Category Archives: Plant of the day

Adenostoma fasciculatum

Chamise is a needle-leaved shrub of the chaparral. Right now it’s spikes of small white flowers are fading to brown, but the dried flowers will stay on the bush for most of the summer. A close look at those that are still blooming will show five little petals and the long splayed stamens. The flowers are so small that even when a bush is in full bloom it looks understated, not showy.

The small, leathery leaves of chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) are about a quarter of an inch long and grow in bunches off the stem. This is one of the most common chaparral plants, and its leaves secretes an oil that burns easily. Native tribes used the oil to treat skin infections (they also used an infusion of bark and leaves to treat syphilis, and collected scale insects from the plant to make a glue for arrows and baskets).

In the shade of the forest, clusters of brilliant red berries seem to glow with color. This is red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), the cousin of blue elderberry which I wrote about yesterday. There is a lot less written about this beautiful plant–some sources say the berries are edible, some say they are not. My guess is that even if you can safely eat them they aren’t nearly as tasty as their blue cousins or more info would be available.

Despite their names, the Jepson database says that red elderberry can also be a blueish-black color; the way to tell it isn’t blue elderberry is that the dark form of the berries lack the glaucous white coating on their surface.

This tall reed rustles its leaves above a small pond. Long cylindrical flower heads look like two plump brown sausages on a spit. The sausages are actually flower heads, with the female flowers clustered in the lower, plumper segment while the male flowers are clustered together above.

These are narrow leaf cat-tails, a common sight in wetlands or roadside ditches. There are actually three species here in the Bay Area that hybridize with one another; the main way to tell them apart is by the flower heads (if the skinnier flower head is stacked immediately above the fatter one with no gap of stem visible in between, you’re looking at common cattail, or Typha latifolia). The two species of narrowleaf cattail (T. domingensis and T. angustifolia) are harder to tell apart–look for orange or yellow flowers, and dark dots on the inside of the lower leaf, to ID T. domingensis.