Roy Martin is a retired University of Washington professor of anesthesiology and bioengineering. He is now pursuing a very different passion, the genus Arbutus, best known locally by A. menziesii, the Pacific Madrone. Eleven species are recognized and in “A Romance with the Exotic Madrona, Alias of the Arbutus,” Martin explores them all, visiting their native ranges in Mexico, western North America, and around the Mediterranean.
This book is very engaging, reading much like a travel journal in places and a history of human culture elsewhere. The author includes a detailed discussion of the common name for our native species, concluding that there are distinction even within our region. In Washington, it is Madrona or Pacific Madrone, while in British Columbia, the name Arbutus is typical.
After exploring the other species, Martin comes home to begin searching for outstanding specimens of A. menziesii. While not abundant, there are several examples of massive trees, hundreds of years old. Martin not only tells the natural history of each tree, as best it is known, but that of the people and locales that surround each.
It is clear that Arbutus menziesii has captured Roy Martin’s heart. “It is not an aggressive tree; it does not, as some trees do, grow rapidly in order to reach the upper stratosphere of the forest and thereby capture most of the available light at the expense of its neighbors. It is, rather, an uncommonly cordial tree, often contorting itself as necessary to find open spaces, through which light falls naturally, as if to accommodate smaller trees it would otherwise effectively starve.”
Excerpted from Brian Thompson’s article in the Spring 2023 issue of the Arboretum Bulletin