The Elfin Forest

Posted on August 1, 2003 in Ecotone

I’m surrounded by a sparse forest of tall trees. Long leaf pines, eucalyptus, liquid ambers, mimosas, and purple plums sprouting from an emerald green lawn make this sun-charred place resemble an Eastern woodland or, in real estate dreams, Scotland which is over the horizon and alive with the sounds of sheep — as these hills once were a century ago. The landscaper’s artifice is to equate home with the place where you escape from the freeways and the concrete of the workplace. There are several office complexes down the hill here and they are not landscaped much differently. There’s concrete in both places and a lie being told by the trees.

Not a single one of the trees that I mentioned is native to this land. We have here a forest that most overlook because the trunks are short and the canopies beneath our waists and beneath our knees. The “Elfin Forest” is what Francis Fultz called the brush in a book written in the 1920s. It’s the chaparral, the land that rips your clothing off if you run too fast through it, named for chaparro, the scrub oak. The land loves fire. Every few years a conflagration rolls through these parts, tearing away the round top bushes of the dwarf trees. For two or three years following, medusoid black stumps carry the memory.

Then seeds in the ground and deep rootstocks start to replace what was lost. A shrub which poets call “chamise” and fearful landowners call “greasewood” adapts itself with bellicosity to the circumstances here. Drop a match on a stand of greasewood and you have a fire that burns as insanely as a frying pan. It not only sacrifices itself but its self-immolation carries to the white sage, the manzanita, and the coyote brush which stand adjacent. The terrible holocausts that you see on television from your chairs near those Eastern forests — those are fueled by greasewood. When the storm has blacked the land, a secret manifest destiny has begun. Chamise resprouts from its own roots. Following the season of rain, stands crop up in places where underground pathfinder branches reached in previous seasons of abundance. The stuff spreads, conquers. Homeowners fret because greasewood lives only for itself and the fire which took everything seems to be prepared to give everything to this plant.

It behaves a little bit like the Bush Administration in Iraq, you see, destroying and giving itself favors in the reconstruction.

Other plants have learned to resist, either by paratrooping down as seeds, or, like coyote brush, being resistant to fire. Gardeners who want a natural feel about their canyon homes love coyote brush: it does not tempt or scourge.

Coyote brush, scrub oak, and greasewood live on dry slopes. What Easterners would call “real trees” live in the clefts between the slopes. The live oaks rise to heights of thirty to fifty feet. If I showed you the leaves, you wouldn’t take them for an oak because they are toothed ellipses. They have acorns: that’s the giveaway. Near me, a long line of such oaks overarches Trabuco Canyon Road. It’s like those arbors you see in old films about people who visit rich relatives in overwrought mansions. Except the color coming down through the leaves at midday is turquoise. Again our habitat declares its separate identity from the false forests of this hilltop.

Someday, when California fades like all the old cosmopolitan civilizations did and tourists come to visit the ruins of the Crystal Cathedral and gawk at the faux Matterhorn, these trees will unite with the bunch grasses to reassert their claim to us. I’ve been to Greece, I’ve seen how great centers of trade can disappear in a wheatfield or under a rocky slope. The plants shove themselves forth and cover our artificial promontories. The real mountains here will spit forth endless tons of gravel and dirt, burying our lives. When we are the subject of archaeology, our motion pictures mere fragments of celluloid that researchers will squint through or imprisoned on unreadable DVDs and video tapes, the short forest will show that it knows the land better than the liquid ambers and the purple plums. The song of the chaparral shall flow off the hills, giving the grasses space so that eyes can see the duet.

Maybe there will be sheep again, bighorns come down from the adjacent stone summits.

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