The trees are still growing! They have been growing for so long that no person living can remember who planted them or exactly when. From their rate of growth and present size, we know that they are now over 100 years old.
The Eucalyptus, Orange, Olive and Palm trees are California icons to the Nation. They are not native Californians like you and I. They are immigrants from the Old World. They didn’t arrive here by them selves! People with a vision brought these trees here, with purpose. Though they would never live to see them to maturity.
The Spanish Padres came through the length of California just that long ago. They have been given credit for the plantings of Eucalyptus.
These Fathers, with no children to benefit from the future shade or hope of shade in their own time, planted these trees! To pass a blessing down to our generation
In this desert, I can work in the shade most all day. I can stand in an acre of open sky and be shaded by the tall trees standing some 500 feet away. Only at Hi noon, when the tree stands in its own shade, does man and horse seek artificial shelter.
The tree leaves re-position themselves during the day. Their motivation is selfish, seeking the sun’s light, to power the tree’s food factory. We are benefited as the shade of each leaf is combined precisely to shade us below.
Resting here under these ancient plantings, I imagine the Indians roaming here with only the shade of their movable huts. The Padres, with their robes hitched up for labor, digging a planting place, right here where this tree stands! That was only the beginning!
The little tree had to be watered often and over a long time. To be alive now, it had to be helped to grow until it could, litterly, stand-alone. This tree has dug its own well! Its roots have reached down about thirty feet to water! (Powered by the sun, it not only pumps water up to the surface, it lifts it up to the highest leaf 100 plus feet above us.
This stand of Eucalyptus is independent. Without man, especially without man, it can survive alone! The sun, water and soil, wind and rain are essentials. Its life includes the birds, animals and insects, and now man.
I see the marks of man, his staples and barbed wire, the burned pockets of black and scars of his axe.
The tree prunes itself! We see around the trunk’s base, a random pile of small dry limbs. Many are five to ten feet long. These are die/back wood, broken by weight and wind. Weather cycles change the rate of growth. The tree decides how much it can maintain. Most of the time, we hear little crackles as small limbs are shed.
When a large limb falls: -I have had the experience- it happens at any time, even in a dead calm on a blistering summer day. I hear a loud, s l o w, c r r r r a a a a c k, several seconds long. Frantically I search for movement. (Some, trees, are tall enough and close enough to crash over a dwelling or barn.) As the fall accelerates, I can see a tree-sized, limb carrying a mass of foliage, slowly move to horizontal. Immediately it begins to plunge. I am still following it down, when I hear the crash!
The tree sways as it re-balances itself in a new position. Birds fly safely away. The tree now, has a new silhouette, against the sky. I rush over to inspect the damage. The tree doesn’t bleed. There is no stripped off bark at the break. Several lower and smaller limbs have been carried away by the fall. I see the fall close to the trunk. It looks like a tree itself: four feet in diameter, and some twenty feet long. The, half flattened, brush is head high.
This is all in the front yard of #5. (This is where the free firewood comes from.) I cut it into fire wood lengths and haul away the brush with the tractor.
I am able to drag the heavy log with the tractor. I chain it to the drawbar and lift the end a little, so that it acts like a sled. I move it away from the house to be cut up with my chain saw. I have help to load the brush into a trailer, behind the tractor. (There is a huge compost pile just over a small hill.) The tractor pushes the brush over onto a pile where it is reduced by the weather and weight. - A coyote has a den back under the pile. –
Another fall from a tree in this stand, fell vertically, like a spent arrow. Its broken branches anchored the over sized limb between two standing trees. The broken trunk spiked into the ground, as if it grew there! Looking up I could see the spot where it broke away but I couldn’t see where it should have fallen! (The giant limb had disappeared in plain sight!)
Red tailed hawks have reared generations of family in the tree top branches. –Collectors prize the hawk’s molted feathers. - (A neighbor lady searches the ground beneath the trees.) She asks for my permission and promises that her Doberman won’t bite!
Owls also roost in the tall eucalyptus trees. We hear them calling after dusk. We can’t see where they roost. But the fallen leaves are spattered with, white, splashes that mark their place above. Here too we find the owl’s ‘castings’. +
+ The owl eats and digests food that it cannot excrete! It doesn’t bite or chew. It coughs out the complete skeleton of the mouse, kangaroo Rat++ or other animal that it has swallowed whole. The tiny skeleton falls to the ground, already bleached and unbroken!
Around the base of each tree is a mound of fallen leaves and bits of shed bark. This builds to several feet of dry duff unless it is raked up and hauled off. These mounds present a fire hazard to the tree if not cleared away.
++ The Kangaroo Rat is an endangered species. (Each acre of land sold is charged $1000 to provide for this rat’s habitat.)
“Quietly,
Like the breeze
That blows the olive tree.”
Rod McHuen
The Ranch has thirty some, old, overgrown, olive trees. With un-trimmed, trunks, and standing two rows deep, they screen the barn lot from Gloria Road. Others flank the little private road connecting our buildings east and west across the property. I rested on a rock, in the shade and quietly watched the olive trees.
Here was no wind to thrash the limbs and bend the tall trees.
But slowly the olive leaves moved in the breeze. In unison, they turned from olive green to silver and back to green again, and again. They looked like under sea anemone, waving, in the invisible current. They seemed like a busy school of little, silver fish, flashing in the soft light.
The annual olive crop is wasted. The fruit is attractive, nourishing and salable. (The Lindsay Ripe Olive Association is a commercial success.) But in ten years, no one has picked this crop. The ‘berries’ ripen and fall to the ground. Along the traveled areas, they are crushed underfoot and wheel. The olive oil darkens the sand and to some extant, lubricates the path!
Three men from Kuwait asked about this and promised to come back at harvest time.
The fruit would be free for the picking! They said, “The first rain is Allah’s sign that the time is right.” They came out to see the trees. They told how that they had lost three boats when their country was invaded. We never saw them again.
Note: Do not eat an olive picked from the tree! (Locals enjoy offering the raw fruit to strangers.) The taste is bitter and the oily flesh is difficult to spit out!
Properly prepared, the olive is delicious, eaten in food dishes or out of hand. +++
+++The whole olive is first ‘cooked’ in a bath of lye. (Sodium Hydroxide) Slicing the olive will show the change in color as the treatment continues. When the color reaches the pit, the ‘cooking’ is over. Next, the olives are rinsed in salt water, -brine- to remove all of the lye. – It takes about three changes of brine - lastly the olives are kept in salt water until eaten. The olive now retains a mild salt flavor that proves that it was worth all the trouble taken!
Much or most of the olive crop is crushed for its oil.
Central Valley Orange growers traditionally surrounded their groves with borders of olive trees. This was to provide shelter for the orange grove. This was to minimize wind and frost damage to the orange crop. The olive crop was of little value.
Interestingly, we lived to see the market change until; the olive border crop was more valuable than the oranges it was protecting!
The thin wall was a bright green, curtain, easily parted. We could stand up when we walked inside. One giant we called the Grandfather tree. A large, limb supported a rope/auto tire, swing. It was a playhouse for children. Like a stalled carrousel, the tree was a shaded canopy around the huge trunk.
One or two children rode in the tractor tire. One rode on the top holding on to the rope. One more pushed the swing. The smooth natural framework of the pepper tree became a ‘jungle gym’.
Ducking my head I could ride the tractor through the curtain and around inside the tree. The tractor tool dressed the ground for a weed free, dirt floor.
Tractor trips under the trees can be dangerous. I once ducked down to the steering wheel while the brush, brushed by my head. The hanging limb was strong, brushing off my hat and moving the gas lever to high speed. We crashed through, before I could stop, the ganged disk had cut my straw hat in two places.
The small, stiff branches tore my shirt and scratched my face and hands. The sudden roar of the exhaust and the unexpected lurch forward as we jumped from bright sunlight into shade, was a sound and light show. I was the sole actor and only audience.
A young pepper tree grew up to shade the large water tank. The shade was fine but the limbs and roots were a problem. The growing roots were slowly pushing pipes out of place. Some encircled the pipe so that it was difficult to cut away the root without cutting the pipe. Other larger roots were tilting the tank itself. I drilled holes and used root killer. I cut the wood back from the pipe and severely pruned the tree. Some of this was below ground and out of sight.
I moved the pipe away from the tree roots. As I dug out the pipe to change it, I could see where some one had done the same thing before me! I cut down the whole tree.
The stump, cut at ground level, produced new growth. A new tree would be there soon!
For other reasons, in separate steps, we gradually moved the pump, the tank, the electrical power and water line to another well. The Pepper tree grows there still!
Note: The pepper tree’s seedpods taste like pepper. The early settlers said that the Indians used it for seasoning, food.
High School biology, as I remember it, explains how a tree grows, disperses its seeds and where it lives, naturally. These ranch trees had all of the life systems in common.
The tree is sun powered. It uses carbon dioxide and sunlight to feed itself. The process takes place in the vertical palisade cells in the leaf. The active material is green stuff called chlorophyll, which is plant language for green stuff!
The translation of sun and gas into plant food is called photosynthesis. Which means ‘put together by light!’ The tree exhales Oxygen! Remarkable, it is vital stuff for humans.
(If you ever create such a system, be sure to create the plants before you create the
Breathing things!)
Tree-plant, food contains trace mineral and metal. This is necessary for our diet. We have no other source. That isn’t remarkable. But remarkably, the plant has no use for these materials!
Two more words: Hydrotropism, the support of plants by water.
Heliotropism, the servo-system that repositions the leaves as the angle of sunlight changes during the day.
Arbole Grande had a small fruit orchard for domestic use. Several nut trees grew there. And some citrus trees were planted by the #3 dwelling. Tall twin palms marked the #1 house. Together, all of these trees brought a unique charm to Rancho Arbole Grande.