Franciscan manzanita

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If you are going to San Francisco..

In 2009, after just crossing the bridge on his way back from a climate change conference at which he gave a talk about the vital imperative to prevent species from going extinct, botanist Daniel Gluesenkamp looked out of the window of his car.

His eyes settled on what should be the impossible. Through a break in the vegetation, Gluesenkamp noticed a handful of delicate creamy-white flowers nestled among the undergrowth before he zipped along the highway and out of sight. Yet that split-second glimpse was enough. He returned to this little clump of greenery clinging on in the middle of the urban sprawl and found a plant that had not been seen in the wild since 1947.

The Franciscan manzanita (Arctostaphylos franciscana) is a low-growing, sprawling shrub. Perfectly adapted for the regions sand dunes, wind and fog, it once dotted the coastal hills and plains surrounding San Francisco. Found nowhere else in the world, it is one of 105 species of manzanita that are found all along the North American Pacific coast where they have been growing for the last two million years.

But over the last century the Franciscan manzanita has suffered. As the city of San Francisco grew and expanded, housing developments spread across the native chaparral shrubland to which the manzanita was adapted. This rapid expansion that smothered the surrounding landscape pushed the Franciscan manzanita to the very edge.

Eventually, all that remained of this Californian species anywhere in the world was a small patch growing in San Francisco’s old Laurel Hill Cemetery. But even the days of this consecrated land were numbered. In 1947, the bulldozers moved through the old cemetery, clearing the ground and dousing it in concrete for yet more housing and businesses to take its place.

Just before the last known wild plant was ripped up, one botanist managed to save two specimens, taking them into care and propagating them. The plant even became popular as an ornamental shrub, but many experts believed that these last surviving remnants were actually hybrids and not pure Franciscan manzanitas.

 

Serendipity

For the last 62 years it was thought that the plant, once only found in the city and the surrounding county, was extinct in the wild. That was until Gluesenkamp’s serendipitous discovery. After returning to the site twice to make certain of the plants continued survival, he alerted biologists at the Presidio Trust, which helps to manage the national parks surrounding the Golden Gate bridge.

But there was a worrying reason why that break in the vegetation allowed Gluesenkamp to see the manzanita for the first time. Despite likely having been growing in that one location for at least 100 years – before the Golden Gate bridge had even been erected – the last remaining Franciscan manzanita was about to be destroyed as the road it lived in was being redeveloped.

Because the plant was thought to have gone extinct some 60 years previous, it was not listed on the Endangered Species Act, and so had no formal protection. The botanists had to move fast.

While standing just 60 centimetres tall the manzanita spanned 2.4 metres by 3.6 metres, not an insignificant plant to move. As scientists rushed to file emergency paperwork to get the Franciscan manzanita legally protected, others took cuttings of the plant itself, and even collected samples of the surrounding soil in the hope that they might contain additional seeds as well as bacteria and fungi that might be essential for the plant to grow.

 

Operation Manzanita

Eventually, the botanists managed to persuade the authorities that the only way to save the last remaining Franciscan manzanita, then known as the loneliest plant in the world, was to relocate the ageing plant. At a cost of over $200,000, the road was closed, a crane drafted in and a small army set to work extracting the plant from where it had been growing for the past century.

To some this was a gross waste of money on what many simply considered a nondescript rambling shrub no different to many others that could be found in the surrounding hills. But to Gluesenkamp, and all of his colleagues, this was a truly rare opportunity to put right a past wrong and save a rare species, found nowhere else on Earth, from extinction.

The plant was moved to an undisclosed location picked out due to it favourable conditions and protected location. In the absence of the oppressive air pollution and threat of destruction, the manzanita thrived. But the plant’s story did not end there. It took a further three years for the plant to gain formal protection when, in 2009, the Franciscan manzanita finally made it onto the Endangered Species Act. While obviously welcome news by those trying to save the plant, that alone was not enough.

A single specimen does not make an ecosystem, and so the botanists struck out to try and find other members of the species. They have been tracking down the descendants from the two plants saved from the Laurel Hill Cemetery all those years ago, in the hope that some of them may be pure Franciscan manzanitas.

The scientists then plan on planting a few new specimens around the old survivor to help kickstart a whole new generation, which will hopefully continue growing in the San Franciscan bay for centuries more to come.

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