Trees

The city is temporarily barred from removing 54 ficus trees from downtown after an appellate court Friday halted an $8-million beautification project. A restraining order from October will remain in effect, protecting the trees along 2nd and 4th streets. The city planned to relocate 31 trees and destroy 23, replacing them with young ginkgo trees. The environmental activist group Treesavers sued the city last year, more than six months after the City Council passed the streetscape plan in October 2005.

From the backyard of their house, Philip and Eileen Peterson can see Catalina Island, the city of Long Beach and the port, Point Fermin and Cabrillo Beach, a view not uncommon in Rancho Palos Verdes. But part of their view is blocked by trees belonging to their longtime neighbors below, across Crest Drive, and views are the thing in Rancho Palos Verdes.

More trees are dying in the West's forests as the region warms, a trend that could ultimately spell widespread change for mountain landscapes from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies. Scientists who examined decades of tree mortality data from research plots around the West found the death rate had risen as average temperatures in the region increased by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit.

Residents of an upscale retirement community near here knew Douglas Hoffman was upset that trees were blocking his backyard view of the Strip. But at a hearing Monday, where Hoffman was sentenced to up to five years in prison for killing more than 500 trees, a prosecutor said the retired construction worker had threatened to unleash "chemical, biological, nuclear mass destruction" because of it.

The ficus crisis in Santa Monica appears to be headed to court. For the last several months, local activists and city officials have sparred over the planned removal of 54 ficus trees along 2nd and 4th streets, part of an $8-million beautification project. On Monday, Santa Monica's Landmarks Commission voted 6 to 1 to deny landmark status to those trees -- and 99 others -- in the downtown area near Third Street Promenade.

The fight over the fate of the 54 ficus trees in Santa Monica isn't exactly over, but a judge's decision Thursday will probably lead to their removal within a few weeks. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ann I. Jones dismissed a lawsuit that sought a trial to determine whether the city could remove the ficus trees along 2nd and 4th streets in downtown Santa Monica as part of an $8-million beautification project.

Today a high school, tomorrow an orchard (with a high school attached). That was sort of the idea when students from the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale got down and dirty helping to plant some 60 fruit trees and shrubs on their small campus near Hawthorne Boulevard. The school, now in its seventh year, has an environmental focus and a college preparatory curriculum.

Scientists using radiocarbon dating have confirmed that an ancient Judean date palm seed among those found in the ruins of Masada in present-day Israel and planted three years ago is 2,000 years old -- the oldest seed ever to germinate. The seed has grown into a healthy, 4-foot-tall seedling, surpassing the previous record for oldest germinated seed -- a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.

A tiny insect that can carry a disease that kills citrus trees has been discovered just blocks south of the border in Tijuana, sending shock waves through the California citrus industry. The disease, known as citrus greening, has already killed tens of thousands of acres of orange groves in Florida and has the potential to ruin much of California's $1.2-billion citrus growing business, industry officials said.

A piece of heavy equipment called a hot saw is slicing through a high-country stand of skinny ponderosa pines like a mechanical Paul Bunyan on steroids. Nearby, a computer-programmed log processor is stripping the branches off cut trees as if it were peeling carrots. Most of the logs are no more than a foot in diameter -- not big enough to properly be called timber.