ARTHUR C. GIBSON, MEMBG Director
Former garden manager Rand Plewak had a name for our giant trees. He called them "old bones." Prized trees are often used as focal points in famous botanical gardens and arboreta of the world, and garden maps often encode these to be used as landmarks around a collection. And MEMBG has scores of such giants that are our treasures, which are very large specimens of each kind and also plants that are infrequently cultivated around Los Angeles. Use the MEMBG garden map and wear a pair of tennis shoes to visit each of the following fine old bones.
1. Melaleuca styphelioides is an Australian tree, called prickly-leaf paperbark, that sheds its tan, papery bark in long, thick segments. As the bark ages, it may turn light charcoal, but visitors to MEMBG tend to peel off pieces prematurely. Our specimen, nearly 20 meters tall, is located close to the north entrance and the lily section and has beneath it the memorial bench dedicated to H. Miles Raskoff.
2. Agonis flexuosa is the Australian willow myrtle but also is known as the Western Australia peppermint, because its evergreen leaves are fragrant when crushed. Planted opposite the prickly-leaf paperbark tree, our Agonis, with its multiple, twisted trunks, has long been considered to be the most photogenic tree in the garden. Willow accurately describes the general appearance of its spreading to pendant branchlets, and myrtle properly identifies this as a member of the myrtle family (Myrtaceae). The genus name Agonis means without angles, describing the soft, drooping form of this plant, and, of course, its branchlets are flexuosa, i.e., flexuous. Agonis flexuosa is commonly used in Australia as a street tree and is adaptable in both temperate and tropical climates under a wide range of conditions. The tree does best along coastlines growing in partial shade and sandy or well-drained soil.
3. Ficus petiolaris is special among the many fig species cultivated in Southern California because it has gorgeous greenish tan, rather than gray, smooth bark. Its handsome leaves have petioles that are nearly as long as the broadly ovate blades. In general, figs produce dense canopies of evergreen leaves and require regular pruning to thin, but F. petiolaris, a deciduous tree native to dry tropical forests of western mainland Mexico, is more see-through, so requires no pruning to maintain. Our magnificent specimen, whose growth form and bark are inspirational at any time of the day, towers over the Central American slope and service road.
4. Eucalyptus grandis, rose gum or flooded gum, is an emergent tree of rain forest canopies in eastern Australia to New Guinea. Two individuals of this species tower above the northern botanical garden-one at 175 feet in 1996 (now over 190 feet and taller than 162-ft. Bunche Hall), then the tallest measured angiosperm tree in California and possibly the country-creating emergents in the MEMBG canopy that can be seen from any vantage point around the garden. Remarkably, these giants were planted there only a half century ago.
5. Pinus torreyana, the Torrey pine, in the wild is one of the world's rarest pine species. This species was named for Dr. John Torrey (1796-1873), a professor of chemistry and botany at Princeton and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. John Torrey had recommended Dr. Charles Christopher Parry of Davenport, Iowa, to accompany a military surveying expedition in 1849 to California along the international boundary. Parry, then 26, was appointed assistant surveyor and assigned tasks of collecting weather data and geology notes for mapping. Parry, with a team protected under the command of Lt. Amiel Whipple, set out from San Diego to explore southern and western California, and in June 1850 they made a trip north of Soledad Valley (San Diego County). There Parry collected a 5-needled pine growing on porous sandstone bluffs overlooking the Pacific. He wrote to Torrey, "if new I wish it with your permission to bear the name of Pinus torreyana." It was, and the site of collection near Del Mar is now Torrey Pines State Park. Torrey pine belongs to the group called California big-cone pines. MEMBG has one of the five tallest specimens (ca. 40 meters), and ours was probably planted in the early 1930s by garden superintendent George Groenewegen.
6. Erythrina falcata is a very large type of coral tree from dry tropical forests of southern South America. The descriptor falcate refers to the flower, which is curved like a sickle. Our specimen is about 20 meters tall and commands a post at the top of Hershey Slope on the northern edge of the garden, directly opposite the UCLA Plant Growth Center (currently under construction). Its red flowers are produced in lax clusters and make this a real showpiece when the tree is in full bloom during May. Fallen blossoms colorfully litter the ground by the thousands! Seeds released from its lofty pods germinate around the garden, so that we always have a set of seedlings to be extirpated from the beds-or else we would be a coral tree forest of red-flowered giants.
7. Jubaea chilensis, called the Chilean wine palm or palma chilena, forms an amazingly thick trunk for its size, up to two meters in diameter for a plant that attains a height of 30 meters. This feather palm is endemic to Chile, where it is protected, but by permit villagers may cut them down, whereafter sap-filled tissue is sliced daily from the cut end and boiled to produce palm honey.
8. Taxodium distichum, bald cypress or, less commonly, called swamp cypress, is the often-photographed deciduous conifer living in the backwater swamps of Louisiana bayou's, where it has buttressed trunks equipped with "knees," modified roots that arise at the waterline, and commonly is draped with Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). In the 1930s (apparently), George Groenewegen had planted several of these in a grove near Hilgard and an entrance into the botanical garden, and their trunks now are quite wide. In temperate climates, bald cypress becomes deciduous in the fall by abscission of the flat, leafy shoots that were produced in the spring, and its thin, pendant woody branches are also shed. In Westwood, where the climate never reaches freezing, the plants shed young branches throughout the year but remain evergreen, i.e., always bearing foliage.
9. Metasequoia glyptostroboides is the dawn redwood, and MEMBG has several beautiful specimens, including the one by the Cricket Bench that is among the tallest individuals (30 meters) in North America. This coniferous species, which has soft, deciduous leafy shoots, was first described as a fossil in 1941 by the Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki. It has been commonly identified in sedimentary rocks dating from 90 to 15 million years ago, occurring across the Northern Hemisphere and being one of the most abundant conifers in those ancient floras. Fossils of Metasequoia dated as recent as a few million years were found in Japan and eastern Siberia. Imagine, therefore, the excitement when in 1944 Chinese forester Tsang Wang visited the village of Mo-tao-chi in south central China and found a huge tree of dawn redwood around which the people had built a temple! In 1948 an expedition up the Yangtze and over mountain ranges, led by UC Berkeley Professor Ralph Chaney, found native popula-tions of dawn redwood in a remote area of western China. Thousands of seeds from that expedition were immediately distributed, and several specimens in MEMBG were offspring from that seed batch, i.e., they are several of the first grown in the United States.
10. Eucalyptus deglupta is the Mindanao gum from the tropical wet forests of the Philippines. Of the dozens of eucalypt species cultivated in Southern California, its bark is the most distinctive, consisting of thin dark brown and orange-red strips, when removed revealing green beneath. A tall specimen may form small buttresses around the trunk base, showing us how it has an ecological pedigree shared with other rainforest emergent trees.
11. Eucalyptus robusta, called swamp mahogany, and the larger and closely related southern mahogany, E. botryoides, are other impressive Australian eucalypt species that are thriving at MEMBG. Swamp mahogany inhabits swamps and wet soils along the coastline of eastern Australia. Our impressive specimen of southern mahogany, approximately 30 meters tall and growing just upslope of the south entrance, nicely exhibits the rough and persistent, soft and spongy, red-brown bark of this type of Eucalyptus. Because wood of this species is resistant to marine borers, it has been used for wharf construction.
12. Quercus lobata, the valley oak, with its very wide canopy greets visitors entering the garden at the south entrance. The trunk of this California native, covered with fissured, dark gray bark, is now too wide to hug, if you are that type of person, and requires at least three adult holding hands to encircle. Valley oak, commonly seen on grassy hillsides and valley bottoms in nearby Ventura County, is a winter-deciduous species having dull green leaves with rounded lobes and sinuses.
13. Chorisia speciosa, the floss-silk tree (MEMBG Newsletter 1999 winter), is commonly planted around Southern California, but our tall specimen by the rhododendron collection is a magnificent example of the species. There the straight, green trunk arises 14 meters before its main canopy branches, giving the feeling of how these trees grow in their tropical deciduous forest habitats of Argentina and southern Brazil. On sunny mornings visitors can sometimes witness butterflies fluttering round and about the canopy. One negative aspect is that the silky hairs (like kapok) from its capsular fruits drop on plants and downwind, like someone has discarded the stuffing of a mattress. Another large specimen grows at the corner of the Botany Building, and smaller individuals adorn the southern corner at Hilgard and Le Conte.
14. Hibiscus elatus, the blue mahoe or Cuba bark, is a tall straight tree at MEMBG that visitors walk past without giving a second glance-but they should. Growing along the new path in the Hawaiian section, this species has solid tropical credentials and is a native of Cuba and Jamaica. Most interesting are the bell-shaped flowers, 8 to 12 cm in length, that are orange-yellow but darken to burnt orange or crimson when they age and drop on the path below. Our specimen is approximately 21 meters in height.
15. Spathodea campanulata, the African tulip tree or fountain tree, may also not be one of the tallest in the collection, but it is a tree that stands its own opposite the daunting Factor Building on the corner of Young Drive South and South Tiverton at the northwest corner of our collection. The notable feature is that the tree can become covered with terminal clusters of large, cup-shaped, bright orange and red blossoms (MEMBG Newsletter 1998 fall) that bedazzle the observer when in full flower during late summer or early fall. Down at ground level, visitors are impressed with the markedly lobed trunk.
If you are really interested in large trees, try to purchase a copy of Exceptional Trees of Los Angeles by Donald R. Hodel (1988), the same plantsman who donated a wonderful collection of Central American palms to MEMBG.
MEMBG is planning ahead to have giants for future generations of Californians. In The Triangle we have planted specimens of the big tree of Yosemite National Park, Sequoiadendron giganteum (now only 0.5 meter tall), and the tallest of the tall eucalypts, E. regnans (now only 3.5 meter tall), from Tasmania. Plan to visit these when they are massive giants in 2050!