Mahonia x media “Arthur Menzies"

 

from my garden

In mid-January this year (2026), my Mahonia x media “Arthur Menzies" bloomed. It is a genus of spiny or soft-leaved evergreen shrubs in the family Berberidaceae, native to North America, Central America, and Asia. The one in my garden is a tough hybrid and very prickley. I tell visitors to my garden that it is the "POW Mahonia."

This evergreen is named for Arthur Menzies, a former supervisor of plant accessions at San Francisco’s Strybing Arboretum, who in 1961 sent seedlings raised from the Mahonia lomarifolia plants in his garden to the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle, Washington.

After growing these seedlings for a year, the Arboretum staff noticed that one of them was not quite the same. It had foliage more reminiscent of leatherleaf mahonia (M. bealei), a Chinese species like M. lomarifolia, but a much more cold-hardy one. The Arboretum staff suspected they had a hybrid on their hands, and their suspicions were strengthened a few years later when cold December temperatures turned all the sister seedlings into mush, but left the mystery plant relatively unharmed.

A large evergreen shrub, this Mahonia grows up to 10 feet tall and 5 feet wide, and produces big, bold, compound leaves composed of numerous barbed deep-blue-green holly-like leaflets. Spectacular sprays of fragrant, lemon-yellow flowers appear atop the plant in midwinter and are magnets for hummingbirds. The flowers develop into sumptuous clusters of grape-like waxy blue-purple berries by summertime. Distinguished from its seed parent (M. lomarifolia) by its greater cold-hardiness and from its putative pollen parent (M. bealei) by its significantly greater vigor in the Pacific Northwest and earlier bloom time, ‘Arthur Menzies’ also stands out from other M. × media cultivars because of its more dramatic foliage, vigorous growth, and very frost-resistant flowers. The plant is best grown in evenly moist soil and partial shade, with protection from winter winds. 

Its creator, Arthur Menzies, was tough and prickley too, until he was not. He had survived when many of his fellow POWs of Japan "turned into mush." In the spring of 1942, long before he was a noted American horticulturist, Menzies, 26, was a soldier with U.S. Army’s 60th Coast Artillery stationed on Corregidor, a fortress island in the bay of Manila in the Philippines. 

Technical Sergeant Arthur L. Menzies (60th CA, Battery K [Kingston, Anti-Aircraft]) (Serial #19048713) helped man the big guns on Corregidor Island against the invading Japanese. He survived the seige which included a relentless month-long, night and day bombing by the Japanese. The defenders were forced to surrender on May 6, 1942 which Japanese tanks breached the shore.

Barely a month earlier, on April 9, the Bataan Peninsula was surrendered. It was three miles from Corregidor. There the survivors were forced on the infamous Bataan Death March--a 100 mile trek up the east side of the Peninsula that included 28 miles in packed, sweltering train box cars -- men died standing -- to a make-shift POW camp called, O'Donnell.

Menzies did not participate in the Bataan Death March. He did suffer the "March of Shame," which many survivors remember as the Bataan Death March. Here, the POWs from Corregidor were taken on barges to the shallow waters off the Manila harbor to wade ashore and then march down the city's main thoroughfare through humiliations from Japanese troops to an ancient prison before being taken to the Cabanatuan POW camp on Luzon.

In 1944, he was taken to Japan for slave labor aboard the hellship Nissyo Maru. He mined coal for Nippon Steel's Futase Mining Co. at Fukuoka #7-B Futase POW Camp. There he was subjected to arbitrary beatings, starvation, and overwork.

Returning to San Francisco after the war, he became a noted horticulturist working  as assistant curator at Strybing Arboretum. He was considered a leading authority on California wildflowers and known for creating the evergreen shrub Mahonia × media ‘Arthur Menzies’. Some research suggests that he was a distant relation the famous Scottish surgeon, botanist, and plant explore, Archibald Menzies (1754–1842).

On March 16, 1973, suffering from severe PTSD and vivid flashbacks, Menzies (57) shot himself at home. It is possible that he had again mistook his grown daughters for Japanese prison guards who he had vowed to kill. And it is likely in that his 6-year old grandson was in the house. After his death, the Arthur L. Menzies Garden of California Native Plants, San Francisco’s premier native plant garden, was created in the San Francisco Botanical Garden in his honor. [Pictures]

The grandson, Grant Newsom grew up to become governor of California (2019-2027).