Home & Garden Columns

It must have been just about a year ago that a reader wrote to me via The Planet, asking about a row of trees on a street near Ashby and San Pablo. They were blooming—as they are now—and he’d been enjoying them for a long time and wondered what they were. 

A reasonable question, but as always, my good intentions were sabotaged by my very bad organizational skills. The letter vanished, and it turned up again only recently when I was cleaning out the office to make way for a new printer. My apologies to the gentleman for the lateness of the reply. 

I did, however, have the question floating around my consciousness and so I drove over to what I thought was the street in question. The trees are flaxleaf paperbarks, Melaleuca linariifolia. They’re covered in a froth of tiny creamy-white flowers, which on their rounded canopy evoke cumulus clouds or fluffy snowdrifts. Some folks call the species “snow-in-summer tree.”  

You can see others of its kind on Jefferson Street north of Dwight, and on the Albany border along the BART tracks. 

It’s an import, as so many of our street trees are, and from Australia, ditto. It’s kin to the infamous Melaleuca quinquenervia, which has invaded wildlands in Florida to the extent that it’s threatening what’s left of the Everglades. Like so many exotics, it’s less useful to the ecosystem it has invaded than the native plants it’s crowding out. That’s especially poignant in the Everglades, such a unique place that fosters unique life. 

On city streets both species are less of a problem. I like M. linariifolia better, personally, just because of that dizzy dazzling form it assumes in bloom; there’s nothing like it to make a passerby smile. My correspondent mentioned nicknaming the ones he encountered “Fluffula Truffula trees.” (Now, of course, that’s the way I think of them too. Thanks, I think.) 

Most of the time it’s just a tree on the street, giving shade and shelter and not much else to the city’s birds and other wildlife. Its foliage is a nice dark shade of green and its trunk is handsomely contrasting, white to buff-colored. 

Getting closer rewards the pedestrian. The bark is not only papery, it’s spongy; press it with your thumb and isn’t that the oddest sensation? Bouncy! It’s soft and smooth, too, between the fluffed-out seams. If you’re going to hug a tree I guess this would be the tree to hug.  

Sometimes I think the right to use exotic plants is rather like the right to keep and bear arms: It wouldn’t need so much frenzied defending if there were more information, consensus, and will to do it right. I know gun owners who are just fine, thank you, and I boast of a 100-percent accurate target record myself. (It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out how I got that one.)  

But half the foofaraw would be nonexistent if everybody took the care my friends have to keep the guns locked up, learn gun etiquette and safety (which are pretty much synonymous), and know they’re not video games or penis-enlargement devices.  

Problem exotics are a similar matter of Things in the Wrong Hands. The wrong hands in this case are those of folks who haven’t bothered to educate themselves about the place that’s keeping them alive, that supplies the ground they stand on, the water they drink, the very air they breathe, to understand what’s being overrun.  

Unfortunately that includes many landscapers.  

It’s not that hard, really. Anything that thrives as well under tough conditions in cities should be considered dangerous as guns and motor vehicles and explosives are. Keep them in their place, and there’s less chance of disaster. Keep them well away from wildlands-—parks, preserves, and just plain “un-owned” spaces—and you can take pleasure in using them.  

Native plants aren’t appropriate everywhere. Yes, you read that right. Oleanders are just fine on freeway medians, because you wouldn’t want to attract wildlife there anyway, and because you know they won’t mess with the local gene pool of plants we don’t quite understand yet.  

In cities, though, I’d love to see more native trees, and I rejoice in any research I hear of into their use. (Street trees lead hard lives and must co-exist peacefully with paving, traffic, and humans with other things on their minds.) 

But there’s no reason we can’t be responsible and use imports too. When I look out the BART train window at that cluster of trees from Mexico, Australia, and elsewhere clustered on the plaza on MLK near Children’s Hospital, I think of a bunch of old guys from all over hanging out and socializing on benches in the town square. I like thinking of that. Gives me hope.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

“Fluffula Truffula” trees line a street in south Berkeley. Like fireworks, exotic plants are so much fun we shouldn’t screw the situation up with irresponsible use.