Properly Classifying Crocker Park’s Canary Island Pines

Arbor Day comes once a year, and y.

But Piedmonters are passionate about trees 365 days a year. And so we have another tree story.

It’s more of a tree correction. Piedmont Patch in its Community Resources, Parks & Gardens section for Crocker Park had this sentence: “Beneath the redwoods, a granite sculpture by Beniamino Bufano of a bear nursing her two cubs is the centerpiece of the park.”

A sharp Patch reader, Valerie Matzger, noticed that and opined that the trees overlooking the Bufano sculpture are Canary Island pines. Patch confirmed this with Mark Feldkamp, parks and project manager for the city of Piedmont.

So Patch has changed that sentence in the Crocker Park entry. And it also gives us a chance to say something about Beniamino Bufano, the famous sculptor.

An immigrant from Italy, Bufano came to prominence in 1915, winning a New York contest on the theme “The Immigrant in America,” for a sculpture in tile, granite and steel titled “Peace,” according to Wikipedia. The contest was sponsored by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The “Peace” piece is now relocated to an inn in Timber Cove, Sonoma County. Another famous Bufano work is a statue of Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Bufano, a fervent radical, protested the United States’ entry into World War I by chopping off his trigger finger and sending it to President Woodrow Wilson, according to Wikipedia.