Wood IDs #1: 2 species of branches found in my green waste bin - what are they?

I’ve had quite a weekend here in LA with the free wood gathering. It’s laughable to you folks on farms, or out in the deep woods with harvestable lumber all around you, but here, we have to beg for our scraps, or put down hard earned cash at the stores :)

Thursday night after work, I came home to find the green plant-matter bin out by the road, indicating the gardeners had been by (landlady pays for them 2x/mo). Unusually, however, were limbs sticking out of it. I only have a few trees, and they don’t really have anything like dying limbs that I can use. I’ve been interested in collecting usably-sized branches in the many species decorating streets and lawns here for use in my mini lathe, so it was an exciting moment. They don’t appear to have come from my yard, so it’s possible the gardners found them in their truck and threw them in my bin when they finished their work. I’d love help identifying them both.

Here are some shots of the first, twisty one:

The leaves were fuzzy, and weed-like, and I’m guessing this is considered simply a very large weed.

It goes from a tree-like brown bark to a green, plant/weed-like thing in an almost linear progression as the branches split and narrow.

It’s more like a thick weed at this end:

The bulb-like, twisting bottom was obviously underground, with the dirt caked around it, and it appears they wrenched it free, perhaps with a shovel.

There are more pics in the beginning of the Flickr set here

The second species is a simpler, straighter-limbed thing. It had no leaves whatsoever, but tons of twigs in a very busy display. Here are some pics:

Lots of twigs:

The gardeners, not realizing how important these things are, were obviously a bit rough with this limb :)

One last shot of a twig, in case it helps any:

So… any ideas? I wish trees all grew with some kind of unique ID, or a barcode :)

-- Gary, Los Angeles, video game animator