DryStoneGarden

Manzanita

…post a manzanita photo. I’m still in the mountains, so I don’t know what’s going on down in my garden, but whatever is happening, I’m sure that the trunk of this manzanita is appropriate. Manzanita trunks are great for winter interest, and I’ve decided they’re great for remote-blogging interest, too. This is one of my favorite individual specimens, a manzanita at Tilden. Across the path from it is another great one with peeling bark. Four of them form an arbor. The ones on the right are Arctostaphylos montana-regis and the one on the left is Arctostaphylos pallida, the arcto native to the Oakland-Berkeley hills. So nice.

Manzanita bark

Manzanitas at Tilden

“The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them.” Jack Gilbert

The trunk of an Arctostaphylos pallida, Alameda manzanita, endemic to the Bay Area and endangered, in Huckleberry Preserve in the Oakland hills. A few of the manzanitas are blooming, but they are not at peak yet. I love the trunks of these manzanitas, especially how the dark red bark wraps around the dead gray wood. There are some great specimens where most of the trunk is dead and a single line of red bark tracks sinuously up the wood like a drip of living paint. I doubt that could develop in any garden that we maintain, which is kind of a shame. The Japanese try to emphasize this element in their gardens, a woman reminded me recently when she stopped me from pruning a dead branch out of her picturesque little Japanese maple.

ryan 12/30