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Comment by sapote | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed by your response given that I've been reading here for ages and figured I'd weigh in on something I know a lot about...but ok.

To respond to your point: I think there's probably a good reason he chose what he did -- it's what Jobs was used to (given that the fruits they planted were the commercial fruit varieties that were commonly grown in the area when Jobs was a kid). That doesn't make it an interesting orchard worthy of the press it's gotten. And I'm sure he put lots of effort into the aesthetics of it, but he didn't in the actual selection of fruits. Also, the climate of 2050 won't be the climate of 1950 (both due to climate change and the urban heat island) -- it's possible to successfully grow many fruits that only did well in Southern CA 50 years ago. (Just to highlight the lack of forward thinking: the orchard includes many citrus fruit trees, which are going to be toast in a matter of just a few years due to HLB.)

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By the way, for those who are curious, here's a list of fruit trees that they planted at the new Apple campus:

http://www.cityfarmer.org/treesapple.jpg

(Edit: the list is from several years ago, so no idea if this is a complete list and/or accurate -- I've seen other lists that include a few more trees than are listed here.)

I'm not sure why the other guy was downvoted. I just read the article and it points out their choices and why: wanted to make it a microcosm of trees pre-Silicon Valley.

That being said you can be disappointed at their selection of fruit trees. It's just an opinion.

"Muffly, who had been sensitive to the native growth of the region for years, got it immediately. “That’s what I’ve been doing — planting fruit trees, oak trees,” he said."

The thing that's funny about it is that the pre-silicon valley landscape that Jobs was familiar with was not native at all. None of the fruits that they are planting are native to the region (though sure, the oaks are). Most of the old growth forests in the region had already been completely logged by the the 1950s (well before that, actually). This article talks about how the redwood forests that covered the local hillsides were all clearcut in the 1800s:

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/cover/1996_Nov_...

Just on the other side of the bay (in the East Bay hills) there used to be a stand of some of the largest redwoods ever known to have existed, that were used for navigation by ships through the golden gate because they were so large.

I get it -- the building is really a monument to Jobs, and so creating his childhood vision of the valley is fine. And it's a private company -- they can do what they want. I just guess I see this tree planting as a missed opportunity, one that is being given far more credit than it deserves.

What happened to the redwoods?

They were logged during the mid-1800s as SF and Oakland were growing and the gold rush was going on, then again after the 1906 earthquake.

Essentially no old-growth trees remain (one, I think?); but a stand of younger redwoods does still exist in Redwood Regional Park [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_Regional_Park

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