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"People are disdainful," Judith Belzer is telling me. "And fearful. They really get upset about them." I am in Belzer's Berkeley studio, admiring the paintings she will show at the Sonoma County Museum late this month. Given her remarks, you might think her subjects were criminals or venomous snakes. The paintings are of eucalyptus trees.
"The Trees That Captured California" was the headline on a Sunset cover story back in 1956. That's understating it. Two other arboreal imports, the palm and the orange tree, may be more famous symbols of California ease. But the eucalyptus is more ubiquitous than either of them. In the late 19th century, promoters planted them by the thousands, sure the fast-growing trees would earn riches as timber and fuel. Chief among the boosters was Abbot Kinney, the same dreamer who created a California Venice, complete with canals, on the shores of Santa Monica Bay. As it turned out, the young eucalypts of California never made good wood, but soon the trees were growing in groves and windbreaks from Santa Catalina Island to the Sacramento Valley, adding their distinctive pungent scent to the California air. Not until Nicole Kidman would there be an Australian import with the same impact, or the same rangy beauty.
Well, no more. Eucalypts are vanishing across California. Many have fallen to shopping centers and houses, of course, but they're also being removed from gardens and parks: Angel Island State Park, for example, and the University of California, Berkeley, campus. There are reasons for this. The trees can grow tall, too tall for many spaces. Native plant enthusiasts consider them garish intruders. Above all, eucalyptus trees have been condemned as a fire hazard, blamed — unfairly, say their defenders — for the disastrous Oakland Hills fire of 1991.
The controversy interested Belzer. "I'm drawn to elements in nature that have a certain degree of threat," she says. She, too, is an import, moving to Berkeley from Connecticut when her husband, writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), took a job at UC Berkeley's journalism school, and she saw the trees with a newcomer's eye. "I love the sloppiness of them, the infinitely rich tones of the bark. When they branch out, they look like human joints. They are animate forces to me." Belzer's paintings get all of that. Seen in disorienting close-up, her eucalyptus trees are intense, gorgeous, and above all, wild. The paintings get me thinking on my drive home about the strange, potent role that trees take in our lives. They are animate forces, with more power than we're willing to admit. I realize I can mark my entire life by eucalyptus trees, from driving fast as a teenager down the ranch roads of the Oxnard Plain, the eucalyptus windbreaks serving as shaggy mileposts, to today, watching from my San Francisco living room window as fog slithers through the eucalyptus branches of Golden Gate Park.
No wonder California eucalyptus fans get worked up at their demise: It's our lives being chopped down. To reassure myself, I go to one of my favorite groves, on Stanford University's campus. These trees, too, have had their trials. They're old — Leland Stanford planted the grove in the late 1800s. But when they die, they'll be replanted with more eucalyptus trees because of the grove's historical importance. Grounds manager Herb Fong tells me that Stanford retains more than 30 species of eucalyptus on campus, and they're actually planting more elsewhere on the grounds: "We will always have eucalyptus trees."
The thought makes me feel better. Part of being a Californian, I realize, is having a lot and still wanting more. We have beaches and mountains, but we want orange trees and palm trees, and our own Venetian canals, and Nicole Kidman at the Academy Awards. We want the eucalypts. I walk up to a really big specimen, tiger-striped with peeling bark, and grab a low-lying leaf. I crush it in my hand, then inhale. There it is, all of California with its danger and promise, in the perfume of a battered, irreplaceable tree.
INFO: Among the Eucalypts: Paintings by Judith Belzer opens this month at the Sonoma County Museum (Jul 28–Sep 9, closed Mon–Tue; $5; 425 Seventh St., Santa Rosa, CA; 707/579-1500).
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