Once I asked Steve Norman if he knew much about trees.
"There are two types of trees—Trees, and Pine Trees," he said.
That summed up my knowledge about trees, too. Later, after becoming dimly aware that some non-Pine Trees don't lose their leaves in the winter, I felt a need to identify Palo Alto trees. The Camphor tree struck me as particularly bizarre. It never seems to lose any leaves, unless you pull them off, and that's not easy—the leaves are waxy and feel like they're made out of plastic. If you think, "OK, I'll just crush this nasty little leaf and show it who's boss," you find that your fingers smell like Mentholatum. Camphor trees just keep getting bigger and bigger, adding more low limbs like some kind of mutant octopus.
They're the squat Asian wrestlers of the arbor world, and can do some heavy lifting.
In the photo (click it), a camphor has pushed up a block of concrete so far that the owner just gave up on half his driveway, painted it white, and made it into a street curb instead.
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