The Eucalyptus of Northern California
By Casey Mills
Photos by Kate Sawyer
My dad is a great storyteller, though he leans heavily on one crutch—while able to rattle off a stream-of-consciousness saga with the best of them, he also keeps about forty stories in regular rotation.
But he doesn’t just walk around reciting them. Instead, you have to hit one of the triggers. Each of the stories in his rotation has one, and you have to know him for years before you learn them all. Take the story he tells about seeing Easy Rider in Europe. This one requires someone to mention Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, or Berkeley in the sixties, but curiously, not Easy Rider itself. Or the story about me almost drowning in a pig’s water trough. It comes when someone talks about homesteading or the quality of home-grown meat, but not when pigs are mentioned. And so on. It’s as if he’s trying to throw us off his trail.
The story about eucalyptus trees and Jack London, one of my favorites, may involve his most complicated trigger. Someone has to mention eucalyptuses to him while such a tree is within his field of vision. Once this happens, a lever is pulled in his brain, and he begins the story:
Living in Oakland in the early nineteen hundreds, the wealthy author Jack London wanted to get even richer. He learned of a tree from Australia, one that grew rapidly in climates similar to the Bay Area’s and produced wood of exceptional quality. London procured a large number of eucalyptus seeds and planted a massive plot of them in the Oakland Hills.
Harvest time came, and London cut down a small chunk of his plot to determine the quality of the wood. It quickly became apparent the wood was trash—it split, it bent, it dried out, ultimately proving itself substandard for any use other than cheap firewood. He apparently planted the wrong species of eucalyptus, and his crop was useless.
In disgust, London let the grove stand rather than waste the money to cut the rest down. And soon, with no help from anyone, the invasive eucalyptus forest began to grow. South around the Bay into San Mateo, north towards the delta into Contra Costa, eventually making it all the way to Marin; like a plague from down under, the virus spread. In this manner, London unwittingly produced the region we know today—one covered with an entirely non-native tree.
According to my father, this was how eucalyptus came to Northern California, and I believed him completely.
This is an excerpt of “The Eucalyptus of Northern California”