Trees in Paradise: A California History - Hardcover

Farmer, Jared

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393078027 ISBN 13: 9780393078022

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California.

California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It's the work of history.

In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built the lucrative "Orange Empire" on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel, an industrial fruit. They lined their streets with graceful palms to announce that they were not in the Midwest anymore.

To the north the majestic coastal redwoods inspired awe and invited exploitation. A resource in the state, the durable heartwood of these timeless giants became infrastructure, transformed by the saw teeth of American enterprise. By 1900 timber firms owned the entire redwood forest; by 1950 they had clear-cut almost all of the old-growth trees.

In time California's new landscape proved to be no paradise: the eucalypts in the Berkeley hills exploded in fire; the orange groves near Riverside froze on cold nights; Los Angeles's palms harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds on the streets below. Disease, infestation, and development all spelled decline for these nonnative evergreens. In the north, however, a new forest of second-growth redwood took root, nurtured by protective laws and sustainable harvesting. Today there are more California redwoods than there were a century ago.

Rich in character and story, Trees in Paradise is a dazzling narrative that offers an insightful, new perspective on the history of the Golden State and the American West.

32 pages of illustrations.

About this title

About the Author

Jared Farmer, a Utah native and former Californian, is the author of Trees in Paradise and On Zion’s Mount, a landscape history awarded the prestigious Parkman Prize for literary excellence. He teaches history at Stony Brook University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

Tourists who cross the length and breadth of California’s topographically diverse countryside can’t fail to notice its wide variety of trees, from the giant sequoias of the north to the coconut palms and Joshua trees of the south. As Stony Brook University professor and former Californian Farmer points out in this oversize landscape history of our third-largest state, many of these trees are nonnative flora, like eucalyptus and citrus trees, cultivated after the U.S. conquest of Mexico and concurrent discovery of gold in 1848. Those seminal events in California’s history not only lured a flood of settlers but also inspired its new citizens to transform once-brown hills and valleys into Eden-like sanctuaries of orange groves and fig trees. In his comprehensive inquiry, Farmer charts the highs and lows of this horticultural revolution, including the ecological devastation that prompted environmentalists to protect the Yosemite Valley. More than just a dry botanical study, Farmer’s work blends superlatively nuanced prose with plentiful eye-opening anecdotes to produce a unique history of little-known but significant aspects of the Golden State. --Carl Hays

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393078027
• ISBN 13: 9780393078022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592