On a single evening just before the first rains of autumn, a cyclonic swarming of termites from thousands of colonies takes to the air. While legions of losers uber across town into eternity, a few successful pairings settle down to ultimately eat your house. Butterflies drawn by invisible cues for thousands of miles, across lakes, mountains and deserts never before seen, arrive together en masse to a few hundred fir trees in Central Mexico. A million Sandhill Cranes constringe along a small length of the Platte River near Kearney, Nebraska over ten days in late March. And murmurations of starlings appear at dusk in choreographed, shape-shifting, fluid clouds above the Edmonds Ferry Terminal in late summer. Just a fraction of the highly predictable, byzantine synchronicities of the natural world that shifts me to that state of non-self.
Sandhill Crane Migration, Kearney, Nebraska, March 16th, 2025
Monarchs on Abies religiosa awakening to the first rays of sun in Michoacán, western Mexico, February, 2022
These orchestrations are hardly confined to the poster children of the peregrinate. There are the horned and hoofed, spined or -like trumpeting sycophants- spineless, winged or apterous. All going somewhere in particular or nowhere at all, all at once and always in a hurry. This brings me, admittedly in incongruous fashion, to our most iconic native tree species that guards the bluff edges at Windcliff.
A bird’s eye view of the bluff edge at Windcliff, with Arbutus meniziesii holding it all together, literally and figuratively. Photo Credit; Claire Takacs.
As the Baobab to Madagasgar or the Coconut to tropical islands, there is no tree that more visually brandishes itself to the Pacific Northwest than our beloved Madrona. It was ḰEḰEYIȽĆ to the Saanich People of southern Vancouver Island, a sacred tree to which their canoes were tethered during the great flood. In 1769, the Spanish missionary Juan Crespi was sufficiently schooled in botany to note its resemblance to the Mediterranean Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo) and dubbed it Madroño. George Vancouver’s voyage into the Straits of San Juan de Fuca in 1792 carried aboard English botanist Archibald Menzies who returned with a tree that would ultimately be named Arbutus menziesii in his honor.
Sixty four years later, in 1857, cartographer and U.S. Lieutenant George Davidson mistook the identity of the same tree while referencing a peninsula in the Puget Sound as Magnolia Bluff, lying directly southeast of our garden. To this day, this misnomer sallies forth in the significantly-sized Seattle neighborhood of Magnolia.
Davidson was an undeniably brilliant surveyor yet out of his depth botanically while out of his mind in love with a young Ms. Elinor Fauntleroy. In an attempt to curry favor with his future father-in-law, he named all things observable after someone in their family, including Fauntleroy Cove, as well as, in the Olympic Range, Mt. Elinor (his betrothed), Mt. Constance (his future sister-in-law), Mt. Rose (another sister-in-law) and The Brothers (two additional sisters of the betrothed who were, at the time, transitioning)(that is not true)(to the best of my knowledge). So, in actuality, our dendrologicaly-annointed Seattle neighborhood could have easily enough honored in perpetuity a pervy Fauntleroy uncle.
Our beloved Madronas. They change by the hour and by the day and through the seasons. In every interaction, you are introduced to a new tree, never before seen or even remotely imagined, like the recent attempts at rewriting 275 years of American democracy. Though most scintillating during the sunrise and sunset hours, through a window it can by itself warm the room of a chilled and swampy December day.
Dawn
Dusk
April (photo credit; Flower Essence Services)
The ureolate or urn-shaped flowers are a signature floral type of the Ericaceae, an enormous assemblage of horticulturally significant plants including Pieris, Rhododendron, heaths and heathers and the very closely related manzanitas in the genus Arctostaphylos. Chief pollinators include hummingbirds, native bees and honey bees and the spring azure butterfly. The nectar and pollen rich flowers are designed perfectly for a strategy known as ‘buzz pollination’, in which bumblebees in particular dislodge pollen through vibration of their wings.
October
On a good year, the Pacific Madrone can be weighted with succulent, red, rough-textured berries and swarmed by frenzied flocks of frugivorous and omnivorous birds alike. We have been entranced while watching wind-hovering seagulls kite in gale force winds above the bluff while gluttonously plucking fruit on the wing.
Arbutus menziesii preparing to shed its rusty-colored shards of aging skin.
As stately, as imposing and as sacred as they might be, Madronas are ALWAYS losing themselves, whether it be branches, leaves, flowers or fruit. But in that vein, on one day each year, when the conditions are just right, we witness something remarkable. It is something one hears before seeing, a rattly gurgle that I mistaken repeatedly as a gushing broken irrigation line. The sound draws my eyes to its source which seems to build to a crescendo in only a matter of seconds.
And then it goes sort of like this:
The night before I was to graduate from Michigan State University in 1976, I stayed up all night with a devilishly handsome and mischievous sprite of a man named Baron Munchausen. Despite the ridiculously high odds that this is a lie, indeed that very thing for which his namesake was discreditably known, it is in all aspects a true story. Just before dawn we had somehow arrived to the Woldumar Wetlands and hiked along a trail to the edge of an expansive cattail marsh. In late May, it was filled with only the remnants of last year’s growth. The precise moment the surrounding landscape was flooded by the first ray of sun on that morning of my graduation, an unheard snap or bark or splash ignited a concatenation of thousands of roosting red-winged blackbirds that lifted in unison into an opulent gilded light.
Like a pre-thunk flight of birds or butterflies or deliberated cyclones of termites, our Madrone lets loose its skin in a whoosh and whirl to the air, like a direct hit to a piñata by a school house bully. And why I find this so remarkable is probably the same reason so many find me unremarkable. My tree has scattered its skin to the entirety of the garden and beyond, carrying with it in one magnificent holy flight not only its own substance, but those countless things upon which they grow, an inoculation, a migration of my beloved tree and all that belongs on her.
DJH 9/26/25
Windcliff Plants (updated inventory here) is available to visitors by appointment Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (which can easily be scheduled by emailing windcliff2@centurytel.net ). If you are visiting for a specific plant, please ask regarding its current availability prior to your visit. Additionally, a selection of our plants are for sale exclusively at Heronswood, Ravenna Gardens of University Village in Seattle, Crazy Hill Gardens and Botanicals in Belfair and Bay Hay and Feed on Bainbridge Island.
The garden has been enlivened by cooler temperatures, shortening days and a wee bit of precipitation . We feel it is worthy of a wander and wonder, and we look forward to seeing you here.
A lovely and funny essay, full of descriptions of astonishing happenings. I did not know about exploding Madronas. I do remember that on my first trip to the Northwest it was the plant I wanted to take back to my garden in North Carolina. Thank you, Dan, for this!
Thank you once again for the plant info and ‘other’ commentary. If only we could shed the orange layer in DC as the Madrone sheds for itself that which no longer is useful to it. I wish your column was weekly. Always an enjoyable and informative read with a laugh included. We need both.
Remarkable.
Thank you for this post. A love poem to the Madrone.