Authors note

This guide concerns the horticultural, ecological, and scientific value of a handful of the plants in Arlington Garden. It also tells part of the story of these species from an earlier age — before global industrialization or, at any rate, before its effects had been fully felt. Some of this story is about evolutionary history: that part of the tale is very old! But some of the history is more recent and concerns human relationships with these species a mere hundred or thousand years out.

Why tell these stories, which are usually stories of loss? Humans tend to live in the present and the past fades; this is not so terrible — living is not easy — the problem is that we tend to treat the present as special. It has that special inertia that comes with being the status quo. One reason to tell the stories in this guide is to unmoor the present by adopting a very long or very wide point of view. Things weren’t always the way they are now. That future (our present) was open. The world changed radically. Our future is similar.

—AJ Jewell (2023)

Arlington Garden is located on a layered landscape. We stand on the lands of the Gabrieleño Kizh Band of Mission Indians/Gabrielino Tongva, on what would have been a freeway, and on a community refuge for people, plants, and fauna. We invite you to care for this land and its history.

Welcome to Arlington Garden

While you are here, you might find yourself relaxing under the Torrey pine. You might find yourself walking in the fragrant shade of a “Californian” pepper tree. Or you might find yourself sitting happily with some yarrow. One place where you will not find yourself is in the middle of the 710 freeway, which is remarkable, because a freeway is what this CalTrans land was destined to be.

This garden is the creation of community members who transformed a CalTrans staging site into an urban oasis. Arlington Garden is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization. We are a free community-forward, mediterranean-climate, habitat garden that uses regenerative gardening techniques. Caring for our local ecosystems and reconnecting people with their environment is our top priority! The majority of our revenue comes from individual donations, grants, and the sale of marmalade, which is produced from oranges grown in our citrus grove. Our revenue is supplemented with essential volunteering. Were it not for our dedicated volunteer community, this site might be another groaning, grayscale thoroughfare, instead of the kaleidoscopic microcosm it is!

A Note About Foraging

—capri kasai (2023)

Arlington prohibits visitors from collecting plants found in the garden without prior arrangement or permission. The garden’s 2.5 acres cannot support large-scale foraging, and — more importantly — munching on plants, even in a cultivated setting, can be hazardous to human health. Foraging should be done under the guidance of experts who know how to prepare plants for consumption and distinguish edible species from toxic doppelgangers. Even some edible plants, if prepared the wrong way, can cause life threatening illness. Although this guide discusses human uses of plants, it does not provide guidance of the right sort to eat them!

COAST LIVE OAK: Quercus agrifolia, encina/encino (Spanish), weť (Tongva)

ORIGIN: California Floristic Province, coastal regions up to Mendocino

MATURE HEIGHT AND WIDTH: trees often wider than tall: 30-60 ft. tall, 40-70 ft. wide

GARDENING NOTES: evergreen, cupped, holly-shaped leaves; develops multiple trunks with space and time; trees live for 250+ years with older specimens recorded; keystone species in oak woodlands and hence a beneficial habitat plant; avoid changing grade under the tree canopy.

This Coast Live Oak Is Over

100 YEARS OLD. It was one of 8 trees already on this site when the garden was founded in 2005, and it looks largely unchanged since that time. Of course, if you had been a rock or a mountainside during the tree’s early years, your mineral eyes would have seen branches fork across the sky and trunks explode upwards. Coast live oaks like this one undergo relatively rapid growth during maturation, growing up to 40 ft in a measly 20 years.

Acorns And Fire

Older coast live oaks produce acorns in abundance, providing a dietary staple for Native American communities throughout California. These communities maximized production of acorns by using small, frequent fires to clear the brush under oaks, which made it easier to harvest acorns, keep other plants from encroaching, and prevent pests and diseases. Indigenous communities harnessed, and continue to harness, these small fires in sophisticated ways. Burning was timed to exploit weaknesses in the life cycle of detrimental insects: the filbertworm, Cydia latiferreana, is an acorn pest that spends part of its life pupating in the leaf-litter beneath oaks before remarkably transforming into an unremarkable-looking moth. Indigenous burning of undergrowth in the Fall killed filbertworms in their pupal stage, protecting the acorn harvest.

Reliable Indicators

Beginning at the southern border and ending on the North Coast, the Spanish mission system in California followed the range of the coast live oak. This is probably not an accident, since the gnarled oaks — called “encinas” by the Spanish, using their name for the European holm oak Quercus ilex — frequently grow in deep soils along the coasts. Franciscan missionaries were aware that coast live oaks were indicators of arable soil, which was a requirement for their European agricultural practices.

As the friars crept up the coast, they encountered open woodlands and savannas dominated by gigantic oaks. In 1769, the Franciscan missionary Fray Juan Crespí described “large tablelands” with an open understory of “fine grasses” and “big tall liveoaks” — so big that he had never seen larger — around present-day Santa Barbara. These landscapes were the result of centuries of continuous care, incorporating frequent burning by the Indigenous people who lived there: Fray Juan Crespi was praising the work of the Chumash, intentionally or not, when he marveled at the great trees. The missions needed farmland. They also sought Indigenous people to work, very often against their will, to convert, and to indoctrinate. Terrible and ironic as it may be, the presence of a coast live oak savanna, with a “parklike” understory and ample acorn harvest, would have been an indicator of both farmland and an Indigenous community to convert.

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