The Flowering Ash of Bernal Heights Library

Somebody chose well for a branch library door. Two flowering ash stand either side of the entrance at 500 Cortland Avenue, and the pair is on San Francisco's Landmark Tree list, which runs to only about twenty-five trees in the whole city. One of those designations went to the doorway of a neighbourhood branch library in Bernal Heights. Fraxinus ornus is a southern European and Near Eastern tree, growing wild from Spain through Austria to Lebanon and Armenia, and it is an odd thing to find flanking a civic building in California. It is small, it is neat, and it earns its common name once a year when the whole crown goes over to creamy plumes of flower. Mike Sullivan, who wrote the book on this city's trees, has the pair on his own Bernal Heights walking tour, one stop, both trees. That is how to treat it. You stand at the library door and you have seen the entry; there is nothing to hunt for. No planting date exists for either tree in the city's file or in Sullivan's, so their age is anybody's guess, and a librarian or a neighbour who remembers them going in would settle it in a sentence. Cortland Avenue is the main street of the neighbourhood, so the walk up is worth having anyway.