The shurb is now protected by a fence and its location is kept secret, in part because the National Park Service and the unsupervised, out of control, flush with stimulus cash, Presidio Trust fear that nature-lovers seeking to see the “rare wild” Manzanita might trample it to death.

Bet you thought $823,000 was extravagant for 300 employees of the General Services Administration to hold an office party.

How about the National Park Service and other government agencies contriving a hair-brained scheme to spend more than $205k to transplant one bush of a common house-front shrub that can be purchased from nurseries for $15.98 each?

Closeup of Manzanita shrub (Arctostaphylos franciscana) branches and leaves, bright red bark.

CNSNews.com:

The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045-billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009.

“In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. “The plant’s location was directly in the footprint of a roadway improvement project designed to upgrade the seismic and structural integrity of the south access to the Golden Gate Bridge.

“The translocation of the Arctostaphylos franciscana plant to an active native plant management area of the Presidio was accomplished, apparently successfully and according to plan, on January 23, 2010,” the Interior Department reported.

The bush — a Franciscan manzanita — was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries for as little as $15.98 per plant. The particular plant in question, however, was discovered in the midst of the City of San Francisco, in the median strip of a highway, and was deemed to be the last example of the species in the “wild.” [Bold added.]

Read more. It’ll make you even sicker.

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