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URBAN FOREST - Earlier I reported on the Los Angeles’ Urban Forest, and its importance to the city.
If there is anything which Los Angeles needs, it is trees, and a lot of them. Trees provide beauty, cool the city with shade, they enhance and enrich the lives of the city populace. They are greatly needed in lower income neighborhoods. A Los Angeles Urban Forest seems like a very positive move to enhance the city.
The Urban Forest is created and maintained by governments and their departments and agencies.
From the U.S. Forestry Service: The 2010 census reported that nearly 81% of Americans now live in urban centers, up from 79% just 10 years earlier. Over this same time frame, urban populations grew by more than 12.1%, outpacing the national growth average of just 9.7%. It is clear that we are becoming a more urbanized nation. Because of these growth patterns, urban forests are more important than ever- they are the trees outside our front doors. They are dynamic ecosystems that provide critical benefits to people and wildlife. Urban forests help to filter air and water, control storm water, conserve energy, and provide animal habitat and shade. They add beauty, form, and structure to urban design. By reducing noise and providing places to recreate, urban forests strengthen social cohesion, spur community revitalization, and add economic value to our communities.
Trees indeed add beauty to the urban landscape, and particularly flowering trees whose existence is to flower and share with us their inspiring beauty.
The earlier report was my frustration on the needless and painful-to-see mangling of a part of the Urban Forest by LAX/LAWA of Orchid Trees planted along Westchester Parkway, which runs north of LAX.
Over the summer the trees were mangled in a pruning job which cut branches while full of orchid flowers. This pruning did not share the beauties of the trees, but destroyed them.
Two emails were sent to LAX/LAWA to ask if those Orchid Trees were under their jurisdiction. A reply was finally received from them, and two phones took place to discuss the trees and their botched pruning.
It is senseless to prune, let alone mangle, flowering trees while in full bloom. This pruning was a very severe cutting of the branches close to the trunk so the trees ended up looking like shish-kabobs. The remaining stunted branches had a few leaves sticking out, and the very sorry sight of a few orchid flowers, stranded like someone shipwrecked. The mangled pruning left the trees looking forlorn, severely raw, and pathetic.
After the mangling some of the branches have new leaves and there are small branches, but the trees look deformed. In addition to the beauty of the flowers, the long and elegant branches of the Orchid Tree add to its beauty. That beauty is not found in the trees today.
In the first phone call I spoke with very nice and very professional representative from LAWA Public Relations. She listened patiently as I described the hatchet job of the pruning of the Orchestra Trees while they were in full flower.
There were questions where the Orchid Trees were located along the parkway. Together we reviewed a map on-line, and I directed her to the location of the trees. She said she needed to consult with her management to determine if indeed these trees were under the jurisdiction of LAX/LAWA, or City of Los Angeles Street Services.
The second phone call from LAX/LAWA took place a little over a week later with the same professional P.R. representative. She confirmed that those Orchid Trees along Westchester Parkway were under the jurisdiction of LAX/LAWA, and they directed the pruning.
She also informed me to not shoot the messenger. She does not make policy but only relates the information given to her. Fair enough.
I was told by the Publicity Office of LAWA that the trees were pruned, mangled, because some of the branches posed a hazard. This was a difficult reason to accept.
These trees are planted directly in front of the cinderblock walls which separate the airport’s parking lots from the parkway. The trees sit in a stretch of land about three to four feet wide, and then there is the sidewalk, and then the street Westchester Parkway.
That seems like enough room for the trees and pedestrians and vehicle traffic.
If some of the spread of the branches of the trees were a hazard, it is hard to see how. Orchid trees have been planted in other places in the Los Angeles Basin.
In Santa Monica along Olympic Boulevard around 17th Street are Orchid Trees which were planted in the sidewalk, and directly along the boulevard. Pedestrians and vehicles pass close to the trees with there long branches. The trees had flowers. It is not as spacious as along Westchester Parkway. Yet Santa Monica has gratefully allowed these tree to branch out with their branches and flowers.
In West L.A. along Centinela Avenue between Venice and Washington Boulevards in the City of Los Angeles there are Orchid Trees lining the streets with long branches. There seems to be no problems with these trees.
The situation with LAX/LAWA leads to questions.
- Who planned on planting Orchid Trees?
- Did no one know how they would grow, and that they would flower?
- Are flowering trees considered dangerous and hazardous by LAX/LAWA?
- Is there no Arborist for LAX/LAWA?
- Will LAX/LAWA allow the Orchid Trees to fully flower and go through the next flowering cycle before pruning them.
- Could not LAX/LAWA just do a selected pruning of branches considered dangerous and leave alone the rest of the tree?
- Are the flowers on the ground, if the trees are allowed to fully bloom in the future, hazardous? If they are, could LAX/LAWA not send out workers to sweep the flowers?
For now, for the health of the trees so they can recover from the mangled pruning, LAX/LAWA needs to do some maintenance. The suckers, short branches growing from the base of the trunk, need pruned, by hand with hand pruners and not a string line trimmer which will cut into the trunk making it susceptible to insect infestation and disease.
By planting trees, and I am glad they did, LAX/LAWA is now a steward of Los Angeles’ Urban Forest. They have responsibilities to the trees, and to the city to let the Orchid Trees flower and share their beauty. They need to do better.
(Matthew Hetz is a Los Angeles native, a composer whose works have been performed nationally, and some can be found here. He is the past President of the Culver City Symphony Orchestra and Marina del Rey Symphony. His dedication to transit issues is to help improve the transit riding experience for all, and to convince drivers to ride buses and trains to fight air pollution and global warming. He is an instructor at Emeritus/Santa Monica College and a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.)
