Today’s rant is brought to you in defense of bay trees. On a friend’s Facebook page, someone was trash-talking California bay laurel trees, saying, among other things, they were an invasive species and should be completely eradicated. Well, to say I lost my mind, was an understatement—more like ballistic. He was confusing our native bay tree with the Mediterranean species, in the same family, with the same common name. So was everyone else on the thread. This is why we have Latinate names, folks—family, genus, species. That’s FGS, fergawdsakes.
I wrote: Well, I see it’s time to pull out the big guns and invoke the Latin names here. Most Californians have always called Umbellularia californica a bay tree, the Mediterranean cousin was also called bay laurel. Then someone a little too wordy for his own good, decided to call it a longish mouthful—California Bay Laurel—to clarify the name and distinguish it from the Mediterranean Laurus nobilis, aka sweet bay laurel, noble laurel, true laurel, Greek laurel—thus confusing most of the people most of the time.
I was on a roll. During the Miocene era, the entire Mediterranean basin was covered with lush bay laurel. Even the Sahara. In ancient Greece, the plant was called Daphne, after a river nymph Apollo had the hots for, who was turned into a bay laurel tree by her father. Misdirected love is why the bay is an evergreen. Now sweetbay, or bay laurel only survives in small pockets at high altitudes in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, so it’s considered rare as love.
Back to our bay tree. There is only one sole species of Umbellularia. During the Cenozoic era, aka the age of mammals, there were three other Lauraceae relatives in California, Nectandra, Ocotea, aka sweetwood, and Persea—ancient avocados. Bay nut pulp, if eaten young, taste a lot like its avocado cousin. The persea, with its giant seed, had a unique seed distribution system, giant sloths.
The giant sloths, aka the Lestodon, were the only mammals who had intestines big enough to pass the giant avocado pits. Lesser mammals croaked from terminal constipation. So when the giant sloths, who slowly ate ancient avocados went exstinky, the ancestral avocados’ shinola propagation game plan was up to your neck in schitt creek without a sphincter of hope. See, the only way the Persea coalingensis could propagate from seed was when the giant sloths took a giant dump. Geologist Garry Hayes said joshua trees were also a favored snack.
“The original avocado found in the area now designated California can be related to prehistoric times, namely the middle Eocene and Pliocene epochs which have been determined by geologists to be approximately 10 to 60 million years ago. The history of these progenitors of the modern avocado and close botanical relatives in our current Persea species is recorded in fossil remains embedded in rocky outcroppings and in formations exposed comparatively recently by the work of man as he sought gold in California. ...Persea praelinque, P. pseudo-carolinensis, P. coalingensis were scattered throughout California in prehistoric times and are represented today only by botanical relatives found in Sonoran Mexico. —from Prehistoric Avocados in CaliforniaAdds a whole new level of meaning to gold digger. The persea pit could only sprout after a dark, wild journey through the giant sloth’s intestine—a weird, ill-fated symbiosis. Needless to say both tree and sloth went by the wayside. Civit coffee move over. I, for one, could’ve survived life without knowing the circumference of a giant sloth’s asshole. No shit, Sherlock. I guess I should say, Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Let’s talk about overpriced avocado toast, pass the guacamole, please. You do know that avocado means testicle in Náhuatl, right? I’ll let you guess what guacamole means.
Settlers used our native bay leaves for seasoning—they’re much spicier and pungent than their sweetbay relatives in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. I used the last of Nevada County poet laureate, Molly Fisk’s piquant bay laurel leave wreath in the turkey soup. It was resting on its laurels in the back seat of her car.... It’s a long story. Chris Olander is the current Nevada County poet laureate, in case you’re wondering. Just don’t confuse wordsmith Olander with oleander sometimes used as a bay leaf laurel crown, though they do look alike, as oleander is very toxic, but Chris is a long, cool drink of water.
California bay was an important food source for Native peoples who ate the pulp of young bay nuts, roasted and powdered the mature nut, used the young leaves as a green, as a tea. Deer adore young bay shoots—high in protein. Mature leaves were used as a seasoning, a medicine, and an insecticide to get rid of lice, and to keep grubs from their acorn granaries. Squirrels, jays, and rodents like the nuts, and woodrats also use bay leaves to keep their dens pest free. No more fleas.
But I digress, the noble laurel, from whence we get the word and the shrubbery to crown for our poets Laureate. Joy Harjo is our current/third term US Poet Laureate), and the Nobel prize, not to mention those laurels for ancient Greeks to rest upon, is a shrub, a small tree—not the big monster tree that our native bays can become. Swedish chemist who invented TNT, Alfred Nobel, cleverly coined the Nobel Prize, which was also a pun on his name. Dynamite!
The largest bay tree in the world is in Mendocino, an official Big Tree. The Big Tree on Graton Road in Sonoma County is at least 600 years old. Sonoma County has the highest concentration of CA bays in the world. There’s a monster tree in Santa Clara, but it split in two. I know of another monster in Las Gallinas/Lucas Valley (photo—can you find West Marin poet Brian Kirven in the tree? He’s six feet tall, and he should be a poet laureate).
I said to the FB poster, Please don’t call our native bay tree a generic laurel tree, that’s another series of shrubbery altogether. All those other laurels by any other name, other than the noble laurel, are loaded with cyanide. Especially the English laurel. The California bay is endemic to California, meaning it grows nowhere else in the world except here, in riparian zones wherever both types of sequoias were found—the coasts and the Sierra foothills to 5000 feet. And it likes to grow with oak trees.
There are a few bay groves in southwestern Oregon too, where they inexplicably call it Oregon myrtle. Another non-California common name is headache tree. Early pioneer settlers called it pepperwood because of the odor. Most of the Native names are lost; in Yuki, it is called pōl’-cum ōl. In Humboldt County, near Weott, Avenue of the Giants, there’s a wide spot in the road, a hamlet that changed its name to Pepperwood from Barkdull. A town swept away in the 1955 flood, and finished off in 1964. But the name persists. All that’s left today is a giant corn cob monument commemorating the spot where the village of Pepperwood once stood on the Eel River floodplain.
Who remembers the Pepperwood Restaurant on Mark West Creek in Santa Rosa? Sort of a bland Zim’s joint. The nearby Pepperwood Preserve was donated to the Academy of Sciences in 1979, and turned into a preserve in 2005.The old Knight’s Valley cattle ranches, last owned by the Bechtels, were once part of the 1843 Rancho Mallacomes land grant. Before that it was Wappo country, but it curiously doesn’t have massive bay tree stands—mostly oak woodlands burned by myriad wildfires. There are two small isolated pockets of bays in Tacoma and BC, so California bay laurel may have been once more widespread. Or someone planted them.
Though baywood is terrible to use as a main source of firewood as it’s too wet, it hisses like a snake, and makes a huge sooty mess in the stovepipe, it’s an excellent source of wood for fine carving, and it’s also a superb tonewood, sought out by luthiers. Great guitar backs. During the 1970s, I was in a southwestern Oregon art gallery admiring a lovely hand-carved wooden salad bowl, and the propieter made a big fuss about how rare myrtlewood burl was. I was quite miffed when I realized he was talking about baywood. Oh, for fucksakes, California bays are common as weeds.
The unnamed FB poster further maligned bay trees saying they were forest thugs choking and strangling other trees. He said it would better to eradicate them all. By that point, my ears were steaming. I must’ve been channeling Edward Abbey who said, "It is no longer sufficient to describe the world of nature. The point is to defend it."
I said, Bays don’t have an invasive root system that kills other trees. But they do grow big and create a huge root crown, or lignotuber base—a kind of tree larder—so they can regenerate after a fire. Their dead leaves release termines, like oak leaves release tannin, which does discourage undergrowth—but they are not the bullies. Once again, here we are, with our myopic three-second soundbyte masquerading as critical thinking skills.
Yes, bay and tanoak are host to Sudden Oak Death, the bay is wounded, but doesn’t die from it, however to the tanoak, it is nearly always lethal. SOD is a waterborn pathogen introduced from China via imported rhododendrons, the bay did not introduce it to oaks, the rhododendrons did. Blame that Marin nursery that imported diseased rhodies.
The fungus, Phytophthora ramorum, similar to the potato blight, is transmitted by water, and well, bays like water, and to make things more complicated, bays and oaks often prefer to grow with each other. It’s a symbiotic thing. Bays and oaks are BFFs People maligning and madly killing bay trees in order to to save the oaks, are sadly misinformed. SOD harms bay trees too, leaving spots on bay leaves. The pathogen is waterborn. Might as well try and stop the rain. Speaking of which, we could really use some rain to end this mega-drought.
I prefer to call it a bay tree than by any other name. I’ll put my laurels down now. Step away slowly from the keyboard. Now.
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| That massive lignotumor suggests the crown is not first growth. |
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