A Tour of L.A.’s Neighborhood Trees

There are cities that ask you to look up. New York, of course. Tokyo, Paris, London. Then there are the cities that invite you to look out. The vistas are the party. Los Angeles is a looking-out city. And when you do, what you see are trees.

The trees of Los Angeles may well be the most underrated reason to visit. “This is one of the most densely populated, diverse urban forests in the world,” said Bryan Vejar, the senior manager of arboricultural training and education at TreePeople, the oldest environmental nonprofit based in Southern California. (TreePeople has planted three million trees since it started 50 years ago.) “We have nearly 500 different species of trees in greater Los Angeles,” said Mr. Vejar.

The trees of Los Angeles are as varied and storied as the city itself and touring them is the cheapest way to take in its charms.

“Every neighborhood treats their trees differently,” said Nick Araya, a master arborist and founder of TreeCareLA, a tree management company. “In Laurel Canyon, it feels like the trees are in charge. But then there are places that are much more manicured. It’s very rare that a tree will start growing in Beverly Hills and be allowed to stay.”

Over 95 percent of the city’s trees are nonnative. But no matter where they come from, they are good for the cityscape, providing cooling shade for people and habitat for birds and animals. “Trees can save Los Angeles if we let them,” said Mr. Araya.

Some of the most recognizable trees in Los Angeles, like the California date palms and Mexican fan palms lining the iconic strip of North Beverly Drive, just south of the Beverly Hills Hotel, are not the most helpful to the environment.

“You can’t have Los Angeles without palm trees,” said Mr. Araya. “But they have a small canopy and almost no shade. Most trees get bigger and better as they age — palms just go up. And they’re invasive.” In case it wasn’t clear: “I’m not a fan.”

Exploring the city through its arboreal citizens, as I did with Mr. Araya, offers a new take on some of its classic neighborhoods. Here, how to explore three sections of the city where the trees provide a distinctive feel.

Hancock Park

Park in Larchmont Village — a miniature stretch of Brooklyn on the West Coast — and grab a coffee at Groundwork or Go Get Em Tiger on North Larchmont Boulevard to fuel up before your walk. Larchmont Avenue is lined with boutiques, cafes and a farmers’ market (open every Wednesday and Sunday), making it the perfect base as you head into Hancock Park. Make your way down to Irving Boulevard and West Second Street. Mr. Araya and I stood on the corner of the residential neighborhood as he clicked his laser pointer on massive Deodar cedars across the street. Left alone, a Deodar cedar looks like a weeping pine tree — its silhouette is often a lopsided triangle, not unlike the Sorting Hat in the “Harry Potter” series.

“This is a really interesting intersection because you can see half a dozen Deodar cedars with different management styles,” Mr. Araya said. “One is pruned to have pompoms, some pruned to look natural, some left totally alone. Deodar cedars come from the Himalayas — the highest elevation in the world. And here they are practically at sea level. That’s how resilient they are.”

Deodar cedars have been growing well in Hancock Park since they were brought in almost 100 years ago. A hawk swooped down from the tree we were looking at.

“The tops of these trees don’t come to a point so they provide the perfect perch for predatory birds,” he said. “What makes the Deodar cedar so special is that we have an agreed-upon communal contract for the most part not to disrupt them. People don’t top them.”

Topping trees — excessively pruning the branches — is uniquely popular in Los Angeles, Mr. Araya explained, in part because people worry about the liability of having branches fall on a parked car and in part because they love sunshine.

We walked a block to West Second Street and South Windsor Boulevard home to a carob tree with gloriously thick sweeping branches low to the ground and enough shade for a small village. Carob trees are originally from North Africa and the Mediterranean “and they make a lot of shade and attract birds and squirrels so a lot of cities planted them,” Mr. Araya explained. “This one is probably 100 years old,” he said, and pointed out a swarm of mushrooms growing out of the trunk. “Chicken of the woods mushrooms — great to eat but bad for the tree.”

Mr. Araya took this moment to talk about the irony of sprinklers.

“We are obsessed with our lawns in Los Angeles,” he said, explaining that sprinklers hit the trunk of the tree, and people assume that watering a tree would be beneficial. But in fact, hitting the base of a tree with water in the same place year after year leads to rot and fungus growth.

We made our way down Second Street to Norton Avenue, a wide street lined with Canary Island date palms — thicker and shorter than the famously long, skinny Mexican fan palms all over Los Angeles — and the sound of parrots. Canary Island date palms were planted in Hancock Park and Beverly Hills in the 1920s and 1930s.

“I have a love-hate relationship with the Canary Island palms. Their dead fronds are 20 feet long and can do a lot of damage if they fall. But they are a habitat for wildlife and their canopy gets huge — maybe 50 feet wide — and we need shade because Los Angeles is shade deprived.”

Hancock Park has no shortage of pear trees, olive trees, California sycamores (also known as a Western sycamore) and magnolias.

You’ll pass all of them as you make your way back to Larchmont Avenue. Before leaving the neighborhood, grab a salad or breakfast burrito at Great White, one of the most popular cafes in the neighborhood. And if you get a table outside, check out the ficus trees lining Larchmont.

“They’re sheared to look like lollipops,” said Mr. Araya. “The more you trim on top, the slower the roots grow.” Ficus roots are particularly invasive and “these roots are messing up the plumbing all over Larchmont so this is a fair compromise between the trees and the community.”

Laurel Canyon

On your way up to Laurel Canyon, drive on North Detroit Street. On the west side of the street between Clinton and Melrose, you’ll pass a spectacular Ficus religiosa, its hundreds of thousands of heart-shaped leaves gracefully dangling over the street.

“This is the same kind of tree that the Buddha sat underneath when he found enlightenment,” said Mr. Araya who is also married to a board-certified master arborist. “This is my wife’s favorite tree in Los Angeles. It hurts her heart to see people butcher trees, but this one has been pruned very responsibly.”

We continued our drive up into the hills.

As flora life goes, Laurel Canyon is chaos: 130-foot-tall Canary Island pines, native California bay laurels (the source of the neighborhood’s name) and coast live oaks, Aleppo pines from Syria, giant eucalyptus originally from Australia — all growing up and out in every direction, branches resting on utility lines, massive trunks leaning into rooftops. There is nothing manicured about Laurel Canyon — the landscape is wild and the scale is humbling.

You get the sense that the trees run things here; the people just try to stay out of their way. “It’s a slice of what this part of the world would look like if we humans hadn’t colonized the area,” Mr. Vejar later told me.

And unlike the more manicured pockets of the city, Laurel Canyon is a hedge-free zone.

It was early spring and Mr. Araya pointed to a burst of yellow on the hillside. “The acacias are starting to bloom,” he said. We parked the car (illegally) on the corner of Lookout Mountain and Wonderland. “In California, we have a rolling bloom: It starts with the acacias, then the pear trees, then the saucer magnolias. And the mild climate here means that a lot of our trees bloom with no leaves on them.”

The best way to take in the trees of Laurel Canyon is probably by car — roads are steep and curvy and sidewalks are scarce.

To get a better look at the biodiversity of the area, drive up Laurel Canyon Boulevard (parts of Mulholland Drive are temporarily closed) to Tree People’s headquarters. Their 45 acres of wilderness and miles of trails are open to the public and one of the best ways to take in the biodiversity Mr. Vejar talks about.

On your way back down, visit the heart of Laurel Canyon by way of Pace Restaurant — perfect for a warm bowl of pasta after a day of craning your neck upward.

Beverly Hills

There is perhaps no other neighborhood in Los Angeles in which trees are as much of a status symbol as in Beverly Hills.

“Beverly Hills has the advantage of money to maintain the trees,” said Mr. Araya, indicating some well-appointed front yards. “They like the attention grabbers here: magnolias because their blooms are so well known, Japanese flowering pears, and of course, olive trees often shipped down from Napa.”

We make our way down Alpine Drive, a manicured residential stretch lined with ash trees. Mr. Araya shakes his head.

“The emerald ash borer is wiping out ash trees all over the country, but not here,” he said, explaining that the insect hasn’t made its way to Southern California and it may never come. “These ash trees are absolutely thriving. People don’t know how lucky they are here on Alpine Drive.”

Although almost entirely residential, this pocket of Beverly Hills is arboreally diverse and not without irony. North Maple Drive is lined with camphor trees, which smell like Vicks VapoRub. Palm Drive is decorated with jacarandas, which have brilliant purple flowers in the spring. The one street that lives up to its name: Elm Drive which has neat rows of Chinese elm trees.

A few days later, I asked Ken Pfalzgraf, the city arborist for Beverly Hills, why the trees on its streets don’t correspond to the names.

“Honestly I think it’s as simple as the fact that there weren’t enough palms at the nursery the day they were planting Palm Drive,” he said. “The first four streets that were planted in Beverly Hills in 1907 still have some original plantings. Everything else was planted in the 1930s and 1940s.” Those streets may have had the corresponding trees on them at some point, but over time, if the trees started to die, they were replaced.

Though this pocket of Beverly Hills is very residential, great restaurants and some of Los Angeles’s best shopping are only five minutes away. Drive up Santa Monica Boulevard and make your way to Gracias Madre, a vegan Mexican restaurant with great guacamole and a lively patio on Melrose Avenue.

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