July 2024
Pacific Northwest
Midsummer starts the shedding season for madronas. These broadleaf trees are evergreens but like all trees must replace foliage regularly, and this is their time in the PNW. Conifers, which is usually what we think of as evergreen trees (like firs, pines and spruces) drop their “leaves” too but they do it in fall, littering the ground with millions of brown needles. Madronas have another difference: they also shed their bark. High summer is peak season for leaf and bark turnover.
There’s a patch of madronas I pass every day on my walk between the road and a cliff down to the water. Madronas (Arbutus menziesii) rely on an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi, which may be part of the reason they grow so well in patches like this, though they’re also competitively advantaged on such open, dry rocky sites (a Sitka spruce with them has always been quite marginal). Madronas are almost impossible to transplant but when they choose their own home they are amazingly vigorous and resilient, able to send roots into solid rock and resprout after fire or other extreme conditions that kill off big branches. Our deep freeze last winter, when temps dropped 30° in a few hours into single digits, knocked back a lot of foliage but the trees have rebounded.
Most typically, this is what you see when summer rolls around. Fresh soft golden new foliage emerges, especially on outer branches.
Over the next month or two madronas will be peeling bark and finishing leaf drop. Then the rest of our trees will move into their own peak seasonal foliage drop.
For site context:
Here’s the patch of madronas by the roadside of a rocky ridge. It’s the same spot where all those soapberry bushes produced that plentiful crop of berries that the waxwings foraged for a few weeks earlier this summer. To the left of these trees and shrubs there’s a steep cliff dropping straight down to the bay.
The shrubs start on the far right of the picture below before the road goes uphill. No madronas or soapberries in the sandy ground along the flat.
Partly sunny, with high overcast in the Pacific Northwest islands. Dry. Temps in mid to high 60s. Light westerly breeze.
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