Category — Shrubs

Manzanita may be common; it may be shrubby; it may even be a fire hazard. But it’s beautifully useful all year long, and throughout its hardy, persistent life. I’ve written here about other, high-mountain manzanitas; everything I wrote there about uses of the leaves and berries applies to our local foothills white-leaf or ghost manzanita, perhaps even more, since our manzanita is a bigger shrub. (While you’re looking, don’t forget to check out Steve’s useful comment on cultivating manzanitas below the “berries” link).
Since it’s native to our clay-and-granite, no-summer-water climate, it’s obvious that manzanita is one tough customer. They’re called “ghost manzanitas” because of one of three water-saving tactics of the foliage: the tough, leathery leaves keep evaporation to a minimum, and their vertical posture, with the thin edge toward the sun, reduces it even more. The light-grey-green color reflects sunlight that would steal moisture by transpiration. (Other manzanitas have brilliant green leaves.) Ghost manzanita leaves caught in the headlights, or by a full moon, shine like silvery phosphorescence.

My first introduction to manzanita was as the firewood that burns even when it’s wet. Since I’d ignorantly been trying to burn wet punky pine and other non-starters to keep warm, this was a revelation. Manzanita not only burns wet, it burns so hot it can warp your stove and make the wall behind it smolder. In a campfire, violet and electric blue streak up in the flames along with the more ordinary yellows and oranges.

Manzanita is colorful even when you don’t burn it. Some get big enough to look very like their sisters, the madrones.The bark is a smooth deep mahogany purple-red, and plum-violet and rosy-rust streaks can be found inside most splits of firewood. (I knew a man who carved them into beautiful spoons.) It’s not always easy to find manzanita big enough to split; it’s a shrubby tree, whose trunks often split up and get no bigger around than my arm at the very very bottom.

This photo also shows another characteristic of manzanitas: living and dead wood cohabit. Manzanitas are what I call death-and-resurrection trees. You can find dead and live wood on the same branch, and you can find many dead branches on a healthy living manzanita. Live branches and saplings are tough, long,  and flexible; I used them to build a wickiup when I first came here, and it seems likely to me that the Maidu might have used them for their own dome-like structures, built partly underground for insulation.

Our large masses of manzanitas  were a major food crop for the local Indians, and they must have been an important one, since the tasty acidic dry berries ripen starting in late spring and stay on the bushes well into the beginning of winter. My friend who’s learning Maidu says that she thinks the name for manzanita is “epuh”; the Maidu word for apple is “eppoli”, and this is a diminuitive. (She’s not absolutely sure about this; I’ll confirm it in a comment on this post when I check with her teacher in a few weeks.) It’s the same in Spanish; “manzanita” means “little apple”. All you have to do is take a look at the fruit to know why.

Manzanita berries are still a major food crop for bears and coyotes, who exhibit the evidence in their scat. If you want to experiment with manzanita berries, and don’t have acres of manzanitas out your back door, Steve (his comment is on the bottom of the page this link takes you to) says that watering them will give you bigger crops of berries.

Since we have huge tangled colonies of manzanita here, it’s hard work to clear out the dead parts; manzanita branches start within a few inches of the ground. You have to crawl on your belly with branches snaring your hair, clothes, and tender body parts to get through manzanita settlements, and sometimes it’s impenetrable no matter which way you turn through the maze.

Eventually, the whole thing dies, and you get brushpiles like this, which are a considerable fire hazard. I once made a privacy fence by crudely interweaving these dead branches; it was a great rustic climbing fence for vines, and easy to take down when it was time to move. Dead manzanita branches are also prime kindling, but since we have so much of manzanita everywhere, they are often bulldozed up and disposed of in burn piles.

While it’s certainly faster, easier, and cheaper to do a wholesale clearing on large acreage, you don’t have to raze manzanita to make it safer for fires. Some prefer to clear by hand, leaving selected trees which are limbed up, so they make sculptural shapes which don’t allow potential fires to jump from crown to blazing crown. It also allows the trees full scope to shape themselves as  specimen plants, unhindered by close-growing others.

It was spring when  I was first introduced to manzanita, the time when the pale-pink flowers dangle from the jade-green leaves like  earrings. Manzanita flowers are our first sign of spring - they bloom in February through April, depending on the year and location - and scent the air with a high, light sweetness on sunny days. Hummingbirds and bees buzz out of the woodwork to sip the blooms, and it isn’t just the birds and the bees doing it. I knew an herbalist, when I first came up here, who showed me how to extract a single drop of nectar from the newly-opened flowers. “Put it in a little vial, and share it with someone you love,” he said. The sweet nectar has an astringent aftertaste, not only a reflection of the tannic acid in the leaves, but possibly a commentary on other kinds of sweetness,  on the need for contrasts.

As a flower essence (a homeopathic remedy that addresses emotional conditions, different from an essential oil), manzanita encourages groundedness and an appreciation of the delights of being in a body. Maybe that herbalist was on to something.

Like the high-mountain manzanitas, ghost manzanita is related to heather, uva-ursi, wintergreen, and madrone, all of which share the same kind of flower. It’s typically called urn-shaped, although I’d say that’s for lack of any better description. Whatever the best name for the shape, it’s designed to keep the sexual parts of the flower protected from wind and weather, and give insects protection while they pollinate.

Manzanita provides food, medicine, construction material, fine carving material, firewood, beauty, and an impetus for love. One of our most generous and versatile plants,  it holds up our hard clay foothills from erosion and gives us one of our first hopes of spring.

I think we’ve gotten so used to forysthia we often forget to look at it. Some people are so bored by it, they don’t want to look at it.

But forsythia is worth looking at closely, for its ancient history and medicinal uses, and for its own sake in the present, paying special attention to how the light radiates through its massed petals. Forsythia makes a cheering blaze against a stormy sky, and a radiant force in sunlight.

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Forsythia, named for English plantsman William Forsyth, must have had many names before we got to it: it’s a longstanding staple of the Chinese materia medica (list of medicinal remedies). While we plant forsythia for the flowers, forsythia was probably originally cultivated as a medicinal plant (or maybe for both reasons; before the concept of ornamental gardens, people didn’t feel obliged to make that distinction). The medicinal part of forsythia is its inconspicuous fruit. It’s a traditional Chinese remedy for all kinds of overheating: toxins, fever, swollen lymph glands, flus, and other inflamations. It’s also used to relieve carbuncles (staph abscesses that go deeper and get larger than boils) .

If you want to experiment with forsythia fruit tea, pick the fruit while it’s green.  But that’s just beginning of the process. Chinese herbology, unlike European herbology, wasn’t interrupted by a few hundred years of practitioners being burned, tortured, and otherwise persuaded not to pursue their art. So Chinese herbology has had the time to develop highly complex ways of extracting active herbal ingredients. Here’s what one Chinese materia medica recommends for processing gardenia fruit: “The green fruit gathered in the period of White Dew (fifteenth solar term) is better than the yellow fruit picked in the period of Cold Dew (seventeenth solar term). The fruit is steamed, dried in the sun, and its seeds separated from the flesh.” (TCM Basics)
Combined with other herbs, forsythia fruit is part of formulas for a number of what the Chinese call heat-related conditions (interesting in a plant that’s famous for blooming while it’s still cold). Forsythia is contraindicated where there is deficient yin, or spleen disorders. Mixed with honeysuckle flowers and ground into a powder (yep, plain old ubiquitous Hall’s honeysuckle), forsythia fruit can be used for what western medicine calls upper respiratory tract infections, acute bronchitis, acute endometriosis, measles, acute tonsilities, encephalitis B, meningitis, and parotitis - as well as the ever-present flu.
The variety of forsythia that’s used medicinally is Forsythia suspensa, the weeping forsythia. I’m honestly not sure if the pictures on this post are F. suspensa or something else; it’s my neighbor’s bush, and it was there before she moved in, so she has no way of finding out. It isn’t a particularly weeping form, but there is a variety of F. suspensa, ‘Fortunei’ (most likely named after Robert Fortune, the Royal Horticulturalist Society’s plant collector in 1840s China) which is more upright, and F. suspensa does seem to be the popular choice for specimen (as opposed to hedge) planting. If there are any forsythia experts out there, please let me know.

References:

The World in Your Garden, Camp, Boswell, and Magness, National Geographic Society, 1957

Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Complete Home Medical Guide, Montague Books, 1985

Sacred Lotus

TCM Basics

Your Nature, Your Health: Chinese Herbs in Constitutional Therapy, S. Dharmananda, Ph.D., Institute for Traditional Medicine and Preventive Health Care, 1986

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Co., 1973 (there are many useful editions of this book)

I felt little hard things hitting me on a mountain walk with a friend one year. I turned around, and he was laughing; he’d been throwing acorns at me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that those plants were oaks. Waist-high bushes? Leaves that looked, not like lobed deciduous oak trees, or even like the different forms of live-oak leaves, but, well, like huckleberries. I’d just never noticed the acorns. I mean, does this look like an oak to you?

I think part of my problem was that shrubby bushy things just didn’t get my attention the way flashier plants do. It’s only fairly recently that I’ve come to appreciate foliage en masse–leaves that aren’t unusual close up,  like grapes or gooseberries, but make a great effect massed together. It’s probably something psychological, as if I was looking for the individual, but wasn’t interested in the community. Something like that.

It’s also just that I never imagined there could be an oak that comes only to my waist.  It’s the same high-mountain variation as the manzanitas, only in this case the leaves are entirely different from any other oak. But since I’ve read up on this, I’ve found there is another oak in the desert southwest which is called “shin oak” (Quercus mobriana) because it grows in thickets that are about knee-high. I’d imagine that this oak has adapted to severe desert conditions in the same way huckleberry oak has learned to grow in high altitudes.

Like the other high-mountain plants, huckleberry oak has a short time to make its growth and produce fruit. The catkins come out in May or June, when there is often still snow on the ground (in a heavy winter, quite a lot of it).  I took photos of these acorns in early to mid-September, and as you can see, a lot of them are still quite green. They had about six weeks to two months before the first serious snowfall. (I have seen snow sticking in September at this altitude, but it doesn’t really settle in until later.)

Many of these oaks just had empty acorn caps, and I’m guessing the critters harvested the ripe ones right away. While Native Americans used acorns as a staple food, I’m wondering if they would have left these thumbnail- to fingernail-sized acorns for the chipmunks, squirrels, and other rodents? I’m not sure about this, since there are grinding holes in the high altitudes.

Grinding holes are deep round bowls in the rocks, a sort of natural mortar made by using smaller rocks as pestles. In my area, they are called acorn holes: the assumption is that they were used for grinding acorn meal, a large staple. But maybe that wasn’t their only use.  Manzanita berries are also a huge crop in my area, and the tribes here ground them to make different kinds of food. Would the high-mountain grinding holes have been used for the high mountain manzanita berries (some of which mature earlier), but not oaks?

That might be the case, because the indigenous people moved down the hill in the colder weather, which would have coincided with acorn harvest at lower altitudes. Further down the hill, acorns come off large trees, plentiful, much bigger,  and easier to harvest. But I don’t really know.

I was interested to find that some of these bizarre miniature (as I think of them) huckleberry oaks have wasp galls, just like their larger cousins down the hill. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a decent shot of the oak galls. This kind looks like a strange swelling on the branches, about the size of a jawbreaker (or a large hazelnut): round, cream-colored, and hard, with a textured pattern weirdly like an acorn cap.

The galls are made by a type of gall wasp, Cynips maculipennis. They burrow into the branches and lay their eggs. I’m not sure exactly how the gall forms, but the larvae live in it until they are ready to hatch. According to my natural history books, they sometimes lay eggs on other plants, but I have only seen their galls on oaks.

My gardening lesson? To look more carefully at the plants around me. I might actually recognize them. And maybe the lesson huckleberry oak has for all gardeners is: look for different forms of plants. They may work in your garden better. Or they may just be interesting to know about. All gardeners like to contemplate the infinite variety of the plant world. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be gardeners.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History,  University of California Press, 1963 (There is a newer version out, but this is the one I still own and use.)

Elmer L. Little, The Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Western Region,  Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

After years of passing by this bush on holiday in the high mountains, vaguely noticing its presence, I finally identified it: bush chinquapin.

I’ll give myself a little slack by saying that this sociable bush is almost always growing in with something else: mountan whitethorn in this case (with redberry very close by, but not in this picture. It seems weird, but I really need some kind of wide-angle lens to really get these low, spreading mountain-plant communities, even though they aren’t all that huge).

See what I mean about inconspicuous?

Here it’s growing with a rather small wild currant (on the right). At least I’m pretty sure that’s a currant.

But it’s a rather handsome plant on its own.  It wouldn’t make a bad groundcovery/foundation shrub, in a dry environment. To start it growing, though, you’d need to find its seeds.

I cut open one of the seedpods–a very prickly process–to see if I could find the nuts.  They are supposed to have one to three bitter-tasting nuts which mature every other year. All I found was some very small hard possibly seed-like things, and more prickles. I picked the driest, most mature-looking seedpod I could find, so I may have gotten one that matured too soon and without seeds.  Or I might have just been expecting something more impressive from that big ball of prickly armor.

It’s very odd to see these horse-chestnut-like pods on an inconspicuous Sierra bush that rarely comes above my knee. Chinquapins (also spelled Chinkapins) are more closely related to oaks than to horse chestnuts, though.  They’re in the same family, though they aren’t in the Quercus genus.

Bush chinquapins have made the mountain adaptation of going miniature; there is a Great Chinquapin (also called Chinquapin Oak, just to keep us botanically confused), although I have never seen it. Great Chinquapin grows 40 to 80 feet, and shows the same prickly pods in its pictures. Its seeds are supposedly edible, like small chestnuts.

The underside of the leathery, stiff  bush chinquapin leaves has a faint brushing of yellow hairs, kind of like Labrador tea. The tops have the water-conserving shininess of a lot of mountain plants.

And that’s all I could find or observe on bush chinquapin. I guess it’s an inconspicuous plant to a lot of people.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

The Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, Western Region, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

I’m always intrigued at the way different locations mutate plants into different shapes.

I, of course, am pleased to call them mutations, because I’m used to their other forms. So to me, the different forms are unusual. Intriguing. It’s like looking at a friend who just got plastic surgery or peacock blue hair.

In the high mountains (between 6,000 and 10,000 feet), many of these variations seem to make a plant lower to the ground, smaller.

Where there is snow eight or nine months out of the year, low to the ground is a smart choice for a spreading plant. If it doesn’t stay low, six or seven or up to twenty feet of snow load will put it there.  Smaller size may also have something to do with short growing season and soil fertility. Rock is close to the surface in high mountains.

Where I live, manzanitas are tall, shrubby plants-the mature ones are well over my head–with twisty mahogany-colored branches. When the moon or headlights shine on them, their pale green leaves turn white.

I delight in this little pinemat manzanita (Arctostaphylos nevadensis), which is a miniature version of the type that grows where I live.  In the mountains, it’s still a shrub, but it comes only to my ankles. To me, this shrubby groundcover looks like gorgeous landscaping. But it also serves some practical purposes.

Manzanitas are great soil-preservers, because they can grow and hold soil on slopes and in soils with very little nourishment. In my area, they cover sunny, dense clay hillsides.  In the high mountains, they thrive on a diet of granite and crushed granite, where very few plants can survive.

Pinemat manzanita berries are somewhat smaller than the tall manzanitas that grow in my area, but they are large in proportion to Arctostaphylos nevadensis’s tiny height. There weren’t too many berries evident this year, but they may have already disappeared down the gullets of the grouse, chipmunks, and squirrels and other wildlife who would find these berries at a handy height for eating.

But manzanita has even more to it than beauty and bounty. Manzanita is in the same family as heaths, heathers, and madrone. It’s also related to uva-ursi (bearberry or kinnickinnick), which is easy to see when you look at this creeping variety.

It’s so closely related to uva-ursi that it has almost the same chemical profile in its leaves. Both have arbutin, a natural antibiotic and diuretic. It can kill and wash away bacteria from the urinary tract. Uva-ursi is traditionally used for bladder and kidney problems, so you could use manzanita in the same way.

You’d need to be careful about the dose, though. Many people make the mistake of vaguely believing that plant drugs are safe because they’re “natural”. Digitalis and scopolamine are also natural, but how you take them means the difference between improving your life and meeting your death. It’s important to be respectful of plants and know what you’re doing.

If you take them in very large quantities, uva-ursi and manzanita can both cause collapse and death. The proper dosage is one teaspoon of leaves steeped in sixteen ounces of water, taken two or three times a day. This tea has a not-unpleasant astringent taste, a bit like the tannin in black tea (actually, manzanita has tannins in it, also). Don’t drink it if you’re pregnant, though; in some women, it can cause uterine contractions.

Historically, the Shoshone drank this tea as a remedy for venereal disease (one of the gifts of Europe to the Americas). If you look at the chemical constituency, it seems like a good thing to try. Chances are it was a lot more effective than whatever European remedy was being offered at the time (mercury, a toxin, was used on its own earlier on; it’s still included in many drugs).

Arbutin has been synthesized as a drug. You may be surprised to learn that taking manzanita or uva ursi tea is actually more effective than taking the drug. Arbutin breaks down so quickly in the body that it often destablilizes before doing its work. Uva ursi has substances in its leaves which preserve the arbutin on its travels through your body. It also has other ingredients which may work synergistically with the others, including quercetin, which is good for your respiratory system, and allantoin, the famous nerve- and tissue-healing ingredient in comfrey.

Over the years, I’ve learned over and over about herbs whose effects were better than their so-called active ingredient. We have a lot to learn about plant chemistry. When drugs are isolated from plants, they often cause side effects that are not present when the whole plant is taken. Or, like manzanita and uva-ursi, the constituents of the plant work as a team to make its action more effective.

Coincidence? I think not.

Next post: more uses for yet another kind of manzanita.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989