102 California eucalyptus The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
21Lukens and Muir were particularly keen on growing forests as a
way to provide water—always a key to power in the state. Trees
brought rain and captured fog and moisture; without forests, the
men feared the state’s great cities would dry up.
The forests were diminishing because people were cutting
them down at an ever-increasing rate—which still seemed unable
to keep up with demand. America’s aspiring middle class longed
for wooden houses filled with wooden appliances, and to travel in
trains with wooden coaches that sped over thousands of miles of
rails that rested on wooden ties. As a result there were concerns
about an impending “hardwood famine”—that America was hit-
ting what might be called today “peak wood”. In 1907 a widely cir-
culated report by the Forest Service claimed that America could
run out of hardwood in just 15 years.
The solution was to grow more forests, and quickly. The euca-
lyptus came to be seen as the tree for the job. Evergreen hardwoods
native to Australia, they were first brought back to Europe in the
1770s by Joseph Banks, the greatest British naturalist of the 18th
century. In 1788 Charles Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle gave them their
systematic Linnaean name, derived from the Greek roots eu(well)
and kalyptos(covered). The covering in question is not that which
the trees’ fallen leaves and seed pods provide to forest floors, but
the discreet cap which conceals their flower buds.
Since then, by some estimates, over 100m acres (40m hectares)
of eucalyptus trees have been planted around the world. You can
find them in the hills above Lisbon, in massive plantations
throughout China and in the fields of India. But nowhere have they
thrived more readily than in California.
Nobody quite knows how they got to the state—or, indeed,
whether it was a state when they arrived. Most accounts point to anarrival by ship from Australia sometime in the
mid-19th century, when a traveller could get to San
Francisco more quickly from Sydney than from New
York. Horticulturalists prized them as an exotic novel-
ty, beautiful additions to the gardens making the best
of the young state’s lovely climate. Medical profession-
als recommended their planting as a way of absorbing
the noxious miasmas thought to cause malaria—an
idea that may have been influenced by the trees’ astrin-
gent smell.
As well as these niche applications, the trees also
had a broader claim on human attention, a facility that
has always stood immigrants in good stead: they could
thrive where others could not, and with minimal assis-
tance. The Californian climate, not unlike that of the
parts of Australia they came from, suited them well.
They far outstripped the state’s native species in pro-
ductivity. A black oak, the eucalyptus boosters said,
took 50 years to put on a foot in diameter, a white oak a
century. A eucalyptus could do it in a decade.It’s gonna get a hold on you
In Nipomo, Lukens thought he had found the perfect
place to put this capacity to use. For thousands of years,
winds off the Pacific had blown beach sand in Ni-
pomo’s direction, forming a flat-topped mesa of
around 12,400 acres which was home to scrawny oaks,
scrub brush and little else: “a desert waste of sand”, as a
local newspaper put it, that sold for extremely low
prices. But Lukens was taken by the mesa’s soils—deep
if poor—and cold mists. He deemed it better for euca-
lyptus than any other spot in California, as long as the
young saplings were offered some sort of windbreak
(rows of barley worked well). It could also be reached
by the railroads.
In 1909 Lukens and two businessmen from Iowa put
$150,000 into creating the Los Berros Forest Company
and started planting 8,000 acres they had acquired at
the north end of the mesa. It was both a timber busi-
ness and a property venture. Land with trees was worth
more than land without. In 1910 William Brintnall, who
had served as the president of Drover’s National Bank
in Chicago for more than 30 years, paid over $20,000
for 687 acres on the Los Berros tract—which at $30 an
acre was fetching as much as ten times what had been
paid for it five years earlier.
“EUCALYPTUS PROMISES TO BE GREAT INDUSTRY”,
announced the front page of the San Luis Obispo Daily
Telegram, later claiming that what the speculators fol-
lowing where Lukens had led were planting “will be the
largest artificial forest in the world when completed”.
Land on the fringes of a tiny town that had once been
called worthless now brought in what the newspaper
called “fancy prices”. In 1912 the paper told the story of
George Munger, “an eastern eucalyptus man”, who
rolled into town and spent nearly $50,000 dollars on
200 acres. The area enjoyed some of the largest proper-
ty transactions the county had seen in years.
An advertisement in the Omaha Sunday Beeprom-
ised that the tree’s timber would produce a value of up
to $5,000 an acre ($130,000 in today’s dollars) in just
ten years. Hopeful investors were welcome to a free
1,600-mile trip—no obligation, at least on paper—
aboard a Pullman railcar from Omaha to California to
scope out eucalyptus opportunities. Some companies
promised “forests grown while you wait” or even the