Birches and Eucalypts

Birches

“White birch is the most popular deciduous landscape tree in California.”  So says a label.  If you plant birches, plant a lot of them.  Nothing looks sillier than the cliché trio of birches on a lawn, nor more sublime than a whole grove of them—a symphony of light:  white and silver and warm buffy orange.

It is a great shame that so few kinds of birch are available in nurseries.  Almost all you can find is the common ? white birch (Betula pendula) and now sometimes the rather expensive (because grafted) and not-too-different Jacquement ? birch?  But there are many, and almost all are treasures.  Paper birch, river birch . . .

One of the glories of birches, besides their rather nice autumn foliage and their obvious charms in winter, is their attractiveness to all our local small finches.  American and lesser goldfinches and pine siskins (all genus Spinus) which come in twos and tens and hundreds to feast on the seeds in fall and winter, filling the grove with a delicate chatter that says with sound what the trees themselves say with light.

Eucalypts

Not only a species (the familiar towering blue gum) but a genus of hundreds of species; not only a genus but a huge family of trees and shrubs, nearly all southern hemisphere, most Australian, all evergreen, most eminently satisfactory for a California landscape.

There is one major distinction in the family that you should know about:  there are two major divisions:  one with opposite leaves and single-seeded and (often) fleshy, edible fruit (these tend to be on the smaller/shrubby end of the Myrtaceous continuum, and they tend not to have very showy flowers); the other with alternate leaves and hard, woody capsules instead of fruit containing many small seeds each, and often persisting on the branches (these are generally large shrubs to huge trees, and often have very showy, nectariferous, stamen-brush flowers).

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater; that is, don’t let the big, messy, weedy blue gum prejudice your view of Euc’s.

Even that monster, though, can be absolutely the most majestic, bird-magnet tree in a whole neighborhood—if it is grown in the open, with plenty of room to spread.  It then looks as glorious as crowded, spindly trees in dense groves look dreadful.

Important to note, that near the coast this species is dreadfully weedy, seeding itself all over the place and crowding/shading out everything else in its way (except poison oak, that is—but that isn’t saying much).  However, in the hotter, drier inland it will grow magnificently where it is planted, but it does not “escape”.

Hard frost and fire will kill the leaves and branches, but like most euc’s, blue gum rebounds readily after these insults.  The thing is indestructible:  you can cut the tree off at the knees, and still it will resprout as vigorously as any redwood.

To kill unwanted ones—which means almost ever one (in groves) less than about two feet dbh—you have to poison the stump immediately after cutting it.

A great many Californians, if not all, grew up with blue gums, and know the pungent, nostalgic smell of them, the shreddy strips of bark, the round seed pods like ball bearings.

Naturally, there is often a lot of controversy about them—to cut or not to cut.  Fire hazard or landmark.  Destroyer of native vegetation or neo “native” in its own right.