Speaking for the Trees
One recent evening, I was walking by Metson Lake when I noticed a woman leaning into one of the big old Monterey cypresses there. She had her palms pressed against the corrugated bark in this very intentional way; it reminded me of how our rabbi placed his hands on my children’s shoulders to bless them at their bar mitzvahs. I guessed she was communicating with the tree. So when she pulled back from it, I asked her. (Doing this blog has made me exceptionally nosy.)
“I love this tree,” she told me. Ever since her daughter was in kindergarten they’d spent afternoons in its shade. After ten years, she knew the tree well and now she was worried about it. The trunk seemed to be “shrinking” and the fat roots contracting. She’d seen other trees in the park fall and die. So on her daily walks by the lake, she now makes a point to stop by the tree. “I give it a pat to say you’re loved or somebody cares about you.”
***
I’ve been thinking about how we connect with trees for the last few weeks, as I’ve been working on this post about Rob Bakewell, self-appointed Lorax of the oak woodlands.
The oak woodlands sit in the park’s northeast corner -- a 50-acre grove of twisty, sturdy coast live oaks that have been here for hundreds of years. It’s a time capsule of a long-gone landscape. Before the city was built, before the Gold Rush, before the first Spanish explorers rounded the Golden Gate, there were patches of these wind-stunted oak trees scattered across the scrubby dunes that covered the peninsula. They provided shelter and sustenance to native wildlife from butterflies to quail to deer. The Ohlone and Coast Miwok used their acorns for bread and meal.
The oaks were there when William Hammond Hall began laying out Golden Gate Park. Guided by a vision of creating “a semblance of nature,” he let them be. When people fled to the park after the 1906 earthquake, many of the oaks were cut down for firewood. But the stumps sprouted and the trees grew back over time.
By the early 1990s, however, the woodlands was in a sorry state, mostly neglected by Rec and Park. It had become a no-go zone of impenetrable undergrowth and homeless encampments. Rob Bakewell’s mother lived in an apartment across the street and longed to walk through the area but it didn’t feel safe. She called up her son one day and said “Why don’t you do something about the park.”
He thought he’d spend an afternoon or two cleaning up the park entrance near his mother’s home. But he says, “once you get involved. It's like, a Russian doll: you pick one thing off and you see another issue. And then another issue or another issue.” He would eventually help found the Friends of Oak Woodlands, leading a cadre of devoted volunteers that have been slowly and steadily restoring the woodlands for 30-plus years. (They have also been restoring the adjacent horseshoe courts, but that’s for another post.)
For the first several years, restoration was mostly a matter of removing what didn’t belong there. Tearing out truckloads of invasive Himalayan blackberry and English ivy that was choking the trees. Stripping back a dense carpet of acacia, French and Scotch broom that matted the sloping gully known as Coon Hollow (after Henry Perrin Coon, the mayor who oversaw the city’s early push for a park.) Hauling away garbage that had been dumped in the site. Fighting to oust the homeless people who were camping there; dragging mattresses, tents and garbage to the street again and again and again.
If the people living in the woodlands had respected the site and kept their camps tidy, Bakewell says he might not have minded their presence. But they hacked at the trees and lit fires. Their never-ending litter, which included hypodermic syringes, was demoralizing and scary for his volunteers. It infuriated him that Rec and Park wasn’t doing more to clear the camps out. So, he recalls, “we would come in here on our own with pitchforks and hammers [and] saws and physically confront people till they left and then tear all the shit out and put it in the street.”
He was uncompromising, maybe even a bit heartless; a Lorax on steroids. It was a strange position to be in. “In my real career, I’m a body worker, a massage therapist. I take care of people. That’s all I’ve done. But that’s not my job here,” he says. As the woodland’s steward, “my job here is to protect the park and the ecology, and the trees and the animals that live here and our patrimony.”
Bakewell has a hard time explaining why he's poured so much of his life into tending these old trees. He doesn’t have a spiritual affinity for them, like the Druids who gathered at a smaller cluster of oaks in the park for the summer solstice. (See my post Our Stonehenge) He’s not the sort of guy to seek communion with trees like the woman whispering solace to the cypress. But as someone who has always believed in the importance of preserving nature and wilderness, he felt the woodlands needed protection. They’re an important place that for far too long were neglected and unappreciated. Someone had to speak up for them; someone had to defend them.
***
Walking with him through the woodlands now, it’s hard to conjure that former shambles. We follow a nice sandy trail volunteers built about ten years ago. It winds up and down hills, under bowers of branches, through sun-dappled vales where the old oaks twist and bow. There’s a constant chatter of birds and squirrels scramble across the branches. Runners pass us by.
Over hundreds of monthly work parties, Bakewell and his dedicated volunteers have cleared weeds and planted a rich variety of California natives, filling the grove with plants that will nourish butterflies, birds, mice and other wildlife. He points out sticky monkey flower, ceanothus, coyote bush, sage and poison oak —“We like poison oak. It provides berries”— and of course, baby oaks. Colored flags placed next to each new planting dot the hillsides bordering East Conservatory Drive and along the road leading down to Arguello. As we pass a group of plantings, he notes that some look dry; he’ll need to come back in a few days to water them.
Such jobs fall to him or other volunteers from the Friends because the regular Rec and Park gardeners don’t work in the woodlands. Unlike most of the park, the space is managed by the department’s Natural Resources Division, a small, specialized branch established in the 1990s to protect and restore remnant fragments of San Francisco’s native landscape. NRD staff help guide the Friends’ work; one of them is always on hand for each monthly work party. But with such sites in more than three dozen parks across the city, the NRD team doesn’t have the time to do much more. So, says Bakewell, “The rest of it is us. Me!”
In 2020, with the help of the San Francisco Parks Alliance, the group got a $35,000 grant that made it possible to redo one whole hillside that was covered with ice plant and fill it with some 400 native plants.” It was a hell of a lot of work,” says Bakewell. All through the pandemic, he and other volunteers were picking up plants at nurseries all over the Bay area, making trips to Home Depot for fence posts and other supplies, not to mention the many work parties needed to clear and ready the hill. “I’m told by the NRD that to date it’s the most successful natural habitat restoration project in their entire system” he says proudly.
Coon Hollow is now filled with lupine, California blackberries, grasses and other native bushes. New oaks are growing, thanks either to Bakewell’s group or squirrels. It looks messy and wild -- and that’s the point. It’s becoming a habitat that will draw insects, squirrels, mice, salamanders, birds and maybe even coyotes. If it weren’t for the drone of traffic on Fulton St., you might think you were deep in the Marin Headlands or out at China Camp —or back in time when the woodlands flourished without human protection.
***
If you’re interested in volunteering with Friends of Oak Woodlands, the group meets at the Horseshoe Courts entrance on East Conservatory Drive in Golden Gate Park, on the second Saturday of each month at 9:30AM.
That's a GREAT post!!!
I love this post so much! from the first photograph to the description of “Lorax on steroids.” This captures so much of what “life in the park” is. A tender ferocity that doesn’t actually make any sense at all, and yet seems to hearken to what we ALL should do. Thank you!