Washington's Biggest Madronas
What is it about champion trees that moves us?
The setting is Port Angeles. It is the Fourth of July. All the things those two facts require—a lawn mower derby, the arcade, spilled ice cream, a parade, tents scattered across sun-drenched docks and everybody in the city out there, taking it in, full of anticipation for what else the evening holds—means that we’re in a certain full-color mood as we drive back across town to put the kids to bed.
For once, trees are the last thing on my mind. Eighth Street is nearly carless and unremarkable enough with its churches and houses and low-slung shops that my mind is wandering. Then a tree makes me sit up and spin around.
Rather, it is the skeleton of a tree. Its bole is massive, there in a lawn next to the sidewalk, and its many massive arms reach like sauropod femurs to where they have been cut off twenty feet high. The thing exudes density, bulk, taut skin, muscle.
As we roll past I’m thinking, Could it be a madrona?
Could it be, I think with a flash, the madrona?
It’s buried in a corner of my head. The largest madrona in Washington is here in Port Angeles. Somewhere. Yes, I remember, it is supposed to be on a normal city block, an ancient tree spared every saw as the city grew. In the 1990s a building was built within its dripline and a sidewalk paved within two feet of its trunk. A local arborist adopted it. He attempted to raise money to purchase the lot and turn it into a park but contributions were not sufficient. The tree was measured at 85 feet tall and 21-plus feet in circumference, with an impressive 95-foot average crown spread, enough to crown it the state champion. In the late 90s, after a long period of limbo, a local woman named Virginia Serr, not knowing of the arborist’s efforts, bought the lot and dedicated it to the memory of her husband, a dentist who admired the madrona daily on his commute. When she tried to donate it to the city as a park, the city refused. So she made her own park.
The tree’s health was becoming a concern by then. The arborist’s account of how he and Serr banded together to do everything they could for the tree is well worth a read. But it’s all I had read about the tree, and it says nothing of the tree’s ultimate fate.
I have a thing for madronas. Of all the champion trees in Washington, many of which are also on the Olympic Peninsula, this is the one I have wanted to see the most. But the trip was built around family. I had not connected the dots that seeing the champion madrona would be a possibility.
After the kids are tucked away I confirm what I know to be true but seems too coincidental to believe: in a far reach of a massive state, I have crossed paths with the one tree I wanted one day to see. That’s the thing about spy stories, isn’t it, that makes them hard to read as anything but fiction: clues materialize from nowhere, just when they’re needed. It’s hokey. But maybe that’s how it really happens. Spies are, by definition, primed to recognize important things that everyone else walks past. Spies make themselves into fertile ground, receptive and alert — even, apparently, post-parade.
The champion madrona stands at 8th and Cherry in Port Angeles. The Google Maps digital street view shows the tree still standing, though its crown is notably thin. In 2020, a few months after Virginia Serr died at age 93, the tree died too. A few news articles (such as this one) told brief versions of its story.
A madrona on the Key Peninsula launched my own journey into champion trees. To get to it, you must trek at low tide around a forested point and climb into the woods at just the right place. When I first stumbled on it, emerging through bulwarks of huckleberry bushes to find this ludicrously large madrona holding court in its clearing, I was shocked. The tree is surrounded by firs and cedars, both capable of growing much taller than any madrona, yet the madrona’s crown is way up there rubbing shoulders with the conifers, keeping space for itself, its thick twisting limbs the structural timbers of the point’s forest. Photos don’t do it justice. And it cannot be seen from the beach.
That tree more than any other inspired me to create a champion tree registry for the Key Peninsula. Doing a localized registry on a peninsula that is mostly privately owned, I realized, would require the kind of ferreting that I love, teasing out over time community linkages based on lore and hearsay and time tromping around on foot. It’ll be a lifelong quest, I’m guessing, to find the biggest individual of each tree species on our peninsula. Frankly, it’ll never be complete. There are too many trees hiding in pockets here.
But that’s just the point. In a landscape that has been logged one, two, even three times over, with ownership of parcels constantly fractalizing, infinite pockets have developed. I am often asked, There’s no old-growth left here, right? It was all logged? And I say, well, in fact, there are a few old-growth trees hidden here. They are very rare. Old-growth forest as an ecosystem is gone, yet in a handful of places the second-growth has been untouched for so long, for well over a century, that we can begin again to envision what old-growth forest might look like here.
Why focus attention on these lurking outlier giants, the champion trees, when the majority of our fragmented landscape has youngish forest that is monoculture-ish, full of trees that are prone to disease and drought and suffocation by invasive species? There is imminently so much work that can and should be done to nurse our ecosystems toward diversity and health. Champion trees are not representative of the forest issues facing us.
It is easy to say we are drawn to champion trees by what I’ll call the World’s Largest Egg Roadside Attraction Theory of Champion Trees, i.e. their plain old magnitude. And yes, later in our trip around the Olympic Peninsula we visit the Quinault Spruce, the world’s largest Sitka spruce, and being a naturalist-spy I spend a lot of our time there watching groups of people emerge from the trail and goggle at the tree and go climb its roots and call out to their family members the tree’s vital stats from an old metal sign. The awe is universal. The tree is staggering.
Yet as I watch, thinking of all the clues I try to cultivate myself to find in my home terrain, puzzle pieces that are as psychological as they are ecological, I’m thinking there is more to the general awe in the presence of this spruce than can be accounted for by any single tree, no matter how massive. The tree is a proxy for a landscape. It exudes time as well as matter. Its well-known ability to put us in our places as short-lived and brutish creatures is paired with a less-celebrated ability to spark in us a vision of a time, not so long ago, when such trees were an anchoring presence in every forest in Cascadia. The vision is spatial in nature. In it, young things freely mix with old things, creating a continuous and, we sense, resounding landscape and pattern of life that flows on riverlike, braids intermingling. Such a vision is made all the more compelling by our inability, raised as we are on a spiraling series of land grabs and clearcuts, to fully visualize it.
Why hunt for the biggest trees that remain? The answer that seems most true to me now is that they give us a sense of what’s possible. This is from my first post in Infinite Peninsula: “There. That’s what this naturalist-spy is after: imaginative possibility.”
When I bought a laser hypsometer and forester’s tape to launch the Key Peninsula champion tree registry, the madrona on the point was the first tree I measured. Fighting the underbrush in a wide circle around it to find angles from which to measure its height and crown spread added another layer of appreciation for the tree’s situation in its landscape. It is a thing that cannot be transplanted.
And sure enough, while the Key Peninsula madrona’s girth is nowhere near that of the Port Angeles madrona, its 110+’ height matches and possibly surpasses that of any other madrona in Washington.
Late in the Port Angeles evening, my wife and I slip off to sit on the sidewalk next to the saurian mass of dead wood that is what is left of the Port Angeles madrona. I have realized that no arborist removes a dead tree in this way, leaving the limbs to stand twenty feet tall, unless they want it to be a monument.
And it is. There is no sign to tell the passerby this tree’s story, yet the tree’s amputated body still exudes a sense of what is possible. Sitting there sketching it in pink-orange light, I do not feel sadness or decay so much as a deep personal echo of the mood of collective anticipation that flooded the Fourth of July streets. It occurs to me as I hash in the dark patches of decaying bark that the mood has to do with the ideals we carry despite all depredations.
Endnotes:
Madrona is in the Ericaceae family, which also includes rhododendrons, manzanita, salal, huckleberry and blueberry, wintergreens, and several odd nonphotosynthetic plants such as Indian pipe and gnome plant. You can expect a dive into this fascinating family soon.
Washington doesn’t go in for too many roadside attractions, but the World’s Largest Egg is one of them.
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What a bittersweet and wonderful story. Thanks!
This is making me take a new interest in the very tall lanky madronas we have on our wooded place. I've always loved the spaces they inhabit and mourned that the little ones that come up here and there show symptoms of disease.