Coneheads

BOTANICA: Look what they done to our street trees, though I think recent years show better behavior toward most:

Joan Citron, editor of "Selected Plants for Southern California Gardens," relishes teaching the city through its tree choices. Leading a tour of Reseda and Van Nuys, she points out small Valley streets planted with what have become such immense trees that on one side, city pruners have cut trees in half to free up power lines. "Chop-offs," she calls them, matter-of-factly.

That from this story praising conifers of all sorts, Emily Green of the LA Times makes the connection between California's great trees and the reason they're poorly used:

Redwoods, sequoias and bristlecones. California has the tallest, the biggest and the oldest conifers in the world. To excess, add extravagance. We also have the greatest variety. The whispering forests of the Sierra and Pacific ranges are thick with pine, juniper, larch and hemlock. We have drugs made from yew, homes from Douglas fir, fences from redwood.

Yet when it comes to landscaping our cities, we elected cedars from the Himalayas, pines from the South Pacific, cypresses from Iran. For our Victorian forebears, greatness simply wasn't gracious enough. The conifers of California weren't prize plants — "specimen trees" — selected to preside over a stately sweep of lawn; they were a renewable resource. Exotic plants served so much more clearly to demark town from country, civilization from the wild.

:::::::Ed. note-- Catch that? It was a writer named Green citing a source named Citron in a story about plants.:::::::
And it's a pity this info isn't available to everyone around living Christmas tree time:

Buyer beware: Of the leading types sold around Los Angeles, the wrong California native can be the most problematic. Jerry Turney, plant pathologist for the Los Angeles County Department of Agriculture, has three words about the Monterey pine: "Avoid it completely." They are from a wet maritime climate. They need too much water and, when drought-stressed, become prone to infestation with bark beetle.

Redwoods are simply too big, he adds, and also too thirsty.