From roots to cover, a lush, verdant background of the making of California.

California now has extra bushes than at any time because the overdue Pleistocene. This eco-friendly panorama, in spite of the fact that, isn't the paintings of nature. It’s the paintings of historical past. within the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California panorama, harnessing nature to their imaginative and prescient of the nice existence. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers started to "improve" the naked, brown geographical region, planting hundreds of thousands of timber to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped towns. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy body spray was once proposal to healing malaria. They equipped the profitable "Orange Empire" at the candy juice and thick pores and skin of the Washington navel, an business fruit. They coated their streets with sleek arms to announce that they weren't within the Midwest anymore.

To the north the majestic coastal redwoods encouraged awe and invited exploitation. A source within the nation, the sturdy heartwood of those undying giants turned infrastructure, reworked by way of the observed the teeth of yankee company. via 1900 trees organizations owned the complete redwood woodland; through 1950 that they had simple just about all of the old-growth trees.

In time California’s new panorama proved to be no paradise: the eucalypts within the Berkeley hills exploded in hearth; the orange groves close to Riverside iced over on chilly nights; Los Angeles’s hands harbored rats and dropped heavy fronds at the streets lower than. affliction, infestation, and improvement all spelled decline for those nonnative evergreens. within the north, although, a brand new wooded area of second-growth redwood took root, nurtured through protecting legislation and sustainable harvesting. this day there are extra California redwoods than there have been a century ago.

Rich in personality and tale, Trees in Paradise is a blinding narrative that provides an insightful, new point of view at the heritage of the Golden nation and the yankee West.