CHAPTER V 



A "TREE ISLAND" OF MONTEREY CYPRESS* 



Two rocky headlands, Point Lobos and Cypress Point, one on either side, 

 mark the mouth of the Carmel River, \yhich empties into the Pacific Ocean 

 a few miles south of Monterey Bay. These headlands are small, so small as 

 to border on the insignificant save for this, that each of them bears a nar- 

 row forest of a remarkable sort, consistinfr solely of one kind of cypress 

 tree, and they have thus become endowed with a unique and singular in- 

 terest. In the way of botanical observers, the trees were first seen in 1786 

 by Jean Francois Galoup de la Perouse, commander of an ill-fated scien- 

 tific expedition from France that, two years later, was lost in the South 

 Seas. Since that early day many other expeditions to the California coast 

 have come and gone, and we now know definitely, after this long period 

 of searching, that the Monterey' cypress (Cujn-essus macrocarpa) does not 

 occur at any other locality in California — nor elsewhere in the world. 



The trees grow on the summits of the headlands and on the very face 

 of the cliffs, alwaj's within reach of the flying salt spray from the ocean 

 in times of storm. So exposed are they that the power of the sea may 

 occasionally undermine an individual on the steep face of the rocks, and 

 the tree falls into the thundering gulf below. The Cypress Point grove on 

 the north headland is the larger — a half-mile long, in breadth measuring 

 300 yards at its widest. The Point Lobos grove lies on a higher and wider 

 headland to the south. On both headlands the trees of the cliffs and shore- 

 line carry in their architecture and in their outline, often boldly proclaimed 

 against the sky, the life story of their battle with centuries of storm and 

 wind from the Pacific Ocean — a battle which has recorded in the structural 

 details of the tree's organs, the intensity of the struggle to maintain one 

 last foothold on the Californian shore. The thick weave of the clustered 

 masses of foliage, as smooth as a lawn on the seaward side, the long, gaunt 

 arms, weirdly irregular and picturesque, the vertical structural bracing 

 of the boardlike trunks and main branches — all these things typify combat, 

 resistance, long-enduring tenacity. 



While no two trees of the storm-driven type are alike, all give out so 

 powerful a picture of the dramatic as to make deep appeal to the poet, the 

 lay traveler, the mystically minded. For now three generations, a river of 

 people, who come to see, have flowed past the Carmel shores. Frankly ex- 

 clamatory, or murmuring low one to the other, or querulously skeptical 

 as the eyes turn from the angular type of tree to another, near at hand, 

 which is set in the beauty of its perfect symmetry — all emotions have cen- 

 tered in questionings. Whence came these trees? How is it that they are 

 found only here in California? Why should the}^ have such strange and 



• By Dr. Willis L. Jepson (1869-1946), for many years Professor of Botany, University of 

 California, Berkeley. Author of Silva of California, A Manual of Flowering Plants tw 

 California, and other works. 



"Window vistas" at 



Point Lobos are on esthetic part of 



the cypress forest interiors 



(39) 



