Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
Hard to believe this list when LA is on it and a city like Atlanta isn't. LA has some neighborhoods with great tree coverage, but overall, I don't think of LA as being a great tree city. Of course trees here have to be watered until they are a big enough size to reach down to the water table, so that limits their presence quite a bit.
I'm torn, because while I love trees and the shade they provide, I know they aren't native to LA and our water resources are stretched thin and can only go so far. Some people here really want/expect the city to be forested as if it were in a location where it actually rained more than 4 months out of the year. LA's native vegetation is chaparral with larger trees located only around riparian areas. Trees will often line canyon floors because of the streams that tend to be located there. But looking at old photos of LA shows that the basin and valleys had few trees, and were mostly just grass/dirt and shrubs. The whole lush, tropical feeling that LA crafted its early image around was an artificial construct.
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It's wrong to say that trees are not native to LA. There are of course many trees that have been imported to LA, but there are many that are native to southern California, the oak being one of them. "Encino" and "Los Robles" have to do with oaks after all. In Pasadena/South Pasadena, some neighborhoods were built around already existing oaks.
This is interesting:
https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/t...-brief-history
Olive trees also grow well in southern California's climate; they don't need a lot of water and can grow to provide a lot of shade. They somehow look native to the area, too, even though they are not.