September 9, 2001

La Jolla lost a tree the other day, but perhaps only Elaine Brooks noticed.

In her spare time, Brooks, a teacher and biologist, studies and cares for the last piece of open natural land in La Jolla. As reported over the past year, this patch of canyon and grassland and woods, forgotten in time, has nourished her, even after construction began on multimillion-dollar homes crammed into 1.7 acres along West Muirlands Drive, chewing away the elbow of the patch.

In three days, a single bulldozer "removed just about everything that had taken 50 or more years to grow there," she said.

The development didn't quite get it all, however. For some reason a camphor tree survived, like one of those freakish points of light -- a school, an intact chimney -- that remain after a tornado has rummaged across the plains.

In the three years since, Brooks has often walked past the stunted little camphor tree, stopping to photograph it and all the changes taking place around it. She marveled at how the tree had not only survived the blade, but years of car exhaust, the burying of power lines, the installation of new water pipes, the building of a retaining wall and the framing of the new homes.

Every winter after the rains came, the camphor tree would "send out new red-leafed shoots from its base," and it gave her this feeling of hope. But two Sundays ago, on her walk along Muirlands to the grocery, she realized right away that something had changed.

"The tree was gone, not gone really, but it was splintered into a crumpled heap at the curb mixed with mounds of dirt and slabs of concrete, wrested into a pile."

She stood there looking at the tangle for a while. "I nearly cried. It was like someone had thrown me a sucker punch, and then I immediately began to wonder why I was so upset."

She ran home, white hair flying, grabbed her camera and returned to record "the death throes of the tree," to add to her long record of the change that eats away at what is left of old La Jolla.

That La Jolla was an arch of green that held the cove in which John Steinbeck and his pal Ed Ricketts (a marine biologist, like Brooks) collected specimens for Ricketts' lab on Monterey's Cannery Row. But that was another time, another universe perhaps. She took the pictures and stood there not knowing what to do next.

A cynic might say that a camphor tree means nothing to time, and certainly does not contribute to the economy or the high-tech future, and is replaceable, like the rest of us.

It's a mystery why people become so attached to trees, even ones like this camphor tree, not native or particularly special, but they do: such trees as the giant Moreton Bay fig tree of Spring Valley, believed to be 127 years old, now the object of a community drive to protect it, though so far only rumor has it that the axeman cometh.

Or the century-old Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus in Escondido's Grape Day Park, which stands more than 10 stories high, the focus of a 15-year community effort to protect it -- a campaign that will survive even the death of a homeless man who fell from the blue gum's highest branches in December.

Or the colonnade of Ramona's red gum eucalyptus trees, planted by the children of pioneers in 1910. Like soldiers in a slow-motion battle, the trees are falling to an invading insect known as the lerp psyllid. The town hopes to replant the row with strong young trees, but the future takes a long time to grow.

On August 1, the Julian News  announced with a front-page banner headline the "Final Farewell To Our Champion." Clint Powell, a Julian native and naturalist who, with his long white beard and ranger-style hat, bares resemblance to John Muir, wrote the story. He marked the dismemberment and removal, by a county-contracted crew, of the Coulter pine that had graced Pine Hills Road, near Julian, for as long as anyone could remember.

Recorded in the National Register of Big Trees 2000-2001, the pine was once the largest of its species in the world. By Powell's estimate, the Coulter was a seedling in 1881, and large enough by 1912 that Pine Hills Road had to be built around it. But in 2001, its heavy branches were a threat to passing cars, so down it came. The irony is that the tree had died long ago, but even its skeleton touched people's hearts.

San Diegans, who live in a statistical desert, may well have an outsized love for trees. After all, this is the land of Kate Sessions, the famous horticulturalist, who in the early years of the 20th century planted 100 trees annually in what would become Balboa Park and 300 more throughout the city. Many of those trees still stand. In 1998, a bronze statue of Sessions, the "Mother of Balboa Park," was erected in the park. It marks another time.

A statue of Elaine Brooks, or those who share her sensibility, is unlikely to be erected. Brooks does not go for girth or height or big numbers.

Her wards are small and diminishing in number: the native plants that few now notice, the coastal sage and chaparral -- the "elfin forest," as it's called, which shelters another universe of life, though scraped away day by day; and the little camphor tree that held no fame. At least not here. In 1973, Hiroshima declared the camphor its official tree, because it survived the atomic blast.

Brooks believes that the vegetation that surrounds us "for any length of time completes a kind of transkingdom emotional graft." That graft is easily severed.

"It used to take a man with a shovel and an ax or crosscut saw and a team of horses a day or so to cut down a sizable tree, and with the longer time it took, there was also time for reflection about whether or not it was a good thing to do," she says. Yet, standing over what was left of the camphor tree of La Jolla, she felt a stirring.

"What was remarkable to me was that there was this lingering cloud of camphor odor, a rich old scent that just hung in the air over the exposed roots and the wilting leaves, released from the root tissue in the destruction of the bulldozers. Although the carcass was hauled away on Monday, you can still get a whiff of it as you walk by."

Just before the camphor tree was removed, she took a few cuttings. And took them home.