East Bay Regional Parks: Clearing and Tree Planting – Berkeley and Oakland CA

Description

New Deal work relief and conservation crews cleared hundreds of acres of trees and brush and planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs in three of the original units of the East Bay Regional Parks District (EBRPD):  Tilden, Temescal, and Redwood Regional Parks.  

This work was part of a major New Deal effort to aid the newly-created Parks District (1934) in improving  its parks for public recreation, direct by the Parks District’s first general manager, Elbert Vail. 

The natural landscape of the Oakland-Berkeley hills was mostly grassland, with some oak-chaparral woodlands, riparian vegetation and patches of redwood (all of which had been cut down in the 19th century).  Millions of eucalyptus trees were planted in the hills c 1910-13 in a misbegotten lumber scheme of Frank Havens, Oakland’s leading real estate developer and businessman of the time.  Many of these were cleared to make way for park improvements, but there are still forests of eucalpytus in the parks.

In both cleared areas and places naturally lacking in trees, the Park District planted redwoods, pines, bays, and native shrubs with the help of the CCC and WPA.

The first plantings came in Tilden Park, where the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) did extensive work, starting with clearing brush and eucalyptus.  CCC teams worked under the supervision of John McLaren, director of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, working as an unpaid consultant. The enrollees suffered mightily from the abundant poison oak!

Later, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) entered the parks and, among other tasks, WPA workers help plant a quarter million trees and shrubs in the East Bay parks in 1940-42.  This work was supervised by James Roof, manager of the Tilden Botanical Garden and Nursery Superintendent at the US Forest Service Research facility in Berkeley.

Roof was able to utilize thousands of seedlings from the Forest Service nursery for the improvement of the East Bay parks. It also seems that a nursery was established in Tilden Park for pines and redwoods at the site of the present Native Plants Nursery located near the Tilden Golf Course.