Engaged in August, dated January: Anaheim's 2002 street tree palette and the eighty-foot pine

Street trees are chosen in a conference room and they arrive somewhere else, years later, on a schedule nobody in that room stays around for. The City of Anaheim's Street Beautification Task Force engaged West Coast Arborists, Inc. in August 2001 to work up specie recommendations for fourteen arterial corridors, weighing growing space, existing improvements, overhead utilities, and which lines were scheduled to go underground, and the finished Specie Palette carries the date January 2002. Five months, start to signature. The lag sits one column over from the species name, in the mature height and spread figures: Canary Island pine (Pinus canariensis) at eighty feet and fifty across, coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) at seventy by eighty, American sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) at sixty by thirty-five.

Five months to decide. Several decades to arrive, printed in the same row as the name, where nobody had to notice it.

What went into a three-foot strip in 2002

Five months is the outside figure, and the document undercuts it in its own Scope of Project section. That section reproduces a thumbnail captioned City of Anaheim Specie Palette as of 10/2001 and describes the list as already created in conjunction with the City by then. Three months in, a palette existed.

The Introduction counts fourteen arterial corridors. The Scope section says the concurrent city-wide inventory covered fifteen, excluding the Anaheim Resort and Stadium areas, and the City published fifteen per-street sheets. This plan does not entirely agree with itself.

The finished sheet sorts its fifty-two entries into three growspace classes, sixteen at three feet or more, twenty-two at five feet or more, and fourteen at eight feet or more, which is a reasonable and careful way to organize a decision about a concrete parkway. The eighty-foot pine sits in the eight-foot class. Canary Island date palm (Phoenix canariensis), sixty feet at maturity, sits in the five-foot class.

Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta) sits in the three-foot class with a listed mature spread of ninety feet, which is either a convention about palms this document does not explain or something that got typed once and never looked at again. West Coast Arborists worked that sheet up and the Task Force put its name on the January 2002 version, and the ninety-foot figure has sat in the three-foot column ever since.



The plan's own stated objectives are modest and honest about themselves: a planting and replanting master plan for new development and redevelopment, an approved list clarified corridor by corridor, and specie selection matched to site conditions so as to extend the life span of the tree. The introduction says the recommendations should be ones future generations would benefit from. That is a document written inside one budget cycle, making a commitment on behalf of generations, and the two sentences sit a paragraph apart without anyone reconciling them.

The introduction page carries a photograph captioned Inventory Specialist using GPS, and the Scope section says the work drew on that concurrent city-wide inventory of tree site conditions. The palette went into the appendix. The GPS unit and the person carrying it did not.

The birds were already there in the early 1970s

The California Parrot Project, founded in 1994 out of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, describes red-crowned parrots (Amazona viridigenalis) as present and increasing in urban Orange County since the early 1970s. Philip Unitt's San Diego County Bird Atlas, Proceedings of the San Diego Society of Natural History No. 39, 2004, puts the Los Angeles naturalized population at well over 1,500 birds on the count of Kimball L. Garrett and K. T. Mabb. That account has the species breeding only in densely developed residential areas, and places the southeastern extent of the population at Tustin in central Orange County. That is three decades of documented presence before the Task Force convened in August 2001, and no parrot appears in the plan's introduction, its scope section, its key, the January 2002 palette, or the Ball Road and East Street sheets.

The sequence is worth holding onto, because the usual telling has a specifier making a choice and a consequence arriving decades downstream, and this one runs the other direction: presence from the early 1970s, the plant list in January 2002, the counts last of all, from the 123rd through 125th Christmas Bird Counts in the winters of 2022 through 2025.



The species emphasis usually gets this backwards too. For Orange County specifically the bird carrying the national high count is the lilac-crowned Amazon (Amazona finschi), which the IUCN Red List categorizes as Endangered. Red-crowned's national high count in both the 123rd and 124th Christmas Bird Counts landed in the Pasadena-San Gabriel Valley circle, at 750 and then 771 birds, in Los Angeles County.

Three counts, one day each

The Orange County (coastal) circle held the national high count for lilac-crowned parrot in three consecutive Christmas Bird Counts: 80 in the 123rd, over the period 14 December 2022 to 5 January 2023, then 18 in the 124th, then 42 in the 125th. That 18 was a tie twice over, level with the Pasadena-San Gabriel Valley circle's lilac-crowned count for the same season and level with the coastal circle's own red-lored high count. A national high count is the largest single-day tally reported anywhere in the country that season, and it happened to be Orange County, which is a different statement from how many parrots live there. One day per winter, three winters.



So there are two defensible positions and no way to pick between them from the public record. The California Parrot Project says increasing. Unitt gives a size and an edge, well over 1,500 birds on Garrett and Mabb's count and a southeastern limit at Tustin, which is a standing description of where the population stops rather than a direction of travel.

The counts say 80, then 18, then 42, a factor of four between adjacent years with no trend in it at all. A circle compiler gets one count day inside the 14 December to 5 January window to sample a process that has been running since the early 1970s, and both readings can be honest at once.

The compiler's number is the only public number anyone has.

The cavity comes from the pruning cut, several summers later

The most interesting thing in Unitt's account is not about plant selection at all. San Gabriel Valley red-crowned parrots nest mainly in silver maple, in cavities that formed where pruning exposed heartwood which then rotted out, and in San Diego County apparent nest holes turned up in the sawed-off leaf bases of Canary Island date palms.

Which means the habitat is manufactured by a maintenance schedule. A crew lead closes a work order the same afternoon the cut is made, the wound sits there through the first summer and the second summer doing nothing anyone would notice, and the decay that eventually makes the cavity runs on a clock of years. Nobody specified it. Nobody could have, and the palm it happens in is sitting on the January 2002 palette in the five-foot growspace class, sixty feet tall, listed as a palm.

Anaheim's own per-street sheet for Ball Road carries a small piece of evidence that these lists do get revisited: a red footnote saying windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) is no longer an approved City tree. The same sheet lists it as one of the primary existing species in that parkway. Somebody changed a species decision after the fact. The trees planted under the old decision are still standing.

Carrotwood, and two coasts with opposite answers

Carrotwood (Cupaniopsis anacardioides) does not appear on the California Invasive Plant Council Inventory at any rating, high, moderate, limited or watch. It is not on Anaheim's January 2002 Specie Palette, not on the Ball Road sheet, not on the East Street sheet, and not anywhere in the City of Santa Ana's Designated Tree Species Guide of March 2021.

It is an approved street tree in the City of San Diego, listed in the revised 2023 Street Tree Selection Guide at forty feet by thirty, evergreen, noted as tolerant of direct coastal exposure. Florida regulates it as a noxious weed.

The University of Florida IFAS plant directory describes the fruit as a woody capsule to 2.2 centimeters, three ridged segments, yellow-orange ripening to brown. It splits to show three black seeds in a yellow-red aril, and birds are attracted to it and spread it widely. Not a nut.

Two coasts, one species, opposite official answers, and no Orange County document that takes a position either way. A code that says what may grow within five feet of a wall is a third jurisdiction doing the same thing on a shorter fuse.

What the parrots actually eat here has a published source, Garrett, Mabb, Collins and Kares, Food Items of Naturalized Parrots in Southern California, Western Birds volume 28, issue 4, from 1997, with a companion population paper by Garrett in the same issue. Neither paper appears in the Anaheim plan or the Santa Ana guide, and both predate the January 2002 palette by five years.

Twenty-three years on, landscape scope on an arterial frontage is still set at permit, the January 2002 palette is the list that scope gets checked against, and the water rules run their own document against the same trees on a separate clock. A landscape contractor meets that frontage as a filing first, months before anyone standing on the job asks which species the corridor is supposed to carry.

Next winter a crew will trim a Canary Island date palm on one of those fourteen corridors and leave a ring of sawn leaf bases behind, and the work order will close that afternoon.Red-crowned and yellow-headed Amazons, California, February 2021. Photo by James M. Maley CC BY 4.0