The eucalyptus trees of Phoenix, Arizona


I like trees. I look at them a lot, and I'm especially fascinated by eucalyptus trees, which are native to Australia. They grow extremely well in the Phoenix area, but I'd never seen them as a kid growing up in Minneapolis, because it's too cold there. If you had described a tree to me that never shed its leaves, but instead shed its bark, I would have thought you were describing something from Mars.

But these amazing trees are very real. And yes, many of them shed their bark, like the one in the pic up there. When I first saw them, here in Phoenix, I would walk up and touch the trunk. I still do. My weird behavior isn't understood by Phoenix locals, who grew up there, but visitors understand. And I will always be a visitor here, a stranger in a strange land.

Walk with me. The greater Phoenix area isn't a desert, it's a garden, an oasis. Water has been flowing through this valley for thousands of years, and in the last 100 years or so it's been channeled through canals that brought farmland, and trees. It was an amazing transformation.

When the Phoenix pioneers started bringing water into the valley in the 1870s, they immediately started experimenting to see what would grow. The idea, of course, was to make money by planting crops, and trees were added as windbreaks. A windbreak, by the way, is a row of trees that are planted along farmland to at least slow down the windiness. You know, so the dirt wouldn't all just blow away when the earth was plowed, and made bare. And one type of tree that was planted as a wonderful windbreak was the eucalyptus. Of course now in Phoenix trees as less utilitarian, and mostly used for aesthetic appeal ("curb appeal") and as something that would often get between me and the green on a golf course.

What the Phoenix pioneers found is that eucalyptus trees grew well. Maybe a little too well. They grew fast, which was good, but functionally they were a poor choice, as their branches easily break. So it does take much wind for these "windbreak" trees to break!

If you grew up in Phoenix, you've probably never been amazed at eucalyptus trees. I know a lot of locals who yawn at things that I find spectacular. I understand, it's just the background of life in Phoenix, nothing to get all excited about. But I'm still a visitor here, and I look at trees - especially eucalyptus trees, of which there are many varieties represented in Phoenix.

Thank you for walking with me, and looking at eucalyptus trees.

Image at the top of this post: Camelback Golf Course in 1972, Scottsdale, Arizona, and eucalyptus trees. Gum trees.
Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) today on Patreon!

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more