Features

For a few weeks in spring, the downtown part of Shattuck Avenue gets a tropical feel as the pittosporum trees bloom. The heavy, sleepy orangeblossom scent descends from the high-pruned trees and evokes Waikiki or some unlikely urban citrus grove, and lays a sexy benediction on Berkeley’s nightlife. 

Victorian box is more often a shrub than a tree, and, as its name suggests, is one of a suite of plants we inherit from that era’s garden fanatics. If you have a Victorian-style building and want to keep the plantings authentic, you’re in luck—those folks loved variety and “exotic” appearance, and you have a huge palette of species, forms, and habitat types to choose from. Quite a few, like members of the Pittosporum genus, are even fairly drought-tolerant, so you can have an extravagant look for little water.  

I’ve always liked working on Victorian box because of the strong orange-peel scent the wood gives off when it’s cut. It’s easy to prune, too, as its multiple branches give you lots of choices, and in my experience it recovers well. It gets used as a hedge plant, and it’s good for that, but I think the waste of fragrance and flowers because of constant shearing is a pity. Still, the person doing the work gets to enjoy the wood’s scent, a direct reward to the laborer worthy of that Victorian theorist Marx. Worker bees are drawn to the blossoms, too. I hope the nectar’s taste is as good as the scent. If it’s false advertising, well, we can enjoy it anyway. 

Most of the Pittosporum genus hails from Australia and its neighbors, and like many Aussie plants, they’re suited to life in our climate. I haven’t heard of its being very invasive here except in a very few suburban interfaces, but it’s a problem in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Maybe that crowd heard from their Berkeley brethren about the pleasures of good coffee, and want a cuppa Blue Mountain brew. It’s been a problem in the fynbos of South Africa, but some as-yet-undiagnosed disease seems to be whacking it there.  

Pittosporums have been caught hosting the Sudden Oak Death organism, as have a lot of landscape plants both native and exotic. Don’t panic and cut yours down if it’s healthy, though; it’s the nursery industry that needs to deal with this contagion, and soon. 

The trees on Shattuck Avenue have cousins in gardens and public spaces all around here, some with musical vernacular names like “tobira” and “tawhiwhi.” (Tawhiwhi is the one with the, slightly broader and grayer-green leaves and stylish, slender black twigs, quite an elegant shrub.) The Shattuck trees are about as tall as the plant gets, and are probably near the end of their natural lives; that, with the fact that they drop flowers and little orange fruits and are deemed “messy” and disposable in the landscape trade, means we should enjoy them while we can.