Lang Oak Honored on State Arbor Day

Although its branches provide a great deal of shade for a small island of dirt surrounded by asphalt on Louise Avenue, the Lang Oak Tree could not shade the people who came to honor it Friday from the hot March sun overhead.

But the nearly two dozen people didn’t mind sitting away from the 1,000-year-old oak, which is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, as long as it was being given the honor it deserved as the city’s official tree for California Arbor Day 1997.

The coast live oak tree, which has always been a landmark in the community, is a modern-day reminder that the Encino area was once covered with oaks. At 150 feet wide, 75 feet tall and 24 feet in circumference, it is impressive.

“I’ve never seen anything as phenomenal as that,” marveled a man who knows trees, Wirt Morton, great-great-grandson of National Arbor Day founder J. Sterling Morton. Though California’s Arbor Day was Friday, National Arbor Day is April 22.

Until 1994, residents of Encino could walk under the branches of the Lang Oak and picnic under its shade. But realizing that the tree needed help if it was to survive another hundred years, people collected money and went to the city to save it.

“This tree exemplifies all that is good about an urban forest,” Larry Smith, chairman of the community forest advisory committee, said Friday.

Michael Mahoney, an arborist who cares for the oak, asked those gathered--especially the environmentally active children from area schools--to “send more feelings to this tree to have it get healthier and grow faster.

“It’s healthy in some places and not in others,” he said, indicating the sparse patches on its north side, compared to the lush, leaf-filled branches on its south.

The group planted a small coast live oak a few yards north of the Lang Oak.

The sapling was the first of many expected to be planted over hundreds of years, Mahoney said, an investment in a future without the grand old oak.