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I see the city’s planting some podocarps along Dwight Way just east of Shattuck Avenue. I don’t see that often as a street tree; the plant is more likely to be in a lobby or courtyard, or next to some institutional doorway. As it generally gets used, it’s kind of a 1960s Sunset décor plant, with a poolside aura. It looks natural—which is to say, not quite natural at all—next to an Eames chair or one of those round plastic tables that look like exaggerated hourglasses. 

In fact, the foliage of this tree, sometimes called African fern pine, has an oddly plastic look. Maybe that’s because it’s fairly uniform, all its needly leaves about the same size and color except for the newest growth. That’s paler green, tender and a bit smaller; it gives the tree a sprightly fresh look in spring. 

On the street, though, it looks good—what landscapers call a “clean” look goes well there. Maybe the less sheltered life agrees with it, or maybe those on Dwight Way are just young trees, loose and airy in habit, and not pruned into stiffness yet. The tree does tolerate heavy pruning, which can make it denser for better or worse. I know this because it’s one species that my tree teacher set me on when he was hoping I’d make a new mistake for a change, by pruning too heavily. I did, and the tree is just fine, healthy and handsome now nevertheless. 

I’m not sure whether it’s about having been a good Catholic girl or having been a scholarship student who needed good grades (and was sternly notified of this at about grade six) but making mistakes has always been the scary part of schooling to me. I don’t think I ever really grasped the concept of creative screw-ups until I studied with Dennis Makishima, and I was nearly 40 then. The closest I came before that was that my father had taught me to deliver a good straight-line for a bad joke. Hey kids! Here’s my advice: Screw up now, while you can. And enjoy it! 

Podocarpus gracilior’s English name isn’t quite a mistake, confusing as it is. It’s from east Africa, and though it only looks ferny, it has something real in common with pines: It’s a gymnosperm. Gymnosperms are “primitive” flowering plants—in a sense in which “primitive” means “basal”—that is, basic, a big, senior limb on the tree of life. They include all the conifers, like pines, firs, redwood; and some more stereotypically ancient taxa like cycads, ginkgo, araucarias, ephedra (our own desert tea) and that oddest of desert plants, Welwitschia. (You can see one of those at the UC Bot Garden.) 

You can see araucarias around town, too—the Norfolk Island pines, bunya-bunyas, and monkey puzzle trees that the Victorians were so fond of, and planted in their gardens. Like them, podocarps are plants of ancient Gondwanaland, one of the ur-continents of really ancient Earth. This makes them an odd inhabitant indeed of magazine gardens and decorator lobbies, a souvenir of a time not only before Martha Stewart but before Mrs. Beeton or Eve or even Lilith’s favorite aesthetic daemon. Far from being plastic, it’s not far from being a component of some of the petroleum deposits from which plastic was made… or at least of brown coal. 

Podocarps are semitropical in origin, so one might wonder how they’ll do in the next freeze. Will they be as wimpy as, say, the jacarandas over on Gilman Street, who stagger back from every hard frost just barely able to look gorgeous next flowering season? Podocarps, like jacarandas, are more common as street trees in Los Angeles—maybe the Berkeley tree folks are anticipating global warming. 

But I know a few big ones around town that have soldiered on through the last 25 years or so, and look as good as the necessities of building maintenance and the exigencies of awkward siting could allow. What the hey, they’ve survived continental drift, a few ice ages, the slings and arrows of outrageous landscaping. I like the idea of giving them a crack at surviving Berkeley in the early 21st century.›