As you approach our school from either Grant Street or Bancroft Way, you will notice some new additions to our campus habitat. Thanks to the generosity of the Class of 2019 and the expertise of O’Donnell’s Fairfax Nursery, we have added three new California Live Oak trees to our landscape.
We chose these amazing native trees for their beauty and the numerous benefits they provide:
- They are water wise. They have evolved to capture fog with their leaves and seek out water with their deep roots, allowing them to survive dry summers with little additional water.
- Their falling leaves improve the soil, making it rich and spongy.
- Their acorns are a staple food source to the native peoples of coastal California.
- They are ecosystems unto themselves, hosting more than 100 species of native butterflies and moths. These in turn provide food for many species of native birds, including the rare Hutton’s Vireo. What a boon for our WOOD, AIR, and WATER students for their butterfly, bird, and habitat studies!
- Their canopies can reach an average of 70 feet across, providing deep, cooling shade in urban spaces like our Berkeley neighborhood. We look forward to the shade they will provide on the Big Yard!
Our new trees join other coastal woodland plants like toyon and a new manzanita bush in our border bed. We also removed a number of non-native plants to make room for more natives to be added in the future. We look forward to the positive impact our trees will have on our physical space, as well as the benefits they will bring to our science and social studies programs. I invite you to visit our new trees often, getting to know them and watching how they grow and change.
In Partnership,
Love