Arctostaphylos morroensis 'Park View'

Arctostaphylos morroensis, Morro Manzanita is an evergray shrub that grows best in sun near the coast and prefers afternoon shade in the interior of the state. This is a sand lover, if you have heavy clay it's probably not for you, but if you have beach sand or, decomposed granite, or sandy loam it should love it.

Growing in the inner sand dunes, San Luis Obispo county, it has thrived in the ground at the nursery and survived in containers to 14 degrees F. or less. This species survived a temperature of 0 degrees F. in December, 1990 and a week of temperatures mostly below freezing in 2013.  It wouldn't complain too much if it received regular water in the interior as long as the drainage was good.An in 2013 the weirdness of this plant continues. We had about 2 inches (4cm) of rainfall for the year, many of the other manzanitas were dieing of drought, morroensis was doing fine and then, in a week,  we had 6 nights below 10F, most of the week you only briefly got above freezing. The Ceanothus 'Joyce Coulter' right next to the
morroensis froze and died, but the morroensis looks fine.

The form that we have selected grows about 4-5 feet tall, with grey foliage and red bark. We had selected 7 nice forms of this very diverse species from a mitigation in Los Osos 30 years ago and only one survived our winters, summers and neglect.

It's ironic that folks in coastal dune communities rip out the native plants, put their house in the sand and proceed to plant junk that will not grow in the sand, but fertilize, water try to pretend that it does work. Whole communities have dead or yellow lawns, plastic flowers(because not'ing will grow, don't you know?) and sad looking ground covers, bushes or trees.; Plants like Arctostaphylos morroensis would love to be there and there would be birds and butterflies instead of mice and roaches.

For other plants that tolerate sand, just put sand into our little search box.