Gasquet Manzanita Arctostaphylos hispidula
Gasquet Manzanita is a perennial shrub native to the lower 48 states. It blooms Feb – Sep. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Arctostaphylos hispidula is a species of manzanita known by the common names Gasquet manzanita and Howell's manzanita. It is native to the coastal mountain ranges of southern Oregon and northern California, where it is an uncommon member of the serpentine soils flora and other mountain plant communities. This is a spreading or erect shrub reaching a maximum height between one and two meters. The twigs and foliage are bristly and glandular, the dark green leaves oval to broadly lance-shaped and up to 3 centimeters long. The shrub blooms in crowded inflorescences of urn-shaped flowers and produces whitish to tan colored drupes each 5 to 7 millimeters wide. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 9 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~17 caterpillar species
Arctostaphylos supports ~17 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Arctostaphylos in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Arctostaphylos is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
Related plants
More Arctostaphylos →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (17) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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