Our landscape architect friend from Visalia guided our plant choices (including many natives) and drew plans. We wanted a California Bay Laurel (Umbellaria californica) in our backyard, away from the garage and the fence. We chose it because we knew that it was slow-growing and supported local fauna. We were new in town, but we found someone online, with decent reviews, to help us with irrigation and planting. Unfortunately, this man planted a Grecian laurel (Laurus nobilis) instead of a California Bay. It took me a year to realize it wasn't the right tree. The fact that it was already nearly five feet tall was my first clue. We left it there anyway.
In a little more than seven years it was probably twenty-five feet tall, and that was with annual pruning. It was providing shade but in the wrong places. It shaded our aprium tree and one of our roses. It became a residence for the rats that had tunneled under our fence to eat the chicken food. One good thing about the tree? We got one-hundred years' worth of wonderfully scented bay leaves with each pruning!
So this year, my husband said it was getting too tall for him to safely prune, and we decided to just take it out. I don't like the idea of removing a perfectly healthy, mature tree, but I feel better about it because during the past few years we have planted many other trees, including my California Bay.
Massive numbers of growing trees and plants (in forests or communities) are what we call terrestrial carbon sinks. They suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sunshine, and water mostly from soil, and through chemical reactions in the plant, convert water to oxygen, hydrogen, and spare electrons. Plants use the spare electrons and carbon dioxide to make sugars they need for energy, and they release oxygen. What is scary is that wildfires and deforestation reduce the capacity of our terrestrial carbon sinks. They can't keep up with our CO2 production.*
So yes, it is rational to worry, and to plant trees. But what we all learned during the 2022-2023 rainy season was that it matters what and where you plant trees. For example, it doesn't work well to plant coastal redwoods in the Sacramento Valley. If they survive our heat and droughts, there is a decent chance that your average fifty-year-old, one-hundred-foot tall redwood will drop like a twenty-five-ton rock after a good atmospheric river and a lot of wind.
During that 2022-2023 rainy season, I worked at the UC Master Gardener Help Desk in Yolo County. It was no surprise that we got a lot of tree-related questions. In order to help people who needed to replace trees, we created a list of the characteristics people needed to know before choosing a tree. As it turned out there was a larger group of scientists, arborists, and nursery people working on a broader project to identify appropriate trees for communities and I was fortunate to be folded into that group. The end result will be a list of trees appropriate for city streets, residences, and restoration projects in Yolo County, with information on heat tolerance, water needs, mature size, and notes on limitations for each tree. The final list will be finished soon.
In the meantime, UC Master Gardeners from Yolo County are offering a class on choosing the right tree for your space with a variety of factors in mind. Watch for information about the class in the Coming Events section of our UC Yolo County Master Gardeners website. We hope to see you then!
* National Science Review, Volume 11, Issue 12, December 2024
This article was originally published in The Yolo Gardener Newsletter, February 2025