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American Indians crushed this tree’s poisonous seeds and added them to dammed-up streams to stupefy fish, making them easy to catch. (Today you may find California buckeyes near old Indian campgrounds.)

Perhaps because of its spreading form, the California buckeye is rarely planted as a street tree in San Francisco, due to narrow urban setbacks. You can view a large and spectacular specimen in a yard at 2694 McAllister Street, near the University of San Francisco campus. The tree was scheduled for removal in 1999 in connection with new construction on the lot, but after a neighborhood outcry, plans for the house were changed to build around, and preserve, the tree. As part of the settlement, the property owner signed a tree easement with Friends of the Urban Forest, protecting the tree from future removal—and making this the only tree in the city protected by a contract.

Schinus molle

CALIFORNIA PEPPER TREE

A mature California pepper arching over a backyard patio is a cliché of Sunset magazine’s California lifestyle. Cliché or not, the California pepper is one of the most beautiful trees available to San Francisco tree lovers. Mature peppers have wonderfully gnarled trunks, supporting rounded crowns of graceful, arching branches. The fernlike foliage is finely textured, with bright green leaves composed of many leaflets. California peppers have either male or female flowers; female flowers develop into drooping clusters of showy rose-colored peppercorn berries in the fall and winter. The seeds are sometimes sold as pink peppercorns, although in large quantities they can be toxic. (To avoid messy fruit drop, many city dwellers plant trees with male flowers only.) Like its relative the Brazilian pepper, this tree is related botanically to mangos, pistachios, and cashews, as well as to poison ivy and poison oak; contact with its leaves can cause dermatitis or allergic reactions in some individuals. Despite its common name, this tree is native not to California but to the Andes Mountains in Peru (in fact, many sources now use Peruvian pepper tree as the common name). It has, however, become naturalized in chaparral areas of Southern California.