The Conservancy’s dream of replacing those fire-dangerous eucalyptus trees in upper Claremont Canyon took a step forward recently when volunteers planted some 1,100 redwood seedlings in areas where UC has removed eucalyptus during the last couple of years. The newly planted, year-old seedlings are still so small that they’re hard to spot, but now that the eucs are gone, it is easy to see the 60- and 80-foot-tall redwoods that the Piedmont Rotary Club planted in the upper canyon thirty years ago. Those older redwoods—now obvious on even a casual drive up Claremont Ave to Four Corners—make it easy to imagine what a redwood forest in the upper canyon will look like in the future.
This whole story goes back to about 1910, when tens of thousands of eucalyptus trees were planted in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills as part of a fad that was then sweeping through coastal California. Fast-growing hardwood! That was the idea. But enthusiasm soon faded as people discovered that wood grown from eucalyptus in California was not useful in most of the ways eucalyptus promoters had promised. The trees themselves continued to grow, however.
Seedlings sprouted in many places. In Claremont Canyon, for example, the result was a dense, self-perpetuating forest full of eucalyptus debris—leaves and branches and long shreds of peeled-off bark—that formed a mat several feet deep, enough to overwhelm most low-growing native plants and making it difficult if not impossible for people to walk through. The eucalyptus experiment had become an ecological disaster and a monumental fire hazard.
Then, in December 1972, a prolonged cold snap hit the San Francisco Bay Area. Thousands of eucalyptus trees in upper Claremont Canyon were frost-bitten from top to bottom. They were still standing, but they looked terrible—stark and dry and colorless, like so much kindling waiting for a spark. With the Berkeley Hills wildfire of 1970 still painfully fresh in everyone’s memory, UC Chancellor Albert Bowker decided to take bold action. He had all the eucalyptus trees cut down and hauled away. Logging crews with chainsaws and tractors and big trucks did the job.
Afterward, the upper canyon looked like a war zone. To minimize erosion, the area was seeded from the air, but it still looked terrible.
In response, the Piedmont Rotary Club came forward with a reforestation plan that involved planting some 550 Monterey pines and coast redwood seedlings in the upper canyon. With the approval and support of the University campus planning staff, the club’s little army of volunteers did the job one Sunday morning in April of 1975.
Everyone had overlooked one problem, however. The eucalyptus root systems were not dead. Soon the stumps began to sprout—sending up four or five or six new stems to replace the old ones that been frozen and cut down. Within a few years, the upper canyon turned back into a forest of fast-growing, extremely fire-hazardous eucalyptus trees. By 2002, those new stems were 12 to 18 inches in diameter and as much as 80 feet tall.
Recognizing that the situation was once again out of control, Tom Klatt, manager of emergency planning for the Berkeley campus, set to work. After meeting with members of the Claremont Canyon Conservancy and with experts in forestry and fire safety from various local agencies, he came up with a plan and a budget to solve the problem on a phase-by-phase basis as funds became available. Once again, the eucalyptus trees in the upper canyon have begun to come down. This time, however, Klatt is making sure that the euc stumps do not resprout. Oaks, laurels, elderberrys, and other native trees and shrubs are being left in place and redwoods are being planted in order to create a cool, moist, relatively fire-safe forest in the upper canyon. The Conservancy provided $14,000 to help support
Klatt’s plan and also set out to provide the redwood seedlings needed for reforestation purposes. Seeds were collected from naturally occurring coast redwoods in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills about two miles south of Claremont Canyon. That means that the seedlings are genetically appropriate to the site where they are being planted; they are from a forest that has been evolving and adapting to local conditions for many thousands of years. The seeds were then turned over to the Moran Reforestation Center in Davis, which is operated by the California Department of Forestry. There seeds are cleaned, stratified, and stored under carefully controlled conditions of temperature and humidity until they are needed for reforestation projects. In March 2003, the Conservancy sent seeds to a nursery in Humboldt County to be germinated and grown. After about a year, the resulting seedlings were 20 to as much as 30 inches tall and ready to go into the ground.
As a labor of love and as vice-president of the Conservancy, I did most of the planning for this redwood reforestation project, and managed the actual planting effort. This involved a total of twenty volunteers, including eleven members of the UC Berkeley Forestry Club, two members of the Conservancy board, and a couple of East Bay Municipal Utility District ranger-naturalists, who were sufficiently enthusiastic about the project to use their days off to help out. As a result, about 1,100 redwood seedlings are happily extending their root systems down into the soil of the upper canyon and beginning to stretch their tender green leaves and stems and branches upward into the sunlight. The University is planning to remove another 1,200 to 1,800 eucalyptus stems from upper Claremont Canyon later this year, and the Conservancy is getting ready to follow up by planting more redwoods. Seeds have already been sent to the nursery in Humboldt County to be germinated and grown. We expect to be planting those seedlings next year. Joe Engbeck is a writer, environmental historian and vice president of the Conservancy.
