Hope Blooms: A Tale of Two Manzanitas
A single Franciscan manzanita plant nicknamed Francie, the last of its kind from the wild, charts an unlikely comeback in San Francisco.
By The Revelator and Karen Mockler
Most visitors to San Francisco’s famed Presidio have no idea they’re strolling through the latest setting in a most implausible botanical story.
The star of the tale is a shrubby, red-limbed Franciscan manzanita, nicknamed Francie, and the fate of its kind may well rest on a combination of protection, the latest science, and the whims of reproduction.
But don’t go looking for Francie or its offspring just yet. The plant’s exact location remains a secret, its very existence fragile and its future not yet guaranteed.
In October 2009 a botanist driving along a busy San Francisco freeway spotted something growing in a traffic island surrounded by ramps near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a “fairly ugly” bush, as Dan Gluesenkamp described it later, but he knew it was a manzanita — a genus of evergreen shrubs and small trees — and suspected it was the long-lost Franciscan manzanita, last seen more than 60 years earlier.
While California is home to 95 species and subspecies of manzanita, only two have…
