Brentwood's Coral Tree Median Is Protected by Law, and That's Part of the Problem

On the morning of Sunday, August 16, more than twenty people showed up near Gretna Green Way with wheelbarrows, mulch, and a water truck. They weren't there for the farmers market that sets up a block away every Sunday. They came to weed, water, and haul debris around the coral trees that have lined the median of San Vicente Boulevard since the Eisenhower administration, because the canopy that made this stretch of Brentwood recognizable from a moving car is dying, and the city cannot legally replace it with anything else.

That last part is the detail most residents don't know until they look into why the median has looked thinner every year. San Vicente's coral trees carry a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument designation, granted in 1976, that specifies coral trees and only coral trees for that corridor. The designation was meant to protect the canopy forever. Instead, it now means that when a tree dies of disease or old age, the city cannot plant an oak or a jacaranda or anything hardier in its place. It has to plant another coral tree, a species that is struggling against two pests it has no natural defense against, or leave the gap empty.

A trolley line, then a hedge, now a monument

The median exists because a train used to run down the middle of it. When the Pacific Electric Red Car's Westgate line was pulled up around 1942, the city was left with a bare strip running through Brentwood into Santa Monica. A civic beautification group founded by Valley Knudsen planted the gap with coral trees, and by 1966 the canopy had grown in well enough that Mayor Sam Yorty named the coral tree the official tree of Los Angeles, citing the species for its hardiness and its fit with the city's Spanish and Mexican heritage. Ten years later, the stretch between 26th Street and Brentwood's eastern edge near Bringham Avenue earned formal landmark status as Cultural Heritage Monument No. 148.

For decades that status was a formality. Nobody was trying to remove the trees. The canopy was healthy, the median was shaded, and joggers used it as an informal running path along a boulevard where sidewalks compete with driveways and cross traffic.

Two insects the trees can't outgrow

The trouble started roughly a decade ago and has compounded since. Donald Hodel, an environmental horticulture advisor with University of California Cooperative Extension, has pointed to two invasive pests working on the coral trees from opposite ends. The Erythrina Stem Borer is a moth that lays eggs in the growing tips of branches, and the larvae kill each tip as they hatch, forcing the tree to keep pushing new growth that gets infested again. The Invasive Shot Hole Borer works the trunk and main branches instead, and it carries a fungus with it, so an infested tree is fighting a disease as well as an insect.

Hodel has also noted that coral trees are frequently overwatered and over-fertilized in urban plantings, which encourages the kind of soft, rank growth that makes branches more likely to snap under their own weight. A tree that evolved for a dry South African climate is being asked to thrive on a median that gets treated like a lawn.

The math has not gone the city's way. Only a handful of the original planting remain today, down from a canopy that once ran the full length of the corridor. One of the earlier losses was a sick tree at Bundy and San Vicente, removed after the borers had already done their damage, and the pattern has outpaced anything a maintenance budget alone can reverse.

The city found $1.2 million. It still can't fix the median.

Here is where the story stops being a garden problem and becomes a policy one. StreetsLA, working with funding secured through State Senator Allan's office and coordination with Council District 11, is moving forward with a $1.2 million median greening project along San Vicente. Drought-tolerant plantings and high-efficiency irrigation are part of the plan. New coral trees are not, because the historic designation only permits coral trees to be planted in that median, and the agency's read of the landmark rules does not allow substituting a different species even temporarily while coral tree stock is scarce or the soil is recovering.

So the city can spend over a million dollars on the median and still hand back a corridor with fewer trees than it has today. That is the contradiction a lot of Brentwood residents haven't put together yet: the same 1976 protection that kept a developer from ever paving over the median is now the thing standing between the trees and their own replacement.

Nancy Freedman, a Brentwood resident of more than forty years and a former chair of the Brentwood Community Council, has been one of the people trying to explain that history to neighbors who assumed the median would simply take care of itself. The train that used to run down that strip connected Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles, and when the tracks came out, the coral tree was the replacement chosen for its beauty and its assumed toughness. Freedman's read on it is that the choice made sense for 1966 conditions and has not aged well against pests nobody was planning for.

What the Sunday crew actually did

Without a city budget line that can plant new trees fast enough, the maintenance has fallen to residents. A group calling itself the Coral Tree Crew has been organizing volunteer days, and the August 16 turnout was the latest one. Brentwood resident Emily Loughran organized the event with her husband Kenneth, working alongside the Coral Tree Crew, the Brentwood Homeowners Association, and the Brentwood Community Council. For three hours, the group:

• Weeded the beds around the surviving trees
• Watered trees that had gone without irrigation attention
• Hauled in mulch to protect root zones from the summer heat
• Picked up trash that had accumulated along the median strip

American Growers Company, run by Tracey and David Price, donated the mulch delivery along with a water truck and crew. City Councilwoman Traci Park's Area Director for Brentwood and West Los Angeles, Michael Amster, showed up to help and brought good news with him: funding had come through to trim the coral trees on the eastern edge of the corridor, and the trim work had already happened that same morning. Amir Ebtehadj, Park's newly appointed deputy for Brentwood and the Pacific Palisades, joined as well.

Cai Dixon represented the Santa Monica side of the same historic corridor, since several coral trees have been removed on that end of San Vicente too. Dixon came away from the morning with a simple observation: a canopy planted as one continuous corridor is now maintained by two separate city bureaucracies, and closing that gap took ordinary people willing to spend a Sunday with mulch forks instead of waiting on either city to move first.

Freedman also runs the Coral Tree Endowment Fund, a resident-financed effort with a goal of building a $500,000 reserve dedicated to pruning and replacement trees in perpetuity, so the corridor's care doesn't depend entirely on whichever city budget cycle has room for it. Douglas Emmett has offered a $10,000 matching contribution to the fund this year.

Why this matters if you live two blocks away or twenty

You do not need to own property on San Vicente for this to affect your week. If you jog the median before work, walk it with a dog on Sunday mornings, or park along it for the farmers market that runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. right at Gretna Green Way, the thinning canopy is a visible change to a route you already know by heart. The trees you're used to seeing in bloom each spring, with their distinctive red flowers, are down to a fraction of the original planting, and the fix isn't a simple matter of the city writing a check.

What happens next probably depends less on StreetsLA's budget and more on whether volunteer days like August 16 keep drawing a crowd, and whether the endowment fund gets close enough to its goal that tree care stops being a once-a-year emergency. If you want to help directly, watching for the next Coral Tree Crew call to action through the Brentwood Homeowners Association or Brentwood Community Council is the most concrete thing a neighbor can do.

We follow stories like this one because Brentwood's character isn't just its homes. It's the shaded walk to the market, the landmark you didn't know had a name until you read about the fight to save it, and the neighbors who show up on a Sunday morning to do something about it. If you're curious what any of that means for your own corner of the neighborhood, or simply want a clearer sense of what your home is worth in a market shaped by details like this one, Scott Price Realty is glad to help you Discover Your Home's Value.