Whiteleaf manzanita - Arctostaphylos viscida

In brief

Arctostaphylos viscida, Ericaceae.

- Evergreen shrub, 2 to 4 m
- Native to California and just over the Oregon line
- Flowers January to March
- Fruit a small dry drupe

Where it grows

Dry slopes and poor soil through the Sierra Nevada foothills, the Klamath ranges and the North Coast Ranges. It wants drainage and full sun and will not thank anyone for watering it.

When it blooms

January to March. In most years it is the first shrub on the land to open, and in a mild winter it starts before the new year.

Seed and fruit

A small reddish drupe, dry and mealy. Manzanita is Spanish for little apple, and the fruit is the reason.

Here

Photographed in flower on January 29, 2021 and again on January 30, 2024. Two things are worth looking at up close: the bark peels every year to a smooth red underneath, and the leaves stand edge-on to the sun rather than flat to it, which is how the plant keeps its water through a Sierra summer.

The whole shrub

Close up the flowers are urns on bristly red stalks. From a few paces back the plant is a grey-green mound with red limbs running through it, and in late January it carries enough flower to read as pink from across a valley.