Las Pilitas Nursery
California Native Plants are all we grow!
'Mama Bear' manzanita seems to
be beautiful, very stable, very blossomy, has a nice form, sprouts back
after damage (did I mention I drove the delivery truck over it), has
wonderful pinkish white flowers the hummingbirds and bumblebees like,
looks good in containers and seems to superior to 'Dr. Hurd'
manzanita for most yards(it's smaller and has cleaner foliage). The
purple trunk and gray-green foliage make the six to eight foot tall by
four to five feet wide manzanita a standout. 'Mama Bear' is a hybrid
manzanita between Arctostaphylos
stanfordiana bakeri 'Louis Edmunds'(now Arctostaphylos bakeri ssp. bakeri)
and Arctostaphylos densiflora
'Sentinel'. In the wild Arctostaphylos
densiflora forms miles of hybrids with A. stanfordiana and A. manzanita. We had some 5 gallon
'Louis Edmunds' and 'Sentinel' in a small area that we covered with one
small green house and two shade houses after a couple of years. The
five gallons were long gone, but a few seedlings popped up. Since there
really are not enough people here, things have a tendency to get
ignored unless they burn up, blow up, or block a driveway. The
greenhouse was abandoned and imploded. Under the old poly was this
beautiful manzanita! The greenhouses were named the three bears. The
'Little Bear' or 'Baby Bear' had the seedling growing up through it,
like a phoenix. The small leafed manzanita that we selected was called
'Baby Bear', the large leafed form was 'Mama Bear'. The baby grew to be
bigger than the mama. Click here for
more about California Manzanitas(Arctostaphylos).
