[quote=Rhett]
I’m not a gardening/landscape expert nor do I play one on TV, but our soil is a great deal different than that in Pasadena/LA. You simply cannot grow trees like that here. The only trees that do grow well here are eucalyptus, and I think we know all the negatives that come with them.
I want to echo something that Barneby said – San Diego’s environment is classified as “coastal arid desert”. Our natural color is brown, and the only reason we have green things around here is irrigation. If we don’t get a few El Nino winters or an abnormally wet winter like 2004-5, we are about to run into a big world of trouble when it comes to water.
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Yes, we are in big trouble if we don’t get some rain. People in the weather community had been thinking that conditions were setting up for an El Nino this winter, but they’ve started to back off on that. Let’s hope their initial forecasts were right.
But it’s not so much that good trees don’t grow here — there are plenty of beautiful trees in different neighborhoods that prove they can grow here — it’s the people who cut them down that are the problem. I’ve seen absolutely glorious, mature trees murdered because people thought it obstructed their views, or because they thought the leaves were “dirty.”
And trees are one of the best things for our environment. Some believe that the deforestation of our planet is largely responsible for global warming (of the possible man-made causes of global warming).
…
“By most accounts, deforestation in tropical rainforests adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads.”
Many trees require very little water and, once established, need almost no additional irrigation at all. They keep the ground and air cooler, keep the soil moist, remove pollutants and greenhouse gasses from the air, and they are aesthetically pleasing. Some studies show that trees and nature have a very positive effect on people’s psychological well-being.
