Home & Garden Columns

Once it’s reached adulthood a Monterey cypress is easy to recognize, though it takes wildly different shapes depending on whether it’s near the ocean shore, its native habitat, or inland even only a few miles. Its native habitat, in fact, is the very small section of coastland between Monterey and Point Lobos. If it were only there, it would be rare—and most likely endangered—just because its range would be so small. But it’s handsome and easy to grow from seed, so it’s in cultivation and part of human-made landscapes all over the world. 

Its best fieldmark, aside from the deep green of its scaled foliage: Small round cones like scaly shooter marbles, and the red bark, becoming silvery and furrowed with age, is the way it holds its leaves in graceful horizontal planes, in shapes like far-away new clouds on a horizon. That habit marks the sisterhood of the fantastically twisted, windblown trees on the coast with their more formally symmetrical, upright siblings—where they have space to assume their own unpruned forms—inland. There’s one at the east end of Golden Gate Park that dominates the area, a gorgeous open graceful giant towering in its stately, imperceptibly slow dance above every tree and structure in sight.  

There are several around Berkeley and on the UC campus—look around Dwinelle Hall and the Earth Sciences building—and once you’ve seen one you’ll know them. But when you think you know what to expect, go look at their home population, famously painted and photographed along the Monterey coastline, the sort of thing on which bonsai artists model their most contorted specimens. They seem at once muscular and ancient, digging their roots into rocky prominences and arguing lifelong with the fierce Pacific winds. 

Those winds nurture them uniquely, though. It’s harder to grow them, or at least to make them last long, in really dry places. They thrive on the moisture the ocean delivers to the atmosphere even during our summer droughts. In turn, they nurture ferns and mosses and understory plants beneath them, sieving the fog from the air and condensing it into drops, a very localized rainstorm to water the island of life that grows on the soil they start to form out of their own shed foliage. To see this happening, and a bit closer to home that Monterey, go out to the lighthouse at Point Reyes and look at the trees on the north shoulder of the paved road you walk on from the parking lot, at the carpet under them, brilliant green even in summer. The air smells different under them.  

Monterey cypresses on the coastline often stay upright long after they’ve died, leaving graceful silvered wood sculptures to mark their passing. The wood is tough and endures well in its untreated state, and I suppose might replace redwood in some outdoor lumber uses except for its decidedly un-lumberlike shape. Even the more upright cypresses planted inland don’t grow in an orderly column like redwoods or pines, but, as I’ve seen them, taper rapidly and bifurcate at every opportunity into a sort of organic candelabra.  

We lost several of them, along with some pines, out on the Berkeley Marina after the storms at the turn of the year. They do grow faster in deeper soils that they do in rock clefts; as a result, they share the unfortunate tendencies of fast-growing trees to overreach their capacities, to grow thick foliage sails that catch the wind and topple them when their roots can’t keep up. City life has its perils for them too, even apparently suburban city life like that in a mini-lawn by a Marina parking lot. Pavement interferes with root growth, and poor drainage can weaken their root systems, as it can with most trees, until they overbalance and topple.  

One terrible instance of this happened a few years ago on Sixth Street, when a beautiful old cypress collapsed suddenly—in, as I recall, calm weather, in the arboreal equivalent of a stroke—and killed a driver at a stop sign under it. Trees do die, as all of us living beings do, and living elbow-to-elbow in a city puts us all in peril as we lean on and overshadow each other. 

Photo by Ron Sullivan 

This 20- or 30-something Monterey cypress on the Berkeley Marina is just beginning to show the windswept flat planes of its adult form.