Some trees have even been optimized for their new role. Though they still have a long way to go - he estimates it will take about 65 years to get through all the conifers planted by the Army - in 10 years they have successfully planted 3,700 trees. By reforesting in small blocks, and spacing the interval between plantings - rather than all at once like it was originally planted - the foresters hope to create a more natural forest, with trees in different stages of growth and decline.Įhrlich and his team have removed and replaced roughly two and a half acres of aging trees each year since 2003. “The idea is to plant in different spots and smaller plots, to get a better age structure and an uneven-age forest,” Ehrlich says. In 2001 the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service came up with a plan for the Presidio that included managing the forest for the future. Although many subsequently died from being planted too close together, 60,000 trees survived.īy the time the Army left and the Presidio became a park in 1994, the shorter-lived cypress and pines were all reaching the end of their lifespans. Soldiers provided ample cheap labor to get the job done fast, and by 1910, 100,000 Monterey pine, Monterey cypress, and eucalyptus trees covered the ridgetops and gateways of the Presidio. And after the dunes of Golden Gate Park were forested in the 1880s, confidence mounted that the same transformation could take place at the Presidio. Major William Jones conceived of the project in his Plan For the Cultivation of Trees Upon the Presidio Reservation, a vision encompassing the practical need for a windbreak as well as the desire to highlight the power of government using dense, towering stands of trees. The native oaks that grew in the area were too short to serve as protection from the wind and sand, and the dune habitat looked nothing like the forests that Easterners knew and loved. Drawing by Louis Choris in November 1817. “They had to put lattices on the street to block the wind from blowing sand everywhere, and officers with living rooms on the windward side had sand filling them.” The Presidio of San Francisco when it was a Spanish outpost. “They were very uncomfortable,” Ehrlich says. But when the Army moved in in 1846, it didn’t find these sands of time so much poetic as unpleasant. “It would have looked a lot like the Marin headlands,” with grasslands on the east side and dunes of ancient sand that blew up here 10,000 years ago, Ehrlich says. A few oaks lined the creek beds, and everything was bent to the wind and salt air. Ehrlich’s job is complicated: these aging trees aren’t just wildlife habitat, they’re cultural artifacts from a place with a long human history.īefore the first pine tree loomed over these hills, the Presidio de San Francisco was the northernmost outpost of Spain. Looking out along the high western ridge the vista would have unfolded in rolling waves of sand and grass, dotted with scrubby plants that unfurled all the way to the sea. For the past 10 years he and his crew have been undertaking an ambitious project to rejuvenate all 300 acres of the Presidio’s forest by removing and replanting aging stands of trees. “We keep the as long as we can, but some are too far gone,” says Ehrlich, lead forester for the Presidio Trust. Army more than 120 years ago, but the crew’s intention for them is lofty: to replace a dying forest. The young trees, lined up for planting, are dwarfed by the backdrop of towering eucalyptus, Monterey pine, and Monterey cypress planted here in San Francisco’s Presidio by the U.S. As the slanted light of morning streams into the large clearing where Peter Ehrlich and his forestry crew work, it glints off a pickup truck filled with rows of bright green seedlings like tiny soldiers at attention.
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