Lone tree defies odds

On the Trail


 

 

For some of us, as autumn settles in, our spirits slide downhill. For me the gloom button is activated by trees changing color then shedding their incandescent leaf load to create stark spidery profiles against the sky. That and the need for a sweater and socks once again.

There’s one particular native tree I encounter this time of year that presents a most heartening, reassuring aspect, autumn or not. It is a bigberry manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca) that grows alongside a narrow, cloistered trail in the Zuma Ridge vicinity of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Years ago a couple of horsemen introduced me to this particular route, and it was there I first encountered “Manzy.”

She was a beauty, a lone specimen growing amid ample forests of California lilac and sumac. Other manzanitas grew in thick groves on the ridge’s sunny flank, but Manzy came to the trail through a quirk of placement that only a landslide or wind-dispersed seed could do.

Manzanita may be classified as a shrub or small tree, and Manzy fell into the latter form, ing a perfect urn-shaped center of long, smooth, cinnamon-colored branches supporting a canopy of tough gray-green leaves that bore gorgeous pink-blushed white flower clusters in fall and winter.

What a gloom-busting sight!

But as the years passed, misfortune befell this most attractive little tree that had thrived in her rather desolate, precarious spot above a shady ravine.

A storm literally knocked her block off, then along came an equestrian who bent back Manzy’s two remaining branches that he was too tall to duck under. The already stressed branches snapped, leaving jagged splinters. The rider felt so bad he returned with a file to try to smooth the edges of her limbs.

Manzy was left resembling a corkscrew crossed with the hunchback of Notre Dame. Her remaining two branches grew horizontally then spiraled downward.

In her shaded setting, no new growth arrived to replace her losses or improve her dreadful posture. Manzy’s singular beauty had become grotesque.

Each time I passed her sorry form I figured she’d soon expire. How does a plant survive with so little of it left alive?

I’d been away from the trail a long while when I chanced along it as October opened and my spirits began their “summer’s over” plummet. And there was little deformed, two-branched Manzy bearing a complement of healthy gray-green foliage suspending uncommonly dainty pink and white flower bundles.

I drew in my breath in surprise and wonder. It was still hard not to flinch at Manzy’s bizarre and pitiful posture. Yet it was thrilling to see embodied in a little isolated wild tree a perseverance that would humble warriors and kings.

Glasser is a freelance writer about the natural world. Reach her by email at whirlawaygig@gmail.com.