One of the strangest, mysterious, and most resilient trees in the world is the Pacific Madrona tree. The madrona is a tree that doesn’t know how to be a tree. It’s an evergreen that has cinnamon-red bark, twisting branches, and beautiful red berry clusters. It produces these berries when no other tree is bearing fruit. It’s one weird, but wondrous tree.

The tree grows in western Washington, Oregon, in the San Juan Islands, and on Vancouver Island. The tree only grows at the most unlikely places for a tree to grow –in rocky, course soil, on slopes and bluffs, on the very edges of a river or shoreline. Angling and twisting strangely off-kilter, the gangly tree assures its long life by reaching for water and sun. Its clever roots penetrate deeply and widely in the soil searching for hard-to-…