You can never have too many trees

PETER BUFFA

I like them. I don’t know why. I just do. Off-center holidays, that

is.

We had one just this week. Don’t tell me you missed it. You must

be joking. Arbor Day. That’s when everybody is supposed to plant a

tree, not for this reason or that, but just because trees make the

world a nicer place to live, and we all have to live somewhere.

Who doesn’t love trees? Nobody, that’s who.

Oh sure, we might be miffed by a tree with wandering roots or

falling pieces of whatever now and then, but trees are a good thing.

The big Arbor Day party falls on different days in different states.

Here in California land, Arbor Day is more like Arbor Week, from

March 7 to 14.

Last Tuesday, the Newport-Balboa Rotary Club celebrated Arbor

Day-Week the same way it has for 35 years, which is a long time. It

distributed tree seedlings to every third-grader in the Newport-Mesa

Unified School District, which is a lot of third-graders and even

more trees.

The club has doled out about 83,000 seedlings since they started

doling, way back in 1969, when men walked the moon and people knew

what “Strawberry Alarm Clock” was.

The Rotary club also planted a tree at Kaiser Elementary School on

Tuesday, not far from a tree that they had planted on another Arbor

Day, 20 years ago. Sherrilynne Dangl, a third-grade teacher, is quite

familiar with the Rotary Club and its tree-giving ways. “I grew up in

this area, and I got a tree when I was in third grade,” said Dangl.

“It’s a big thing for me now, seeing kids get their own trees.”

So who started this Arbor Day, Week, whatever, thing anyway?

It was a man named Jonathan Arbor, who also invented apples.

That’s not true. I made that up.

In 1909, California passed a resolution honoring famed

horticulturalist Luther Burbank, who was born on March 7, 1849, and

lived in Santa Cruz. The resolution encouraged people far and wide,

as opposed to close and narrow, to plant a tree in the week of March

7 to honor Luther Burbank and generally spruce the place up. Get it?

“Spruce the place up?” It’s like a joke. Burbank introduced hundreds

of new varieties of plants and fruits and vegetables, most of which

we take for granted today when we slip Luther’s works into our

shopping carts.

By the way, in keeping with the slightly loopy tradition of Arbor

Day, if you think the city of Burbank was named for Luther Burbank,

think harder. In the late 1800s, a Los Angeles dentist and sheep

rancher named David Burbank owned a huge, 4,000-acre sheep ranch in

the San Fernando Valley. Do you know how many dentist-sheep ranchers

there are? I don’t either, but it can’t be that many. David Burbank

sold his ranch to a developer in 1887 to be subdivided. On July 8,

1911, the 4,000-acre site was incorporated, and the new city was

called Burbank. So if it weren’t for David Burbank and his sheep,

there would be no “Tonight Show” and Jay Leno would be out of work.

That’s not quite as bad as “spruce the place up,” but it’s close.

Back at Kaiser School, the kids proved once again that they love

trees and trees love them. Some of the older kids helped with the

tree planting, and third-grader Riley Ricker exhibited a grasp of

both trees and dogs far beyond his years, when he was asked where he

planned to plant his seedling tree.

“Probably out somewhere my dog can’t get it,” mused Riley.

Everybody has their favorite trees, and everybody includes me. If

I had to pick one tree in the world to see outside my window, it

would be the oak tree in Pleasantville, New York. That name might

ring a bell. There was the movie “Pleasantville”, which was great, I

might add. And Pleasantville the town is the headquarters of Reader’s

Digest. Outside the main building is an oak tree that you have to see

to believe. It is at least 200 years old, and the legend is that it

was planted by George Washington during his Westchester encampment,

but I’ve never been able to confirm that. It is the biggest,

grandest, most beautiful, perfectly symmetrical tree I have ever

seen, oak or otherwise. In full bloom, its canopy is at least four

stories high and spans about 100 feet. Whoever coined the term

“mighty oak” must have been looking at this tree. If you want to see

it, get on the Saw Mill River Parkway north of New York City, and get

off at Exit 33, about 30 minutes later. You can’t miss it.

The tree of my wife’s dreams, is the Indian Banyan tree at the

Moana Surfrider hotel on Waikiki Beach, and it is every bit as

impressive. It was 7 feet tall when it was planted in the hotel’s

courtyard in 1904. A century later, it stands 75 feet tall and its

canopy stretches 150 feet across. This week, the guests at the tree’s

100th birthday party included a 90-year old woman whose husband of 60

years, now gone, proposed to her beneath the Banyan tree at the

stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1928. She has returned to the

Surfrider every year since then to visit “their Banyan tree.”

I’m not sure about too rich or too thin, but you can never have

enough trees. So take it from the Newport-Balboa Rotary Club, Luther

Burbank, and all the third-graders at Kaiser School, including Riley

Ricker. Plant a tree. It’s good for you, and Riley’s dog likes it. I

gotta go.

* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs

Sundays. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].