Brentwood’s coral trees, the City’s fragile and finicky signifiers of stewardship and solidarity, will get eight new saplings to line the San Vicente median thanks to the Brentwood Community Council (BCC).
The new corals come during a time when the California drought surges and El Niño nears, with the City cutting off water to all grassy medians.
But thanks to a 1976-designation declaring the San Vicente stand a city historic-cultural monument, the new trees and their more than 100 kin will live through the governor’s order. One of just two medians in Los Angeles, Brentwood’s San Vicente Boulevard will receive modest irrigation from the City’s Urban Forestry Division twice a week, instead of three, to keep the coral trees alive. The other median is on Highland Avenue in Hollywood.
Teri Redman Kahn, environmental representative of the BCC, was instrumental in planting new coral trees. After joining the Council in 2011, one of the first things she did was plant 10 new trees in place of ones that had toppled over the years, one by one.
“They have a life cycle just like a human,” Kahn said. “When they get old they die … And each time one had fallen it was like a dinosaur had fallen. It was a big, giant monster of a tree. And if the whole tree didn’t fall, a major limb went and you knew that the rest of the tree was going to go within the next year. It’s almost like losing a grandparent or something.”
Kahn said the corals’ deaths would also come from getting too much water (sometimes from a broken sprinkler) or some other negative environmental force.
“And the City doesn’t have any money to replace these trees, which is ironic because the coral tree happens to be the symbol of Los Angeles.”
But when they planted the new trees – which Kahn said were difficult to source let alone raise funds for – two died.
“I think the fault was really more of the City, because the City stopped tree-trimming near the base of these trees,” she said. “The coral was very, very dry.”
If coral trees are neglected and left untrimmed, the trees’ brittle branches tend to crack off, and overly moist roots can rot, causing trees to keel over.
It was within these circumstances that Kahn and Nancy Freedman, a fellow BCC member, set out to solicit business owners on the San Vicente Corridor for coral tree contributions.
Thankfully, they found Jordan Kaplan, chief executive and president of Douglas Emmett, Inc., which has 9 different properties on San Vicente Boulevard.
One spring day, Kahn and Kaplan walked down the median to survey the moribund trees.
“He saw the problem, and he saw what a mess it was and that if we let this go and let nature take its course, there would be no coral trees on San Vicente,” Kahn said.
Kaplan offered $10,000 to the Brentwood Coral Tree Endowment Fund if the BCC could match the funds. Within a week, they raised the matching $10,000 from just the 90049 communities.
Valley Crest Tree Co. provided a neighborly discount for the five 48-inch boxes and three 36-inch boxes of coral trees, set to be planted in the business district of San Vicente Boulevard later this month.
But buying and planting the coral trees is half the battle.
“The most expensive part of this whole deal is the maintenance afterward, the aftercare,” Kahn said. “I found a different organization entirely that guaranteed to water the trees for less than half the money per month [Los Angeles Conservation Corp.] We will continue to provide our own watering with a watering truck until our money runs out.”
From the West Los Angeles Veteran Affairs campus to the ocean, about 120 of these trees were planted along the five-mile stretch of San Vicente Boulevard in 1950 to replace the discontinued Red Line trolley tracks.
These gothic and majestic coral trees became the City’s official tree in 1966.
