Saturday, February 6, 2010

Blooming manzanitas in Tilden Botanic Garden

So this last Monday I went up to the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden to have a picnic lunch with a friend.  The garden is 10 acres of California native plants and is really beautiful.  It's stunning in the spring when most of the blooms are on display.  But this time of year the stars are the manzanitas.
 
More after the jump
Parry Manzanita (Arctostaphylos manzanita) from Eldorado County.
Vine Hill Manzanita (Arctostaphylos densiflora) from Sonoma County.  There were two of these and they were literally buzzing with bees.  All sorts of different species of bees.
And a silktassel thrown in for goog measure.  It's bloom was pretty much done, but the catkins still look cool hanging from the tree.

6 comments:

  1. Amazing! I love manzanita, and Tilden has so many different ones. Thanks for the photos, wish I had time to go over there for a picnic myself.

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  2. I just love how beautiful the flowers are, especially close up.

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  3. The lightness of the flowers really shine out from the foliage. It must have been nice to get out before the next rain!

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  4. Beautiful! Manzanita was the first native plant I became familiar with as a burb-grown child at summer camp. No flowers yet on my three-year-old A. bakeri 'Louis Edmunds', just the tiniest of buds forming. Thank you for your post on my blog a few days ago. Agree, we need more (of the right kind of) street trees, and to treat them well.

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  5. Janis, I have three, 1 1/2 year old Louis Edmunds and they just put out their first blooms a couple of days ago. They are much later than my other manzanita.

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  6. Nice photos. I passed by there the other day, too. Like you said, tons of manzanitas in bloom.

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