MANZANITA. BEARBERRY.
Arctostaphylos manzanita, Parry. Heath Family.
Shrubs three to twenty-five feet high, with purple-brown bark. Leaves.—Pale. Flowers.—White or pinkish; in crowded clusters. Corolla.—Four or five lines long; campanulate. Stamens.—Ten; filaments dilated and bearded at base; anthers two-celled, opening terminally, each cell furnished with a long downward-pointing horn. Ovary.—Globose; five to ten-celled. Style simple. Fruit.—Six lines in diameter, containing several bony nutlets. Syn.—Arctostaphylos pungens, HBK. Hab.—Throughout the State.
Of all our shrubs, the manzanita is the most beautiful and the best known. Sometimes as early as Christmas it may be found in full bloom, when its dense crown of pale foliage, surmounting the rich purple-brown stems, is thickly sown with the little clusters of fragrant waxen bells. After the blossoms have passed away, the shrubs put forth numerous brilliant scarlet or crimson shoots, which at a little distance look like a strange and entirely new kind of blossoming. The manzanita is closely allied to the madroño, and resembles it in many ways, particularly in the annual peeling of its rich red bark and in the form of its flowers.
The Greek generic name, translated into English, becomes "bearberry." The pretty Spanish name—from manzana, apple, and the diminutive, ita,—was bestowed by the early Spanish-Californians, who recognized the resemblance of the fruit to tiny apples.
We have a dozen or more species of Arctostaphylos, but A. manzanita is the commonest of them all. It varies greatly in size and habit. In localities most favorable it becomes a large, erect shrub, with many clustered trunks, while in the Sierras it finds but a precarious footing among the granite rocks, often covering their surfaces with its small tortuous, stiff branches. The leaves, by a twisting of their stalks, assume a vertical position on the branches, a habit which enables many plants of dry regions to avoid unnecessary evaporation.
[MANZANITA—Arctostaphylos manzanita.]
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The largest manzanita known is upon the estate of Mr. Tiburcio Parrott, in St. Helena, Napa County, California. It is thirty-five feet high, with a spread of branches equal to its height, while its trunk measures eleven and a half feet in circumference at the ground, soon dividing into large branches. It is a veritable patriarch, and has doubtless seen many centuries. According to an interesting account in "Garden and Forest," it once had a narrow escape from the ax of a woodman. A gentleman who was a lover of trees, happening to pass, paid the woodman two dollars to spare its life.
Years ago no traveler from the East felt that he could return home without a manzanita cane, made from as straight a branch as could be secured.
The berries of this shrub are dry and bony and quite unsatisfactory. They are, however, pleasantly acid, and have been put to several uses. It is said that both brandy and vinegar are made from them, and housewives make quite a good jelly from some species. Bears are fond of the berries, and the Indians eat them, both raw and pounded into a flour, from which mush is made. The leaves made into a tincture or infusion are now an officinal drug, valued in catarrh of the throat or stomach.
From Monterey to San Diego is found A. glauca, Lindl., the great-berried manzanita. It closely resembles the above, but its berries are three fourths of an inch in diameter.
Of the same range as the last is A. bicolor, Gray, whose leaves are of a rich, shining green above and white and woolly beneath. Its berries are the size of a pea, yellowish at first, and turning red later.