Some parts of San Francisco become so woven into my life that I’ve stopped thinking of them as destinations. The Presidio is like that for me. When my son was young, I hiked there almost every day. I knew the trails, the turns, where the light changed under the trees, where things opened up, where I could walk long enough for both of us to settle into whatever kind of day we were having. It wasn’t somewhere I went to “experience nature.” It was simply part of our life.
Years before I trained through this part of the Presidio for a zombie run, which feels like a very specific early-2000s sentence. The Walking Dead was huge, zombies were apparently having their cultural moment, and someone decided the logical next step was to have actual humans run through a crazy zombie race while other actual humans dressed as zombies chased them! It was a blast.
I trained for it.
I finished it.
And, for the record, I survived.
Most people died.
Obviously, nobody actually died. You started the race with flags representing your lives, and the zombies tried to take them while you ran. I crossed the finish with mine, and I remember being disproportionately proud. There is something deeply Gen X about voluntarily paying money to be chased through the woods by zombies and considering it a recreational accomplishment!
So when I started researching the next plant for this Plant Medicine series and landed back here, near Inspiration Point, I thought I knew this landscape pretty well.
I didn’t know this story.
(( I have a practice that goes along with this post you can use here.))
The plant San Francisco thought was gone
Franciscan manzanita (Arctostaphylos franciscana) is native to San Francisco. It was last documented growing wild in the city in the 1940s and was subsequently considered extinct in the wild for decades. Then, in October 2009, biologist Daniel Gluesenkamp was driving through the Presidio when he noticed a manzanita growing in the median along Doyle Drive, in an area being cleared for construction. He went back for another look. Botanists were called. The identification was eventually confirmed.
There it was. A Franciscan manzanita. Growing in a highway median, of all places!
A plant people believed had disappeared from the wild had been hanging on in one of the least romantic places imaginable. (National Park Service)
I love this story for so many reasons, but particularly because Gluesenkamp saw it while driving. People who knew these plants had been through this area before. Restoration work had been happening in the Presidio for years. Yet somehow this plant remained unseen until one person looked closely enough to recognize it.
The plant couldn’t stay where it was. It was directly in the path of the Doyle Drive construction project, so an enormous conservation effort began. Crews dug around the plant, protected its root ball and surrounding soil, and ultimately moved it by crane to a protected location in the Presidio. Before moving it, scientists collected fruit, seeds and cuttings so the species could be propagated. Today, conservation efforts have resulted in multiple established populations of Franciscan manzanita. (The Presidio (San Francisco))
The original rescued plant remains protected at an undisclosed location near Inspiration Point, and I want to be very clear about that because this is not a scavenger hunt. We aren’t going looking for the endangered plant. We are going to walk through the landscape that holds its story.
That's where the medicine begins.
The Medicine of Returning
When I started this series with the California lilac, I wanted to see what happened when I stopped looking at a plant as something pretty and started learning how it actually lived. Its biology gave me the meditation. I want to continue doing that here.
Franciscan manzanita has a complicated relationship with its environment. It is associated with San Francisco’s rare serpentine landscapes, where the soil can be low in nutrients and contain metal concentrations that make growing difficult for many plants. Manzanitas in this ecosystem are also associated with disturbance and fire as part of their reproductive ecology. (National Park Service)
But I keep coming back to something simpler. Everyone thought it was gone. It wasn’t.
That became the medicine for this practice.
How many times do we decide something about ourselves is gone because we haven’t experienced it in a long time? Maybe it is strength. Creativity. Desire. Confidence. Curiosity. The ability to trust your body. The willingness to take a risk. The part of you that used to laugh more easily or wanted to go somewhere simply because you’d never been there.
Life changes, bodies change, relationships change, people leave, children grow up, careers take turns we didn’t expect, and sometimes we stop looking for pieces of ourselves because we’ve quietly concluded they belong to another time.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few years. We are so often encouraged to get ourselves back. Get your old body back. Get your energy back. Get back to normal. Get back to who you were before whatever happened happened.
I’m increasingly less interested in getting back. I’m much more interested in discovering what is still here. That’s different.
The Franciscan manzanita wasn’t waiting for San Francisco to become what it had once been. It was growing in the conditions that existed now. In this case, remarkably, that meant alongside a freeway.
There is something worth sitting with in that.
Come walk it with me
For this Plant Medicine practice, I want you to actually come to the Presidio if you can.
Start at Inspiration Point Overlook. Stand at the overlook for a moment before you put your headphones on and start the meditation. From there you can see Tennessee Hollow below, with the forest, native grasslands, historic buildings and the Bay beyond. The rare serpentine grasslands are part of what makes this particular corner of the Presidio so ecologically interesting. (The Presidio (San Francisco))
Then find the Ecology Trail. It begins just a few feet from the Inspiration Point plaza.
The entire trail is about 1.4 miles and moves through a surprising number of habitats for such a short walk: native grasslands and wildflowers, eucalyptus, redwoods and connections toward El Polín Spring and the Main Post. (The Presidio (San Francisco)) My meditation is only twenty minutes, so you don’t need to make reaching the end part of the assignment. Walk with me for twenty minutes and then keep going if you want.
And if you’re nowhere near San Francisco, you can still do the practice. Find a trail, a park, a neighborhood with trees, a beach path—somewhere you can walk safely without paying too much attention to navigation. The Franciscan manzanita becomes the story we carry rather than something you need to see.
But if you are here, I want you here.
Because that’s becoming an important part of what I’m trying to create with these practices.
A plant. A place. A practice.
Sober in San Francisco has never really been about removing alcohol from a trip and handing you a list of everything that’s left. I’m interested in what happens when we’re actually present enough to experience a place.
Sobriety gave me a very different relationship with attention. Meditation deepened it. And now I’m finding that learning about the plants growing around this city is changing it again.
I’ve probably walked this part of the Presidio hundreds of times. I hiked it with my son when he was little. I trained here while preparing to outrun zombies. I’ve walked these trails in completely different versions of my life.
That’s what I want these Plant Medicine walks to become. Each one will take us to a real place in San Francisco and introduce us to a plant that actually belongs to that landscape. We’ll learn enough about its biology and history to understand what we’re looking at, and then we’ll use that knowledge as the beginning of a meditation—not by assigning some arbitrary spiritual meaning to a flower, but by paying attention to what the plant actually does.
For Franciscan manzanita, the twenty-minute walking meditation is The Medicine of Returning.
As you walk, I’ll eventually ask you one question:
What is still alive in me that I stopped looking for?
You don’t need to answer it. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t try too hard.
Walk.
Breathe.
Look at the ground.
Look at what’s growing.
And consider the possibility that returning to yourself doesn’t necessarily mean going backward.
Sometimes it means looking again.
Plan your walk from Inspiration Point