Constructing Paradise One Tree at a Time in the Golden State

Much of the historiography of California has revolved around notions of paradise, of an extant, sought after, created, or contested Eden. A leading California history textbook is titled, not coincidentally, The Elusive Eden.¹ Jared Farmer’s Trees in Paradise fits squarely in this historiographical tradition, but advances it in new directions by providing an insightful analysis of the biocultural history of California’s treescape. Farmer is concerned with how Californians, in their pursuit of paradise, thought about trees and how they employed tree culture—which encompassed afforestation, horticulture, and landscaping—to define the meaning of the Golden State. In four parts, each consisting of two chapters, Farmer explores the history of iconic California trees, examining the destruction and partial recovery of native sequoias and coast redwoods and, inversely, the propagation and eventual decline of introduced eucalypts, citruses (especially oranges), and palms. Transcending a simple linear narrative of these events, Farmer associates “each tree type with a cluster of ideas and a facet of the California Dream” (p. xxviii). This original and creative approach leads to wide-ranging discussions about ideas of time and antiquity, immigration and naturalization, labor and industry, and beauty and style, all of which the author marshals to address the successes, failures, and limitations of attempts to remake and define post–Gold Rush California.

Sequoias and redwoods are the subject of part one. The discovery of sequoias, in the Calaveras Big Tree grove in the Sierra Nevada in 1852, was met with disbelief; to convince those who thought the claim of the enormous size of the trees a hoax, parts of the bark and trunk of the “Discovery Tree” were shipped to New York and Paris. The initial emphasis on the sequoias’ overwhelming size soon gave way, however, to an emphasis on the trees’ great age and to comparisons with historical events and figures. Sequoias came to represent a “landscape of antiquity” (p. 19), a source of patriotic feeling for Americans that was worth protecting. Thus, when Congress provided the Yosemite Grant in 1864 that turned over Yosemite Valley to California for its protection, it included the Mariposa Grove, lying outside the valley, as well. But most of the sequoia groves, which exist only in the Sierra Nevada, were not protected and were subject to heavy logging. To bring the enormous trees to market, the Kings River Lumber Company built a 54-mile–long flume that descended 4,200 vertical feet to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks in the San Joaquin Valley. Such technological innovations could not overcome the fact that sequoias do not make good lumber; their trunks tend to shatter when they fall and, overall, logging was terribly inefficient. Calls to protect the majority of the surviving groves culminated in 1890 with the creation of Sequoia, Yosemite, and General Grant (the future Kings Canyon) national parks.

Unlike distinct groves of sequoias, redwood forests were once nearly continuous, stretching from the coastal region of central California to southernmost Oregon, and were most expansive in northern California. Redwoods were harvested from the 1850s, although it was not until the 1870s and 1880s that capitalist exploitation of the North Coast “Redwood Empire” really took off. Early industrial logging methods were extremely wasteful, and less than one-third of logged redwood ever made it to market. Farmer notes that such wastefulness points to the “endemic profligacy of post–Civil War America” (p. 58). Efforts to save the redwoods manifested in three successive forms during the twentieth century: the Save-the-Redwoods League, which, during the 1920s and 1930s, coordinated land acquisition for the California state park system; the Sierra Club, which fought for the creation and expansion of Redwood National Park from the 1950s through 1978; and grassroots radical environmentalists, who pursued litigation and organized demonstrations for regulatory reform in subsequent decades.

A shifting complex of ideas about redwoods drove these preservation efforts. Many of the leaders of the Save-the-Redwoods League were...