By Zach St. George, Bay Nature
The gums are mottled tan and brown like chicken bones, crowded together, the spaces between them choked with brush and hung with streamers of bark. Along with the sweet medicine smell of the trees, there is the warm scent of sawdust and a sour hint of exhaust. I’m with Brad Gallup, a fire captain with the East Bay Regional Park District. We’re deep in Tilden Regional Park, standing on a fire road between a feller buncher and a chipper. It’s his job to make sure that if and when this forest burns, it doesn’t take half of Berkeley with it.
In front of us on the uphill side of the road is what looks like a group of seven trees but is really a single tree with multiple boles. Like many of the trees in this forest, it was cut after the hard frost of 1972. Tasmanian blue gums, Eucalyptus globulus, don’t like cold. But the frost didn’t really kill the trees, only made them retreat back down into their roots. The workers who cut the trees then didn’t treat the stumps with herbicide, and now they’re regrown, more trunks and closer together.
Read the complete story at Bay Nature.
