The Biggest Tree in the Neighborhood

This is part one of a duo of posts about this magnificent tree. Part two is available here. This piece was featured first on Sep 3 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

This tree is monumental. I’m standing at its base, redwood bark seeming to flow down-down until it finally gets to ground, where I can’t help but see something elephantine in the way it bulges where it touches earth.

I don’t have to imagine the roots. The infrastructure of this place has had to accommodate itself to this tree. The sidewalk is covered in a spongy material to prevent the inevitable cracking of concrete by root. Strange to think that concrete, which, if you’ve ever hit a slab of it with a sledgehammer, feels adamantine and everlasting, will always yield to the redwood root. The asphalt of the road beyond the sidewalk knows: it is cracked along a line that suggests the tree below.

This tree has no name that I know of. It stands on a small sidestreet in Berkeley, near the Claremont neighborhood. A lovely area. Trees abound, including a smattering of other redwoods. But none of the other redwoods are like this one, which feels out of scale for a neighborhood of single family homes. I am filled with wonder (and envy!) that someone lives with this tree in their front yard! Every day, they go about their business in the understory of this remarkable living creature. Forgetting their keys in the glory of creation, telling a kid to hurry or they’ll be late under the majestic branches.

I don’t know much about the tree. It must be old. But how old? Was it here in 1926? 1776? Before? Could indigenous residents have know this tree when it was a small sapling?

No. In the presence of a giant, the brain can get scrambled. I know better. The Uplands neighborhood nearby was created in the early 20th century out of ranch land and it seems unlikely that there were huge numbers of redwoods on or near that ranch. The house that shares the redwood’s property was built in 1906, which probably means … it was planted around then? Just guessing here. Could it be just 120 years old? I guess that’s not so young. On the outside, maybe it settled into ranch land in the decades before the subdivision.

Regardless of the precise history, this redwood, as grand and majestic as it is … a planting. It’s a co-creation of the people who have lived on that street and its own magnificent possibilities. Somehow, it feels weirder to think that someone(s) lovingly tended this tree. They could not have known that they’d picked the very perfect spot for a redwood. And yet they did.

This magnificent tree is not a remnant or an area of preservation, but an attempt at repair. People have worked to keep it here, despite the complexities it must introduce into life in an American house.

This tree has grown up in this neighborhood, same as my kids.

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