A Passion for the City’s Roots

By Gene Williams
Staff Writer

May 28 -- Have you ever walked along the Third Street Promenade and wondered who waters the palms or trims the ivy covered dinosaurs? Or have you ever driven down Pico or Wilshire boulevards and wondered who planted the trees in the recently constructed medians?

OK, perhaps you haven’t. But maybe you should meet Santa Monica’s Community Forest and Landscape Supervisor Walt Warriner, who – from his command post inside a tiny office at Clover Park – oversees a staff of nine and a yearly budget of a million dollars to keep the City’s 33,600 trees looking beautiful.

“This is a fabulous job and this is a fantastic city to work in,” says Warriner, who’s been Santa Monica’s chief forester for eight years. “Hardly a day goes by when I don’t go home thinking, ‘I’m glad I was at work today.’

“It’s incredibly satisfying,” he is quick to add. “You talk to arborists everywhere you go and nearly all of them are going to tell you the same thing. We’re an incredibly passionate group dedicated to the profession and dedicated to the environment.”

And that passion is evident when you talk to this tall, fit-looking man from Wyoming and see how his eyes light up at the mention of maples, magnolias and jacarandas. Santa Monica’s tree program, he’s proud to say, has become a model for other cities.

One project Warriner gets asked about repeatedly is the Downtown Transit Mall. “We used a specially engineered soil to plant those trees in, and it was new in the field, new in the industry to do this,” he says. “Santa Monica was really on the cutting edge.”

Picking up on the idea from arborists in Palo Alto, Warriner says the special “structural soil” used in the project can be compacted up to 95 percent – stable enough to put a road or a building on – and yet remains porous enough for trees to establish deep roots that won’t lift up the sidewalks.

“It’s been three years since it’s been completed,” he says, and the trees are “growing like gangbusters.

“We get asked by a lot of other cities, ‘Tell us about this structural soil. Tell us about how you did this,’” Warriner says. “People are going off what we’ve done. We’ve kind of set a trend.

“Now we’re experimenting with rubber sidewalks and preventative maintenance systems,” Warriner says, referring to the patches of vulcanized walkways which can be lifted up for root pruning and then laid back down.

“We’re putting in more rubber sidewalks for each repair contract, and we’re becoming better at root pruning,” he says, adding that he learned from a colleague in Santa Barbara how shallow roots which displace sidewalks can be cut back to stimulate growth of a deeper, secondary root system.

But what about those ficus trees that are causing so much trouble to the sidewalks Downtown?

The 2nd and 4th street phase of the urban design plan calls for removal of the ficus, but the City is exploring all its options to decide “what would be best,” Warriner said, adding that he is only involved “on the periphery” of the project.

“It’s no secret that ficus trees have an aggressive root system,” Warriner says, adding that these trees want to grow to 60 feet tall with roots that fan out 20 feet in diameter.

“On one hand the ficus trees were probably planted in sites that were unsuitable,” he adds. “But on the other hand the ficus trees are probably the most environmentally beneficial trees we have. They’re a treasure.”

And when Warriner says “treasure” he isn’t just speaking metaphorically.

Quickly pulling some statistics from his computer, Warriner says that Santa Monica’s urban forest is estimated to be worth some $138 million and its 3,197 ficus make up about $33 million of that total. The figures are based on appraisals of each individual tree.

And the community forester has some other interesting figures to throw out: Warriner says that a 2001 study by the U.S. Forest Service shows that for every dollar the City spends on trees it gets a return of about $1.60 in benefits which include less CO2 and pollution in the air, reduced storm water runoff and higher property values.

Environmentally, the study ranked the cedar number one and the ficus number two, Warriner says.

“But what in my mind makes the ficus tree number one is that it provides all these environmental benefits and it’s so incredibly resilient,” he explains.

“It takes every kind of harsh element that an urban environment can throw at it and it still looks gorgeous, it still grows. You cannot beat it. In the world series of trees, they’re the champs.”

In the year 2000, Warriner undertook the task of planting 2,000 trees in a single year. The last tree – called the millennium tree – is a few feet from his office.

“I’m leaving something behind that other people are going to enjoy,” he says. “I don’t plant trees for me. I plant trees for my kids and for my grandkids.

“I guess just knowing that long after I’m gone people are going to see my work... I guess that’s the most satisfying thing about what I do.”