Wonderment of the Monterey Cypress – A Plant Love Story

Articles: Wonderment of the Monterey Cypress – A Plant Love Story

Contributor

Josh Gevertz

Topics: Nature is Good For You

Summer 2024

The origin of my love for trees traces back to my first waking memory, as I was just turning three years old. I remember running in a circle with the blissful joy of youth, round and round a ring of ivy (Hedera canariensis) skirting three silver birches (Betula pendula) with weeping branches adorned in the full foliage of summer. This moment was my very first visit to the house that would become my childhood home, until I would fledge the proverbial nest. The memory is etched in my heart. So, from the beginning—or from seed, you might say—it was the trees with me.

As an emerging adult, a much different place would grow as a home within my spirit, as a sacred landscape formative in my journey to becoming a naturalist, arborist, and tree storyteller. This place is Bodega Head, of coastal Northern California, and the location of an enchanting Monterey cypress (Hesperocyparis macrocarpa)—in truth, a grove of three—I fondly know as Old Hespero.

There is sense of wonder in the presence of this Monterey cypress

Old Hespero lives amidst the grass of the headland, nestled 100 paces away from the sandstone cliff edge and the crashing Pacific surf just beyond. I cannot recall my first instance of seeing her from afar, nor that inaugural moment of climbing up into her branches. Having so many visits and shared moments with this tree, my memories blend together. But I will always remember—always know—the distinct feeling of being in her presence.

I have witnessed thousands of hours in the company of this plant, a specimen for which centurial is an unjustly small word. She lives on as a primeval shelter, a fortress. The winds don’t enter this place, where both prospect and refuge are found. Old Hespero is a primordial crone, a miraculously ancient being that has collapsed under her own gargantuan weight and yet then rooted to grow anew, layering into the earth and grafting onto herself too many times over the decades for us to guess where her original seed first germinated.

In being with this specimen, a kinship has blossomed from which I have found my purpose, my passion, the profound Why? of my life. Each time I return on my humble pilgrimage up to Bodega Head, I invariably discover something new about trees. Old Hespero’s body language, her patterns of growth, the fibers and foliage that define her form I have long observed. In reflection, the gathering of these subliminal lessons put me on my path to becoming an arborist. What sparked in awe of a majestic plant proceeded on to curiosity, then to a scientific thirst for knowledge, and eventually I came to believe in my profound love for trees and my drive to devote my professional life to their care.

The smallest extant range of any native North American conifer

From this nascency, my exploration of the story of the Monterey cypress seeded and continues to evolve. Perhaps the truest beauty of working with trees, and all plants, for a living is the bountiful potential for life-long learning. Simply put, there is always room to grow! Upon my wandering journey to graduate school and beyond, my affinity for Old Hespero and her kin keeps branching out, to lands near and far, first along the central Californian coast to a rocky promontory known as Point Lobos.

My vision changes, year by year

Each time I visit thee

A conscious aging, sharéd journey

Of your growing majesty

I know you, closer, now than then

As branches broken, strewn

Across the frothy, windswept shore

My wonderment, begins anew

“Wonderment,”—composed in the company of the Veteran Cypress, June 10, 2022

Here upon the point, the ancestral population of Monterey cypresses still dance on the brink of the world. These trees are a relict of a much broader coastal forest of Monterey cypress in the geologic past. These old veterans of Point Lobos, together with the scattered groves of nearby Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula, comprise the smallest extant native range (less than two square miles) of any indigenous North American conifer. In full maturity, select specimens of these wondrous giants have measured at more than 130 feet tall, in some cases forming trunks approaching 15 feet in diameter.

Monterey cypresses are an enduring source of inspiration

For thousands of years, the venerable Monterey cypress groves of Point Lobos in central California have thrived as a cultural gathering site for coastal Ohlone peoples. Today, Monterey cypress inspire countless artists, poets, and creative kin. Stephen Meadows, a member of the Rumsen Ohlone Tribal Community, wrote about his connection to the site in the poem “Point Lobos” (2022):

We are native

we were born

to rest among these stones

the roots and tongues

the quiet turned

among these bones

Clinton Scollard was another prolific poet who shares this intergenerational community with me. In 1925, channeling his own experience of Lobosian wonderment, Scollard wrote the poem “Lyrics of Lobos,” excerpted below (quoted in Streeter 2003):

Who has not trod on Lobos has not known

The face of Wonder intimately shown

A deeply rooted majesty has grown from this remote geographic origin toward a global diaspora of profound and diverse cultural significance. A plant lover of the Victorian era seeded this saga. The German botanist Karl Theodor Hartweg, on a “plant hunting” expedition commissioned in the early 1840s, toured the California coastline in search of seeds and plant material to bring back to London’s Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew.

Hartweg’s journey through the Golden State featured an exploration of the Monterey peninsula and its diverse flora. Notably, this included the formative collection of Cupressus macrocarpa, as the Monterey cypress was originally termed. Hartweg’s 1848 holotype defined the species to western science for the very first time; this ancestral cutting I have held in my own hands.

Quickly after the Hartwegian diaspora event, this species radiated through the Commonwealth, perpetuated by the dominant naval resources and global nursery trade prowess of the United Kingdom at the time. Hesperocyparis macrocarpa, as it is now termed, has come to be a prevalent plant in the cultures and communities of many places across the entire planet, a tale which I have been fortunate enough to retrace across three continents and counting.

This species is a notable world traveler

In late 2019, as a fellow of the Geraldine Knight Scott Traveling Scholarship from the University of California Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, I journeyed to remote landscapes across the planet where the Monterey cypress has taken root—both as a prodigiously gigantic plant and as an indelible part of the culture in places where she grows. Remarkably, despite such a small native extant population, this cypress species today has a cultivated ornamental distribution across a broader geography than any other indigenous Californian tree.

This presence is especially true in the landscapes of the Commonwealth. Most notably, the coastal farmstead plantings and memorial Avenues of Honour present in New Zealand and Australia, respectively, define a growing legacy of cypresses nearing two centuries of Australasian cultivation. This story is part of a profound diaspora, a tale of trees and people, growing onward more than 6,000 miles from the seeded origin of Lobos.

This winding, weaving global love affair eventually brought me, and Old Hespero, too, to yet another sacred landscape that is now my professional home-Cypress Lawn Arboretum. A historic cemetery founded in 1892, Cypress Lawn has been a meaningful place of trees since its origin in the late nineteenth century. Our founder, Hamden Holmes Noble, was the progenitor of a living collection of trees of immense heritage, today including over 150 discrete woody taxa, and plants well over a century in age represented from every habitable continent.

None of these is more defining than the Monterey cypress, the plant that names the place. Now, in the lee of several original plantings of the arboretum’s cypresses, live the children of Old Hespero herself.

Cultivated from seed, the direct offspring of the tree that started my cypress journey are now among the living of our beloved memorial park. With stewardship in the seasons ahead, these wooden ones will grow the Noble story of trees and people in kinship together, celebrating life!