It’s been six months since I began pursuing an interest in trees. I had decided I would like to learn the names of all the trees I saw in California. Little did I know then, of what I recently read: About 3,000 species of trees are in California. But I got a great start when Brenda, the director of CSUN’s Botanical Garden, introduced me to CSUN’s Office of Sustainability, and their location guide to their 3600 trees. Having walked all 25 quadrants of the CSUN campus, I feel I have a good grasp on identifying almost all of their 200 different species of trees.
Now I am venturing out into neighborhoods in search of trees I haven’t yet met. It’s just as exciting as it was walking the campus, learning about those trees. But now I am in new territory. Armed with my camera, and its built-in GPS locator, I can take pictures of a tree, its trunk, leaves, flowers and fruit, and then upon my return home, copy the map of where the “new” trees are. Those photos then go into the “TREESUNKNOWN” folder in my Mac, and I also print them out for further study. In fact, I have printed out over 400 3”x5” photos, many of trees, their trunks, leaves, flowers and fruit from “real life,” but mostly from the internet. I keep the photos alphabetized in a file box. Once in awhile I go through the photos to see if I can readily identify the tree. Once in a while I have success – a Wow moment!
Somewhat naively, I thought that learning the trees on campus would make it easy to identify neighborhood trees. However, there are tree variables – age and other factors – such as a neighborhood tree that is not planted on the CSUN campus, that make the identification of those “new” trees difficult.
I like to look around the backyard vista, around the pool where I swim. I have counted 22 different species of trees that I can see from my yard. I used binoculars to identify three or four of those trees. When I am spying at the trees with those lenses, I feel like a secret agent – now I can see the fruits, flowers, leaves,and bark of those otherwise unidentifiable trees. Just the other night, lying in bed with my trees-of-California book, my eyes lit up in amazement as I identified the Brisbane Box tree in the yard of my neighbor two houses down the way. What fun!
Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at Robertebsen@hotmail.com
