The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Shrubs And Trees
Practically everywhere the need of shade on small places is being supplied today, as it has been for the past fifty years, by means of one or other of the more commonly and cheaply available giant kinds that are made to serve alike for parks, streets, rural roadsides, large estates and small residential places. Nearly all of them are totally unsuited for average home grounds. They grow into proportions utterly out of scale with and beyond the accommodations of small places. And they involve in the long run elements of physical risk through breakage, which are unjustifiable and avoidable. Where such large trees dominate the scene it becomes moreover practically impossible to maintain proper lawns and plantings, because of their far-flung shade and encroaching roots.
The worst offenders are undoubtedly the larger Maples and the American Elm, which are the most commonly planted. Both kinds are voracious surface feeders, matting all nearby lawn and planting areas with their roots, against which no manner of vegetation can maintain itself.
Both kinds are too shallowly anchored in the soil to withstand the leverage of their enormous crowns in wind and ice storms. Every high wind sends them sprawling all over the town. Both kinds, also, develop diffused, i.e., branched trunks with main limbs extending high and wide, and boundto break under stresses of ice and wind, to the peril of house and hide. In short, they possess every quality for which trees ought, in sober judgment, to be disbarred from use in residential quarters, on properties or along streets. There is no justification for their use and no explanation but the momentum of long-established habit and, to be sure, the prevalence, everywhere, of an uncritical, sentimental attitude toward trees, no matter what kind, which beclouds judgment and bars the way to an intelligent enjoyment of good trees.
We conclude all too generally that we must accept as sacred trusts whatever kinds, however lowbrow or ill-suited or unsociable,in fact, whatever tree or trees may have strayed into our lot or by some mischance escaped the contractor's bulldozer. The planting of a tree, any kind at all, becomes a religious sort of act, exempt from critical thought and worthy of commendation.
What inconvenience do we not invite with this drivel! How meekly we let these sacred misfits plague us and ruin our gardens and come crashing down through our roofs and exact, from some of us, fabulous sums to have their tottering carcasses propped up with concrete and fancy hardware! Our attitude is well portrayed by a newspaper clipping at hand, about a man, somewhere in Ohio, who had his back stove in by a falling Maple limb and on the way to the hospital managed one last, happy murmur: "Fools like me."
If we would really enjoy our small home grounds, one of the things we must guard against definitely is the thoughtless retention or introduction of any of these unwieldy Maples, Elms, Buttonballs, Ginkgoes and what not, even if only God can make them.
