One Hard Winter
An Amor Fati story from Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum: a 1961 freeze killed a whole box of seedlings but one, and the survivor changed which birds can live here
In 1961 a man in San Francisco put a box of seedlings in the post to Seattle.
His name was Arthur Menzies and he looked after plant accessions at the Strybing Arboretum. The seedlings had been raised in his own garden. Washington Park Arboretum planted them out, grew them on, and after about a year somebody noticed that one of them was not behaving quite like its siblings. Nobody thought much of it at the time. That is the sort of thing you write on a card and forget about.
Then a hard December freeze came through and killed the whole batch.
All of them, except the odd one.
The survivor turned out to be a hybrid that nobody had planned or ordered. Two Chinese species had been growing near each other in that California garden and had crossed without anyone’s permission. It got written up in the spring of 1967, in this garden’s own bulletin. It is a mahonia, Mahonia × media ‘Arthur Menzies’, and you can still buy one at the Arboretum’s periodic plant sales. The one that didn’t match is the only one still here.
There is a phrase I keep coming back to, amor fati, an old Stoic idea usually translated as love of fate. Nobody ordered that hybrid. Two plants crossed by accident in a California garden, and then a freeze did the choosing. The Arboretum took what the winter left it and has been propagating and selling it ever since.
I spent a morning at the Arboretum on a Master Gardener walk and kept running into that sentence in different clothes. It took me a while to notice it was happening. By the end I had stopped thinking of it as a nice story the garden tells about itself and started thinking of it as the operating procedure.
The rule
The newest part of the Arboretum is the Pacific Connections Garden, and it is planted from seed collected in the wild.
They don’t buy stock and they don’t take cuttings from other gardens. Collecting seed in the wild is slow and expensive and involves getting on aeroplanes. The reason is that material from other gardens is genetically narrow. A bed of near relatives looks exactly like a healthy garden right up until the year that kills all of them at once.
So somebody flies to a hillside in Chile and brings back a genetic spread you cannot order from a catalogue.
There is a second reason, and our guide mentioned it almost in passing. A lot of what they collect is disappearing where it comes from, so the Arboretum keeps copies. If the species goes at home, it is still alive here. I have thought about that more than anything else from that morning.
Both halves of the policy say the same thing, which is that a collection of near clones is one hard winter away from nothing.
What sameness costs
Once you have that in your head you start seeing the bill everywhere.
Nearly every paperbark maple in America, Acer griseum, descends from two seedlings. Two. They came over from China in the 1950s by way of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, and everything spread outward from there into thousands of gardens. It is a lovely tree. The bark is cinnamon coloured and peels off in sheets, and you have probably walked past one without noticing. It is also, genetically, a very small family pretending to be a large one, which is presumably why a recent collecting trip went back to China for more seed.
Then there is a maple called Twombly’s Red Sentinel. A red maple, Acer rubrum, narrow, about ten feet, brilliant in autumn. It started life as a witch’s broom, which is a mutation, one branch on one tree that grew wrong. Twisted leaves, odd colour, a dense tangle where a normal shoot should be. You have walked past dozens of those too.
Growers have been harvesting these deformities since the 1940s. They take the mutant branch, graft it onto ordinary rootstock and sell the mistake as a new variety. You cannot raise one from seed, because seed will not carry it. You have to go and physically get that exact branch, which is generally sixty feet up.
So the traditional method is to shoot it down with a shotgun.
Our guide said this completely deadpan, and then said people still do it. With shotguns, with drones, with very long extending poles.
Every Twombly’s Red Sentinel on earth is a clone of that one accident. A worldwide population that is, genetically, a single individual.
At the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair there was a booth giving away monkey puzzle trees, Araucaria araucana, which is native to Chile. Children took them home and planted them in their parents’ gardens. That is why so many monkey puzzles around Seattle and Bellevue are the same size. They are one cohort, planted in one summer, by one generation of kids. It is a lovely piece of civic history and it is also a city wide monoculture with a shared birthday, all ageing out at once. The Arboretum’s own have been struggling and they have lost several in the past few years.
The tree that has never once flowered
The dove tree, Davidia involucrata, comes from China and is endangered there. In 1899 an English nursery sent a young collector called Ernest Wilson to find one. They gave him directions to a single specimen that another botanist had logged a decade earlier. That was the whole job.
He got there in April 1900 and found a stump. The tree had been cut down the year before and its trunk and branches were now the beams and posts of somebody’s house.
He kept looking, found another one in flower a few weeks later, and came home with more than fourteen thousand seeds. The thirteen thousand seedlings raised from that trip are the stock of essentially every cultivated dove tree in the West.
Which brings me to the variegated one.
There is a variegated dove tree at the Botanical Garden, down by the propagation shed, that has never bloomed. Our guide said that variety has never been known to bloom anywhere, in any garden, by anybody. I have not been able to confirm that independently and I am repeating it as she told it.
Every one of them is a cutting off the same plant. It has never flowered, so it has never set seed. It carries on, and it even spreads, but only because we keep taking pieces of it, and nothing new can ever come out of it.
The garden did a version of this to itself at the very beginning. The original Arboretum was laid out like a filing system, all the oaks here, all the maples over there, everything shelved with its own kind. Then they found out what every gardener eventually finds out, which is that things grouped only with their relatives do not thrive, and they had to redistribute the collections across the whole site. In the oak grove they had planted five where two would have done, and a hundred years later those trees are crowding each other out.
They had planted a library, and they ended up replanting it as an ecosystem.
Difference inside a single trunk
Here is the part I did not expect.
The same principle runs inside individual organisms, and it is the reason some of them are older than writing.
It is called sectored architecture. In a Big Berry manzanita, Arctostaphylos glauca, and most famously in the Great Basin bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva, the plumbing is not one shared system. Each section of root feeds one specific branch and one specific patch of canopy, and those connections are private. So when a bristlecone on some awful exposed ridge loses a chunk of root to a flood or a rockfall or a lightning strike, that limb dies and nothing else does. The tree writes off the district and carries on.
Which is how you get a bristlecone pine that is four thousand years old and roughly the height of a room. Plenty has hurt it over the centuries. It could afford to lose the parts that got hurt.
Western red cedar, Thuja plicata, has a version of the same thing. You can take planks off a living one and it survives being harvested from.
It goes further down than that. Hollies, the genus Ilex, carry their spines low, at the height where a deer can reach, and go smooth further up where nothing can browse them. Big leaf maples, Acer macrophyllum, run large leaves at the bottom, spread out to catch what light gets to the understory, and small ones at the top where the sun and the wind are punishing. One tree behaving like two different trees, because the threat is different at each end.
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Even the dead leaves are doing something. Oaks and hornbeams hold their brown leaves right through December, which looks like a failure to let go and is actually a shield over next spring’s buds.
The part where I stop agreeing
This is where a piece like this usually turns into a greeting card, so let me put the awkward bit in.
Our guide said something that has stuck with me. The Arboretum’s job is to bring things in from places that resemble here, and also to make absolutely sure that nothing it brings in becomes invasive. Keeping things out, she said, is as much of a job as bringing things in.
English ivy. Himalayan blackberry. Difference is not automatically a virtue.
There is a number that makes the point harder. Doug Tallamy measures trees by what they actually feed. A native oak (Washington has exactly one native species, the Garry oak, Quercus garryana) supports more than nine hundred species of moths and butterflies, and no other genus comes close. A ginkgo, Ginkgo biloba, supports about five.
Both of those are trees. Both look, to an untrained eye, equally like they belong. What separates them has nothing to do with looks or effort. Our insects spent millions of years evolving alongside our oaks and never once met a ginkgo.
So the question worth asking about anything different is whether its difference makes room for anything else.
The hummingbird
Back to the seedling that survived the freeze.
That accidental hybrid flowers in January and February, in the dead middle of a Seattle winter, when almost nothing else will. Put that together with the other winter blooming exotics in the city’s gardens and a few hundred thousand sugar feeders, and you have changed what is possible for a bird.
Anna’s hummingbird now spends the winter here. It used to be a southern California species. Since the 1960s it has pushed steadily north and it no longer bothers to leave. It will take a feeder, a garden exotic, whatever is going.
Our rufous hummingbird, the rust orange one, still does it the old way. It leaves, it comes back, and it wants particular things at particular times.
It would be very easy to finish that as a fable. Flexible one wins, rigid one loses, be more like Anna’s. Our guide said something close to it, and I went away and checked, and the evidence does not really support it. In a straight confrontation the rufous usually dominates Anna’s. The decline in rufous numbers is put down mainly to climate change rather than to competition. Anna’s did not out fight anybody. It walked through a door that a freak hybrid opened in 1961 and a million bird feeders have been holding open ever since.
The true version is better than the fable anyway.
If flexibility always won you would end up with a world of pigeons and raccoons and Anna’s hummingbirds, which is a monoculture of generalists, which is sameness arriving by a different road. The rufous is specialised, and specialisation is what diversity actually looks like when you get close enough to see it. Inflexibility has little to do with it.
Flexibility helps an individual survive, while difference is how the whole system gets through, and a garden is one of the few places where you can stand and watch both at once.
Just like people
Halfway through the morning our guide stopped at a shrub covered in small dark berries and told us to taste one before looking at the tag.
The tag said Tasmannia lanceolata. Mountain pepper, southeast Australia. The black berries do very little. The red ones are not hot exactly. They are numbing. Sweet and fruity at the front, and then the lights go out.
I was fasting that day, so I put mine in my pocket for later, which everyone found funnier than I did.
And standing there holding a pepper berry from Tasmania that was growing perfectly happily in Seattle, I said out loud that this is not what we mean when we talk about local food, but that it does show there are things from other countries that could do very well here, if we invest the time.
And then I said, just like people.
Somebody in the group said yes. Then said it again.
I am an immigrant standing in an institution whose whole function is to take living things from somewhere else, give them ground and years and attention, and find out which ones make it. I did not go looking for that. It was printed on a small metal tag, in Australian.
What holds
At the end of the walk there is something hanging over the trail that stops you.
It is called UNION, by the Seattle artist John Grade. Six thousand individually cast resin pieces, framed in charred wood, hung in two nets that span more than a hundred feet between eight living western red cedars. The patterns in the resin are taken from cedar seen at a microscopic scale, the cell structure of the trees it is hanging from. The cupped forms catch rainwater and then let it go. He took the shape from a cedar that fell in Discovery Park, one whose trunk had split into two.
Our guide pointed out the thing I would have walked straight past, which is the counterweights. It hangs on pulleys. It has to, because the trees it is strung between are alive and they move. Pull it tight and the first storm tears it apart.
Six thousand pieces, no two of them doing quite the same job, held together loosely enough to sway.
She said her favourite thing about it is coming across it having forgotten it was there.
The Arboretum Foundation holds plant sales through the year at the Graham Visitors Center. The mahonia that came through the 1961 freeze is sold under the name ‘Arthur Menzies’. Check arboretumfoundation.org for the next date.
Listen to this as an episode of The Mosaic Mind wherever you get your podcasts.
I am also putting together a full written record of the morning, with every plant identified and every claim sourced line by line, including a list of what I could not verify. I am checking it with the people who were standing there before it goes anywhere, and I will link it here when that is done.
How this was made: The content here is ours: the people, the conversations, the recording and the photos. AI helped me with the process of writing it up and getting it out to you, the way you’d type a flyer in Word and print a stack of copies instead of handwriting every single one.
Sources
- Mahonia ‘Arthur Menzies’, origin and the 1961 seedlings: Arboretum Foundation, “Arboretum Scene: Mahonia ‘Arthur Menzies’”
- Doug Tallamy on oaks and Lepidoptera: “Oaks: the most powerful plant of all,” A Way To Garden
- Anna’s hummingbird range expansion: BirdWatching, “Anna’s Hummingbird: Our Winter Hummingbird”
- E. H. Wilson and Davidia involucrata: Arnold Arboretum, “E. H. Wilson’s search for Davidia involucrata”
- UNION: University of Washington Botanic Gardens, “Art at the Arboretum: John Grade,” and John Grade Studio
- Seattle Botanic Gardens: Arboretum Foundation, “Arboretum Foundation and UW Botanic Gardens Unite After Decades of Partnership,” January 2026
- Plant sales: Arboretum Foundation events listing
