The Natural History of Foster City, California
by James K. Sayre
a draft manuscript
12 May 2005
Chapter 25: An Almond Tree Grows in Foster City
In one of the wild areas of Foster City, a small, tough almond tree grows. It is about six feet high and is probably quite old - possibly ten or twenty years old. It survives on rain water and whatever ground water it can extract from the local earth. Each summer it produces a small crop of almonds, none of which have seeded to reproduce. The Almond tree is very closely related to the Peach tree. In fact, I first identified the low-growing tree as a Peach Tree. Both the Almond tree, Prunus amygdalus, and the Peach tree, Prunus persica, are members of the Rose family. The fruit of the Al mond looks like a shrivled-up peach with a crack in the fruit and its inner layer, revealing the seed case. According to the Jepson Manual, Higher Plants of California, some members of the Prunus genus, which include apricots, cherries and plums as well as peaches, manage to persist near human habitation without any direct help, such as watering, weeding or spraying. There is no indication that these fruit trees, whose ancestors lived in temperate climates, have been able to reproduce in our Mediterrean climate, with it long annual summer droughts. This tough little almond tree lives on by itself in a wild area of Foster City.
End.
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