Old trees or older dunes? - Clippings - Brief Article

American Forests, Spring, 2003

San Francisco is struggling with just how historic it wants to he with the Presidio, a former military base turned 1,480-acre national park. Back in the 1880s the U.S. Army base planted an urban forest of species such as eucalyptus and Monterey cypress on ridges and sand dunes; a report by a landscape engineer said the trees would "indirectly accentuate the idea of the power of government," according to an article in the New York Times.

Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has drafted a plan to remove 3,800 trees and re-establish the sand dunes. Those dunes also are one of only two places where you can find the endangered San Francisco lessingia, a delicate yellow flower that thrives in wind-swept sand. Removing the trees would increase habitat for the flower.

The proposal has touched off controversy between so-called tree huggers and sand huggers. An earlier dune recovery plan that removed 19 trees recreated 13 acres of dunes and the lessingia plant numbers there soared from 600 to more than 1 million, the paper said.

The park contains somewhere around 100,000 trees and so far about 500 have been removed to improve vistas and lake views and improve plant and wildlife diversity, the New York Times said. Among the trees that would be removed under the Fish and Wildlife Service plan would be 120-year-old Monterey cypress, a costal species with a fairly short life span that has started to die off or blow over.