Many people will fight to defend animals they care for, be they wild or domestic. They’ll violate regulations, even go beyond the law, in defense of cats and dogs especially, but also in behalf of wolves, whales, dolphins, the irresistible sea otter, and a few others, usually large species recognized as being highly intelligent or charming.

Botanical activists tend to be quieter. Except for the brave souls willing to risk their lives for ancient redwoods, people working to save some part of the plant kingdom have not been known for guerrilla activism. Most who love wildflowers, forests, and gardens love them discreetly. Most who engage in native landscape restoration do so patiently, gathering and planting seeds, sitting on committees.

Occasionally someone will go off the path, of course. Reputable sources have it that a certain native plant advocate, who has given endless hours to reviving urban wastelands, has girdled some eucalyptus trees with wire in hope of strangling them after efforts to remove them legally failed. But such incidents of botanical rage have been rare.

Lately, however, plants seem to be inspiring more ferocious responses and there seem to be more of them. In Rancho Palos Verdes, above Santa Monica Bay, a voter-approved ordinance allows authorities to “restore” homeowners’ views by cutting trees on neighbors’ property. Tree advocates are challenging the ordinance in court.

In a quiet Marin County village, meanwhile, violence was recently committed on a controversial hedge. On the night after the Fourth of July, a person—or persons—attacked and almost felled a row of 180 young cypress recently planted in Bolinas, along the road to Olema, on land purchased about ten years ago by Susie Tompkins Buell, cofounder of Esprit de Corp. The saplings were cut close to the ground, about three-fourths of the way through each trunk.

Community reaction has ranged from anger to approval: “It’s her land. She can do anything she wants,” said one homeowner. “If only she had planted flowering cherries, everyone would have been delighted,” said another. Said a third: “Unfortunately, some of the trees may make it.”

In this community, people differ fiercely in their views of what trees and plants are appropriate. Local resident Judith Larner Lowry, who runs a business propagating native plants, has a “restoration garden” of local wild species. “By seeing your particular piece of land as part of a larger plant-animal community and seeking to enhance old and established relationships through your style of gardening, you join that community,” she writes in Gardening with a Wild Heart: Restoring California’s Native Landscapes at Home (University of California Press 1999). She describes what she learned by careful observation of the coyote bush, sage, and other local wild plants, and also talks of the harm done by certain introduced species. A botanist who is a neighbor of Lowry’s, on the other hand, treasures his collection of tropical plants and does not seem to care that the fast-growing Chiapas oak he introduced has spread into Lowry’s yard, among the coast live oak saplings she is nurturing.

At the time the 180 cypress were planted, “committee and subcommittee meetings had been going on about what to do with the eucalyptus,” on public lands, says Joanne Kyger, Wednesday editor of the thrice-weekly Bolinas Hearsay News. “The town had galvanized into pro-eucalypus and pro–scrub oak. The pro-eucalyptus people were saying, ‘These trees are habitat for the monarch butterflies.’ The others talked of cedar waxwings with their beaks gummed up. There were pictures of little birds with their feet up. People are passionate about plants. I was amazed. After nine months of testimony, awareness of native planting was very high.”

Also very high was the fear that wealthy people who had been buying property in town would change the community’s character, erecting walls between themselves and others. The trees were meant to delineate the property, Mark Buell, husband of Susie Tompkins Buell, explained in the Hearsay News. Shutting out sunlight was not the intent. Another resident noted that if cypress were not carefully maintained they would grow into a high wall, “a dark corridor into town.” Meanwhile, on the non-botanical front, the San Francisco Chronicle told of a rumor that Martha Stewart was looking at property in Bolinas, threatening its cherished obscurity. Soon after, someone attacked the cypress hedge.

There are skeins in this story that have not yet been unraveled. The enormous jump in coastal real estate prices has set neighbor against neighbor. A growing appreciation of native landscapes has led some people to despise eucalyptus and other trees they disapprove of. (Of course, it may be that neither of these facts is relevant to what happened in Bolinas.)

As humans occupy more and more of other species’ habitat, and native plants and animals succumb to the pressures, battles to save what remains become more intense. Eradication campaigns have been launched on several fronts against alien plants that threaten habitats along rivers, in wetlands, and along the nearshore. Even as San Francisco gains a new saltmarsh, invasive alien cordgrass threatens all that has been achieved in other wetlands.

One woman who has devoted decades of her life to wetland recovery has watched these grasses gaining ground. Can anyone blame her for thinking—just a thought, now, not an intention—that time is running out and maybe she should buy some herbicide spray and, never mind the permits, just do what needs to be done?

—Rasa Gustaitis