263 Trees Removed from Pico Blvd. To Make Way for A Whole New Crop

Tree stump, Pico Boulevard
photo by Carolanne Sudderth

Carolanne Sudderth

Mirror Staff Writer

   Despite displays in Santa Monica City Hall proclaiming that Santa Monica’s urban forest is growing, Pico Boulevard has been stripped nearly bare of trees. Residents are asking questions and community forester Walt Warriner agreed to supply some answers.
   The trees are being cut down as part of the Pico Streetscape Project and will be replaced with more appropriate species, according to Warriner. 488 new London plane trees (Platanus acerifolia) will line the sidewalks before the Pico project is finished and 105 new jacarandas will shade the median with clouds of lavender flowers each spring. 
  263 trees have been or will be removed. “We’re going to have a net gain of over 350 new trees on Pico Boulevard,” Warriner said. 
Some of the trees were replanted elsewhere. Fourteen queen palms (Arecastrum romanzoffianum) were moved to Santa Monica High School, and fifteen Mexican fan palms went to Woodlawn Cemetary.
   But it was neither fiscally nor physically feasible to save all of them.
“The average cost is $4,500 to $6,000 to relocate, and we’d be transplanting trees that have 10% to 40% chance of survival,” Warriner told the Mirror. “They most likely wouldn’t survive the transplant. 
   Warriner said that all the Pico trees were evaluated during the design process. “We evaluated the condition of all the trees and found that 80 to 90% of all the trees should be replaced for various reasons. “ 
   Some of the trees were causing ever greater hardscape damage. “We had melaleucas down by the high school that were creating tripping hazards. We had some tristanias (Brisbane box) up near the college east of the cemetery that were definitely outgrowing their sites. “ 
  Other trees were victims of bad pruning, having been subjected to topping and other practices that can turn a good tree into a hazardous one. 
   Topping, for instance, is the commonly seen process of “hedging” the branches down to a more desirable or manageable height, leaving its branches looking like the arms of Venus de Milo. In the long-term, the consequences can be dire. 
   “When you top a tree, the new growth comes out as sucker growth that is only attached to the outer layer of the branch and those suckers start to fill out and as the weight starts to accumulate, they may break out. We’re learning that a branch can drop off during a perfectly normal hot sunny day,” Warriner said. 
   Warriner emphasized that he was not finding fault with his predecessors. “Twenty to thirty years ago, that’s the way these things were done, and we’re seeing the effects of these now. And that’s why it’s so important that proper pruning practices are followed today, so that people who inherit the forest from us will not inherit a bunch of problems.“
   Of the existing Pico Boulevard trees, only those near Santa Monica College have been spared -- the magnolias, because “they did a fairly good job of screening the parking structures, and the evergreen pears because the college asked about saving them. “but so far, they haven’t come up with the funds to relocate them,” Warriner said. 
   London plane trees were chosen because they were deciduous will tolerate root pruning and will grow up and over storefronts 
Deciduous trees were chosen of the amount of foot traffic on Pico, Warriner said. “People wanted sunlight in the winter months when days are shorter and cooler.”
   The trees will be put on a regular program of proper pruning similar to that in place for Wilshire Boulevard. 
   Branches will be pruned annually to maintain visibility and to make sure they’re impacting signage as little as possible. Sidewalks will be maintained through a 40-year root-pruning program, . “London planes do tolerate root-pruning, provided you do it regularly.” 
   In this case, roots will be pruned in year eight and every five years thereafter.
   Warriner said that the Pico project won’t achieve its full promise until the trees have matured. “Fifteen to twenty years from now, when people drive that street with all the London plane trees and the jacarandas in bloom—to put it in California terms, that street is going to be ‘bitchin’.”