ARBOR DA V MANUAL. 
THE MADRONA. 
O the south of San Francisco there is even a greater range of color and 
1 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 every 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. 
Tennyson, Amphion. 
