by funding a chunk of the nonprofit's budget. But in the 2002–<\d>03 city budget, there's danger that the group will lose that funding. (There's a petition on the FUF Web site, www.fuf.net, imploring the city to keep the trees coming.) Northern California has relatively few indigenous trees, and the natives, such as the Monterey pine and the Monterey cypress, are the monster trucks of trees, too massive for urban landscaping. So, most of the street trees in San Francisco are immigrants, with specimens from New Zealand and Australia doing especially well because of the similar climates. That's what makes tree-tracking a challenge for Sullivan and the smattering of tree-junkies, whose idea of a good time is a stroll in search of the city's best weeping bottlebrush or Guadalupe palm. Among the migrant trees here, some have mysterious origins that baffle even tree experts like Scot Medbury, director of the Strybing Arboretum and the Conservatory of Flowers, and Arthur Lee Jacobson, author of Trees of Seattle. After the two men saw Sullivan's Web site, they drove around one winter afternoon on a kind of tree treasure hunt, identifying about two-thirds of the sticklers. At the corner of 19th and Valencia Streets, Sullivan sees three rare chinaberry trees, the only ones of their kind in San Francisco. On 20th Street between Guerrero and Dolores, he picks a pod off of a carob tree, noting that it's the only female carob tree in the city. The carob pods can be ground up and used as a substitute for chocolate. And over on 23rd Street between Shotwell and Folsom, Sullivan points out the explosive, spiky, florescent green fruit of a Spanish chestnut. Yes, there are free chestnuts and fake-chocolate growing out of the pavement in the Mission. In all of these unusual trees, Sullivan sees the hidden hand of a cultivator of the eclectic. "Those chinaberry trees did not get there by accident," he says. "Someone went to the trouble of planting something unusual." But even among local tree-huggers, there's not just peace and love. The ever controversial eucalyptus tree split enthusiasts into two fractious groups. There are the native-plant types, who object to the frisky immigrants because they have a way of smothering surrounding plants, creating a so-called monoculture. A number of eucalypti were recently removed from Tank Hill to help protect the native foliage. But that roils the every-tree-is-sacred types, who don't want to see beautiful trees go, even if they came from somewhere else. Sullivan sidesteps this controversy, but he will say, "You have to accept that there wouldn't be trees in San Francisco if you didn't welcome nonnatives." He gets more riled up by clueless homeowners killing their baby trees in an effort to make them look more attractive. Near Dolores on 24th Street, a tree newly planted by FUF is competing for nutrients with the lavender planted at its base. "This tree probably won't make it," Sullivan sighs. He says he's often tempted to leave a note gently chiding the homeowner for committing a hapless act of tree murder, but he refrains: "They'll think I'm some kind of crank." E-mail Katharine Mieszkowski at km@salon.com. |
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