Re: hedges for very hot areas
I grew up in Pasadena, too, and did my grandmother's yard work as a teenager.
The city had used carob trees, male and female, for the street planting. Ugly,
messy, stinky, as far as a teenager was concerned. However, Chicano families
would come and collect the pods for cooking. I could never decide which was
worse to clean up after: the stinky carobs or grandma's other street tree, a
jacaranda, whose every teensy little leaflet separated from the whip-like leaf
stems, so that every bit of the litter slipped right through the rake.
Kay Dreher
Berkeley, California
Katherine Waser wrote:
>
> Indeed, it is amazing how hard it can be to envision new uses for
> well-known things (plants or otherwise). Carobs do certainly cast very
> dense shade, and I bet they'd make a handsome hedge. My only caveat would
> be that their roots can really heave pavement! When I was a kid in
> Pasadena, California, we had two huge carob trees flanking our paved
> driveway. They eventually made hillocks in the pavement that were at least
> 1/2 meter high. Eventually, the people who then lived in the house cut the
> trees down. So, if your planned hedge is going to be near any kind of paved
> area, you might want to think twice about using carobs. (Maybe this would
> not be a problem with olives? )
>
> Katherine Waser
> Tucson, Arizona
>
> At 09:26 AM 1/12/00 +1030, you wrote:
> >Carob hedges were planted by the earliest colonists here in the
> >1840's and the hedges are still in good order today (...)
> <snip>
> >Trevor Nottle
