Blue Gum Blues No More

A truce has been declared in the tiff between Santa Cruz and its tree-killing poet.

For the better part of a decade, Robert Sward fought City Hall over a thicket of towering blue gum eucalyptuses standing menacingly around his home. He contends that the trees represented a clear and present danger, swaying ominously in windstorms and dropping lethal-sized branches. In 1996, a huge blue gum toppled within a few feet of his wife, artist Gloria Alford.

When he finally wearied of the fight and tried to remove a few trees last year, Sward was hit by a whopping fine and earned his reputation as an herbicidal threat.

But this tempest in the treetops came crashing down recently.

The city dispatched a letter earlier this month advising Sward that he had to begin remediation efforts -- planting several specimen-sized oak trees at a cost of $7,000. If not, he faced new fines and legal action. Sward, a Guggenheim fellow and retired college professor, responded with a call to City Hall. Mayor Emily Riley and two other council members agreed to meet with him.

The meeting was almost a love-fest compared to the last decade’s battles.

“Robert engaged in civil disobedience, and you take your chances when you do that,” said Councilman Mark Primack. “But it was our intent to make the punishment fit the crime.”

The city agreed to slash Sward’s tree-replacement responsibilities. A city parks crew will do the work, and the oaks -- to be planted on municipal property -- will be purchased wholesale, dropping the cost. Sward’s bill will be $1,200. The city also agreed to let him pay it off at $50 a month over the next two years.

“Hallelujah!” Sward proclaimed this week. “It was such a relief. This thing had taken up so much psychic space. A third of my mind was allotted to it: going against the community you live in and like, worrying about the threat to our lives. Under the circumstances, this was probably the best we could have hoped for.”

But he is not compromising on all fronts. Over the years, this man of letters has conducted a war of words against the blue gum eucalyptus. Though prized as a windbreak and for its gangly beauty amid coastal California’s bleached grasslands, the big Australian import is rued by firefighters as the “gasoline tree” because it ignites like a bomb upon the approach of wildfire. Sward plans to continue his campaign to see them thinned all over the state, particularly next to his house.

He also vows to be there as Santa Cruz looks at modifying its Heritage Tree Ordinance, which bans the ax for any tree broader than 14 inches (a blue gum can reach that stature in five years). He hopes to someday get permission to chain-saw his own threatening eucalyptuses.

“We’ll continue to fight the fight,” Sward said. “I don’t see how we can’t.”