Challenging Coral Trees

For seventy-five years, the coral trees down the median of San Vicente have been Brentwood's signature — a two-mile canopy of gnarled branches that erupt each spring into red blossoms, fluttering over traffic like flocks of cardinals. Planted around 1950 in the empty bed of the old Pacific Electric streetcar line, they grew so beloved that in 1966 Mayor Sam Yorty named the coral the official tree of Los Angeles. A decade later, the median itself was declared a Historic-Cultural Monument. Generations have jogged beneath them, met friends under them, and measured the drive to the beach by their shade.

They are also, by nearly every arborist's account, the wrong tree for the job. Coral trees are native to South Africa, not California, and they live on a knife's edge. Too little water and they starve; too much and they rot — a Goldilocks species in a city that lurches between record drought and atmospheric rivers. Their wood grows fast and brittle, prone to sudden collapse unless pruned constantly; over-prune, though, and the bark sunburns. This past Fourth of July, one of them simply fell. An independent arborist who inspected thirteen trees along the Santa Monica stretch found twelve in poor health, worn down by years of drought stress. Only a handful of the original Brentwood trees still stand.

Here's the bind: the very monument status that protects the corals also forbids replacing them with anything else. The city's $1.2 million median project can add drought-tolerant groundcover, shrubs, and grasses — but not a single non-coral tree. So we keep replanting a South African tree that hates our water, on a boulevard we insist we want green forever.

There's a better way to honor the sentiment: plant something that can actually live here. The instinct is to reach for palms, but that's a myth worth puncturing. Of all the palms that line Los Angeles, only the California fan palm is truly native — and palms give you theater, not shade. For a median, the honest natives are the more beautiful choice anyway. The coast live oak spreads a broad evergreen canopy and can live for centuries on rainfall alone. If it's the corals' floral drama you'd miss, the western redbud detonates in magenta each spring, while the desert willow and palo verde bloom for months in pink and gold on almost no water at all.

None of this makes the coral trees less lovely, or their loss less real. Some things are worth mourning even when they were always a little impractical — and Brentwood's attachment to these trees is part of what makes the neighborhood the neighborhood. But the next century of San Vicente shouldn't be spent nursing a species that can't survive the climate we actually have. We can keep the beauty and the picture-postcard median. We just need to be braver about what we plant in it.