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For urban gardeners and several neighbors of the Thai Buddhist Temple, it was the Berkeley chainsaw massacre. For the temple it was a new beginning.  

And for the few who bore witness last month to more than a half-dozen Buddhist monks, dressed in saffron robes and sandals, chopping down trees and otherwise leveling what for 17 years was the South Berkeley Community Garden, it was almost surreal. 

“It was beautiful in that it was so incongruous. The combination of saffron robes and the chainsaws,” said Adam Broner of the Berkeley Tool Lending Library, which abuts the former garden. 

“It freaked me out,” said one neighbor on an adjoining property, who declined to give his name. 

Last year, the temple bought the 11,000-square-foot L-shaped lot at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Oregon Street for approximately $500,000 from the trust of Weston Havens, the last of an old Berkeley moneyed family. 

The temple intends to plant new trees, said Head Monk Manat Suk. 

“We will try to do a new landscape so everything will be nice and new,” he said, adding that he planned to consult a landscape architect. He did not say why the temple was unsatisfied with the previous landscaping. 

Gardeners said temple leaders graciously gave them plenty of time to take what they could from the plot, but were shocked by how quickly after the temple’s March 1 deadline for their departure that the monks arrived with their chainsaws. 

“They gave the impression that they would have a minimum impact on the garden,” said Daniel Miller, executive director of Spiral Gardens, which had run the plot. Miller said gardeners were broken hearted at seeing the once lush plot reduced to dirt and tree stumps. 

“It’s not about whether they had the legal right to do it, it’s about the fundamental understanding of what was there,” said Lisa Stephens, a Spiral Gardens volunteer. 

Where last month 13 fruit trees and four coastal live oaks once stood, just one oak remains, Miller said. Chainsawing the oak trees remains a bone of contention since city law prohibits the removal of healthy oaks whose trunks are greater than one foot in diameter. Miller said two of the fallen trees were around the size where the prohibition would take effect. 

Head Monk Suk said temple leaders had not decided what to ultimately build on the plot, which sits just behind its sanctuary on Russell Street. Neighbors and gardeners said that they have gotten conflicting reports about what might become of the lot, including reports that it will be a site for a dormitory for monks, a second temple, a garden, and a parking lot for worshippers and patrons of the temple’s Sunday brunch. 

Neighbors, meanwhile, have contacted city offices to complain about the clear cutting. 

“We’re all shocked and appalled,” said Rosemary Vimont, who lives beside the plot and contacted the city’s forestry office about the fallen oak trees. “It has really made us antagonistic towards the Buddhists.”  

Vimont, a supporter of the last November’s failed tree initiative, said she now has more reason to lament its defeat. 

“If that was law, they would have had to have asked permission before they cut down those trees,” she said.n