Grove Koger

One of the high points of my writing career was my involvement with Art Patron Magazine, which began publication as Laguna Beach Art Patron Magazine but soon added a Palm Springs edition. Publisher and creative director Christine Evangelides Dodd hired me to copy-edit, proofread and fact-check, but before long I started writing for every issue and eventually graduated to assistant editorship. Today’s post is a shortened version of an article that appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of Palm Springs Art Patron Magazine.

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Were eucalyptus trees a good idea? A bad idea? Over the past few decades, Californians have had sharply differing opinions about them, but they certainly seemed like a good idea at the time.

That time was California in the 1850s, when so many of the new state’s forested acres had been stripped of trees for fuel and construction. In other parts of California, the naturally spare landscape struck newcomers as barren and uninviting. As Jared Farmer notes in his fascinating Trees in Paradise, it was about then that W.C. Walker’s Golden Gate Nursery of San Francisco started selling the seeds of a new and unusual tree—the eucalyptus.

Eucalypti are natives of Australia and thereabouts, but of course countless species now grow in California. One in particular, the Tasmanian blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus), is common in the lower elevations, and its blue-green color and menthol odor are familiar to most of the state’s residents. They’re also giants to be reckoned with. The largest one in California—and the nation—is growing in the Lost Coast community of Petrolia. It’s 141 feet high, 49 feet in circumference, and has a spread of 126 feet.

We can’t be certain, but when nurseryman Walker planted some of those seeds himself in 1853, he may have been the first person in the state to do so. In any case, he hoped to harvest much more than firewood and timber from the exotic trees. Their leaves would yield a medically valuable oil and their flowers a bumper crop of honey. Walker’s optimistic fellow Californians followed suit over the following decades, with encouragement from the federal government. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 specified that homesteaders put a minimum number of their acres in trees, and the fast-growing eucalypti were an obvious choice.

Not coincidentally, California was filling with human newcomers as well, including the men and women who would become its most prominent artists. One of them, Italian-born San Franciscan Giuseppe Cadenasso, became famous for painting eucalypti. Initially the works drew ridicule, but after his death in 1918, the San Francisco Bulletin remembered him as “the first California artist to catch the mystic beauty of the eucalyptus tree with a facile grace and atmosphere entirely his own.”

Farther south, George Rogers bought 155 acres in the early 1880s in what’s now downtown Laguna Beach, planting much of the ground with eucalyptus seed and then subdividing it a few years later. While most of the trees had been cut down by the late 1920s, the newly formed Laguna Beach Garden Club saw to their replanting.

English-born Norman St. Clair had begun living in Pasadena around 1900, but he visited Laguna on a regular basis and set up a studio there in 1903, coming to be regarded as the little community’s “pioneer” artist. At least one of his watercolors, Eucalyptus—Laguna, depicts the trees that had by then become ubiquitous. Other artists followed and were naturally drawn to the giants, which soon became as common on canvas as they were on the ground. Joseph Kleitsch painted them shading Laguna’s old post office, Granville Redmond painted them towering over meadows glowing with wildflowers, and Edgar Payne painted them rising dramatically against a backdrop of distant foothills. Perhaps the most striking example is Guy Rose’s dramatic Laguna Eucalyptus. It wasn’t long before the plein air, Impressionist-influenced painters of Southern California became known as the “Eucalyptus School.”

All things considered, eucalypti haven’t lived up to their promise. Wharf owners and railway men learned early on that their timber made poor pilings and ties. On the other hand, their fallen leaves and constantly peeling bark can be serious fire hazards, as community after community has learned. The trees crowd out native species, alter soil chemistry and nitrogen mineralization rates, interfere with migratory bird patterns—it’s a litany of unpleasant facts that you’re undoubtedly familiar with. And yet …

In the century and a half since W.C. Walker planted his first eucalyptus seeds, the trees have grown to be reassuringly familiar if problematic features of the California landscape. But thanks to a generous assist from the Eucalyptus School, they’ve become something else as well, something bigger—cultural icons. A number of them even appear on Laguna’s Heritage Tree List. And unpleasant facts are no match for icons.

The painting reproduced at the top of today’s post is Eucalyptus—Laguna by Norman St. Clair. It’s followed by The Drug Store (c. 1925) by Joseph Kleitsch; Eucalyptus Landscape by Edgar Payne; and Laguna Eucalyptus (1917) by Guy Rose. All are in the public domain in the United States.

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