ARBOR DA Y ^fANUAL. 



THE MADRONA. 



TO the south of San Francisco there is even a greater range of color and 

 diversity of tree growth. The San Mateo hills are rich with evergreens; 

 the country sweeping up from the pebbly beach at Pescadero is made up of 

 sunny ridges, and rifted with narrow and close-grown valleys, where thread- 

 like brooks murmur their way through tunnels of foliage to the sea, while the 

 mountains of Santa Cruz furnish another rendezvous for the mammoth red- 

 wood, the chestnut, and the oak. But distinguished from all the rest of these 

 Southern nabobs, curious in shape and almost humanly beautiful, stands the 

 giant Madrona, or arbutus tree. The genus really belongs to the old world. 

 Asia has its species, and Mexico claims one or two representatives, but the 

 pride of the family and delight of arboriculturists is the strong, healthy, and 

 handsome child of the west coast. It is often eighty to one hundred feet high, 

 three feet in diameter, and a famous specimen in Marin county has a measured 

 girt of twenty-three feet at the branching point of the tremendous stem, with 

 many of the branches three feet through. The foliage is light and airy, the 

 leaves oblong, pale beneath, bright green above. The bloom is in dense 

 racemes of cream-white flowers ; the fruit, a dry orange-colored berry, rough 

 and uninteresting. But the charm of the Madrona, outside of its general 

 appearance, is in its bark, no, it is not a bark, it is a skin, delicate in texture, 

 smooth, and as soft to the touch as the shoulders of an infant, In the strong 

 sunlight of the summer these trees glisten with the rich color of polished cin- 

 namon, and in the moist shadow of the springtime they are velvety in com- 

 bination colors of old-gold and sage-green. There is a human pose to the 

 trunk. Seen through the tangle of the thicket, it looks like the brown lithe 

 body of an Indian, and in the moonlight the graceful upsweep of its branches 

 is like the careless lifting of a dusky maiden's arms. Every feature of the 

 Madrona is feminine. They grow in groves or neighborhoods, and seldom 

 stand in isolation, courtesy to the winds, mock at the dignified evergreens 

 and oaks, and with ever)' favorable breeze and opportunity flirt desperately 

 with the mountain lilacs that toss high their purple plumes on the headwaters 

 of Los Gatos creek. 



Harper's Magazine, October, 1889. FRED. M. SOMERS. 



The birch tree swang her fragrant hair, 



The bramble cast her berry. 

 The gin within the juniper 



Began to make him merry, 

 The poplars, in long order due, 



With cypress promenaded, 

 The shock-head willows two and two 



By rivers gallopaded. 



TEXXYSOX, Amphion. 



