The Adventures of Robin Hood | Cedar Grove, Bidwell Park — the plantation that stood in for an English wood

Cedar Grove is not native forest and never pretended to be. John Bidwell planted it in 1888 as an experimental plantation — the second tree farm of its kind in the country — filling a meadow beside Big Chico Creek with species collected from around the world. Fifty years later a Warner Bros. company worked under it, because the canopy closes overhead the way an English wood does and the light comes down in shafts a Technicolor camera could use.

The studio did not trust the trees entirely. Crews built artificial trunks to approximate the natural sycamores and set them among the real ones to thicken the frame. Chico historians who have gone looking for the exact set-ups have mostly come away with a shrug; one of them ended an article by wondering aloud why Errol Flynn and the merry men spent quite so much time in Cedar Grove, which is either a location note or a joke about the town's bars.

Today it is a picnic ground and meadow at 1890 East 8th Street, reservable for weddings, and on a weekday morning there is nobody in it. The trees are a century and a half old now, taller than anything the camera saw.

Stand in the middle of the grove and look up. The shafts of light still land the same way, and that is the one thing here that never needed dressing.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.