Oak Trees of Morgan Hill

Oak Trees of Morgan Hill. . Oak woodlands have become California’s signature landscape due to their widespread distribution and unique appearances. These woodlands provide critical wildlife habitat, scenic beauty, healthy watersheds, recreational opportunities, and a link to our historical heritage. Early Native American tribes relied heavily on acorns as a food source. An early map from the 1840s from the Ojo de Aqua de la Coche Rancho, a land grant originally sold to the Martin Murphy family by Juan Hernandez, even depicts the large fan-shaped oak woodland area on the eastern side of Morgan Hill., Early European explorers traveling through southern Santa Clara County in the 1770s had documented that “magnificent clusters of oak” created “one continuous vista of unexampled beauty,” while in the 1850s American botanist William Brewer had described northern Morgan Hill as an oak woodland “four or five miles wide covering the middle” of the valley. However, between the 1850s and 1930, the southern Santa Clara Valley floor experienced an estimated 99 percent decline in the number of valley and coast live oaks due to agricultural and residential development. Because of their ecological and cultural significance, California’s oak woodlands and savannas are now being protected and restored at many sites withing the species’ historic range., Top Image: Orchards can be seen covering most of the formerly wooded Morgan Hill area in this photograph from 1935. The few remaining isolated trees are mostly associated with farm homesteads. In the far right background, groups of oaks can be seen in the remaining pasturelands. (Anonymous 1935, photonumber P2954-32 courtesy of the Santa Clara Valley Water District)., Bottom Image: Contemporary landscape photograph from 2008 showing the same general area now largely urbanized (Courtesy of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, 2008).