There are more than a dozen trees on my block now; when I bought my house, on the edge of Bernal Heights a few doors from Cesar Chavez St., there were only three. Each of those trees was put in for free, planted by volunteers from Friends of the Urban Forest, a San Francisco nonprofit that’s planted tens of thousands of trees on San Francisco streets since its start in 1981. You can see a gallery of San Francisco street trees on their website, which also links to a map of city flora. The Chronicle did an article on the tree map recently.

Not only will they come and plant a tree in front of your house for free, they’ll maintain it for free, replace old trees which have lived out their lives, and employ young people while they’re at it. They involve neighbors and homeowners in their Saturday planting days, because when people help plant the tree in front of their house, they’re more likely to care for it. I love the two trees in front of my house, each now more than ten years old.

They’re planting in Noe Valley this coming Saturday. Contact them and help out.

Chris Carlsson has a fantastic post about walking around Bernal Heights and encountering an Edenic enclave of gardens, stairways, fruit trees and wildlife.

Funny to think of San Francisco as a windswept, barren, sandy and flea-ridden peninsula. These days it’s starting to look like a garden oasis, and if you spend time walking on the hills, behind Noe or Eureka Valleys, on Telegraph Hill or Russian Hill, Bernal or Potrero, you are in for a treat!

His Nowtopian blog is solid on my RSS feed.

Plum trees, planted on sidewalks and in landscaped areas, are starting to bloom in San Francisco. I took this shot early this morning on Mariposa St. outside St. Gregory Nyssa church. Prunus cerasifera, known as the cherry plum or purple-leafed plum, can be seen throughout the city, many of them planted by Friends of the Urban Forest or by CalTrans.