Trees of the Los Padres

Along with the other three national forests in southern California, the Los Padres is unique in having more area covered by shrubs than trees. Approximately 72% of land within the Los Padres National Forest is dominated by chaparral, with the remaining area being dominated by sagebrush scrub, oak woodland, conifer forest, and grassland. However, this national forest is still home to at least 45 different species of trees ranging from towering coast redwoods to the relatively small narrowleaf willow. There’s even one tree species that occurs almost exclusively in the Los Padres National Forest and nowhere else on Earth.

But first—how do we define a tree? This is a surprisingly difficult question, and there’s no one definition that is universally agreed upon. It’s usually obvious that a tree is different from, say, a grass (though bamboo poses an interesting conundrum here), but the difference between a tree and a shrub is sometimes less obvious. We usually think of shrubs as not having a singular stem (i.e. a trunk or a bole) but rather multiple stems coming out of roughly the same spot in the ground. Shrubs are also generally shorter than most trees. However, some plants blur the line as they can often grow as shrubs or trees depending on the conditions of a particular site.

Below is a list of the 45 species we consider to grow naturally within the Los Padres National Forest. We’ve included several species that may be more often found growing as shrubs (labeled “shrub/tree”) as well as others that are usually trees but may sometimes be shrubbier (labeled “tree/shrub”). We’ve also included the approximate maximum height range for each species using a combination of sources including Calscape and Jepson eFlora.

We have informational webpages about some of these species and have linked them in the table. We hope to have a page for each species soon. You may also be interested in Conifers of Pine Mountain, which has additional information and photos for some of the trees below.