Category Archives: Plant of the day

June 16, 2012 · 12:39 pm

Plant of the day: phantom orchid

A stark white stalk of flowers catches a beam of sunlight in the woods of Sonoma’s coast range. This dense cone of blooms is completely white; the only color is a pale yellow smudge on each flower’s bottom lip. Phantom orchid, or Cephalanthera austiniae, is the only orchid in North America that has no chlorophyll at all.

No chlorophyll means it can’t make its own food, so the phantom orchid has to steal all of its nutrients from other plants. There are a variety of different ways that plants do this, but the phantom orchid uses fungi as go-betweens! There’s no direct contact between the orchid and its host plant (in this case, actually, the dead plants rotting on the forest floor). Instead, the tiny fibers of the fungus enter the roots of the host plant and pass nutrients along to them. I’m not yet sure what they get out of the deal, but it’s pretty nifty. The technical term for this is “mycoheterotrophic”.

As far as I know this striking orchid doesn’t grow in Marin, but you may see it when you’re hiking in Sonoma and the northern counties, or down in areas around Monterey as well.

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June 15, 2012 · 1:01 pm

Plant of the day: wintergreen

Under the shade of a redwood grove, slender red stalks rise leafless from the duff. Flowers are scattered sparsely along the stalk, with those toward the bottom opening first. Five pink petals nod toward the ground. If you look underneath, you’ll see an oddly curved pistil surrounded by yellow-dusted stamen.

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This is Pyrola picta, or wintergreen. I saw it in Sonoma County, but it grows in almost all parts of the state – and in all states as far east as South Dakota. There are other types of Pyrola, but none that have been found in the bay area. In many places it has a handful of dark green leaves at its base, but around here it is almost always leafless. It also is often white instead of pink.

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June 14, 2012 · 7:56 am

Plant of the day: ice plant

On a trip to the ocean, I wade through a thick reddish-green mat of rubbery plants to get to the beach. The ankle-high leaves are spiky and break off under my feet with a crunch. Large yellow flowers are scattered across this green carpet, each with hundreds of skinny petals surrounding a nest of pollen-dusted stamens. This is Carpobrotus edulis, one of several kinds of iceplant in the area. None are native.

The fruit of Carpobrotus edulis, as its name suggests, was traditionally eaten back in its original territory of South Africa. It was deliberately brought to California, planted to bind coastal soils together and help stop erosion. It does seem to be successful at that job – you can see it growing on beaches and even in colorful tapestries drooping over the edge of cliffs. However, it’s another good intention gone wrong since it has turned out to be highly invasive; an “ecological bulldozer,” along the lines of broom, that wreaks havoc on the delicate dune ecosystem. All the species of ice plant look at least somewhat similar, though not all of them are closely related (there are five species in four different genera, with the two types of Carpobrotus being the most common around here, as far as I can tell).

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June 13, 2012 · 8:36 am

Plant of the day: Tangier pea

Lathyrus tingitanus

Showy pink blossoms, delicate fragrance and winding tendrils – it’s sweet pea season. I’ve been seeing them growing along roads and trails, in gardens, and in bouquets on people’s tables or shop counters. This is an invasive species that it’s hard not to love – a guilty botanical pleasure!

As with yesterday’s plant, this is one where I learned more than I bargained for in the identification. I had naively assumed that there was only one type of sweet pea and that every time I saw that distinctive pink blossom it was the same species. Wrong again! There are several different kinds, and also some native species with paler pink blooms, so you have to look close. Tangier pea, or Lathyrus tingitanus, has the winged stem, two-parted leaves and large, deep pink flowers that mark it as one of the non-native species. You can tell Tangier pea from sweet pea because it is an annual, and also because it only has two or three blossoms per stalk.

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June 12, 2012 · 5:35 pm

Plant of the day: yellow bush lupine

Despite the obvious, these pretty purple-flowered shrubs are indeed a yellow bush lupine. This was news to me! I didn’t even realize the two color types were the same species until I went to look up the Latin name. After all, I was sure I already knew the common name: purple bush lupine, right?

Wrong. No such plant exists, according to the field guide. So I turned to the key—and couldn’t find it! The darn thing kept keying out to yellow bush lupine (Lupinus arboreous). There are other purple, shrubby lupines (silver lupine and dune bush lupine) but both have distinctively hairy upper petals. This one didn’t. I’m embarrassed to admit that it took a long time for me to read through to the second page of the yellow bush lupine species description where I found the explanation: “It is usually yellow, but always yellow-flowered in the dunes and blue-flowered in the coastal scrub, bishop pine forest, and elsewhere.” The species is also sometimes called coastal bush lupine, which I think is a much better name!

Whatever their name and whatever their color, these lush shrubs dish out fragrant towers of  blossoms. They can grow to be as tall as a person, though often are knee height or lower: spreading mounds of silky-haired, fan-shaped leaves. Look for them on sand dunes and hillsides from Washington state to San Diego. They cling to cliffs and roadsides and are very popular among insects—and rodents too! Each plant produces hundreds of seed pods that our furry friends love to munch.

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June 11, 2012 · 7:33 am

Plant of the day: coast buckwheat

Like the pink pom-poms of an elfin cheerleader, coast buckwheat tosses little bursts of color alongside the trail. The flower heads range from fuschia to pale pink atop a grayish stem. The buds are the darker pink, and the heads turn pale as they open to reveal the lighter petals and the curious long antenna of stamens. All the leaves are gathered in a cluster at the base of the long stems.

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Coast buckwheat (Eriogonum latifolium) can be found all along the coast of California. It prefers to grow along exposed dunes, mesas, bluffs and coastal hills. It’s a member of the buckwheat family, or Polygonaceae. There are 125 different species of Erigonum in California, though only four are listed in the Marin Flora as growing in this county. In general, the group is distinguished by having clustered heads of small flowers atop a long stem that grows out of a basal mound of leaves. The five-petaled flowers generally have obvious stamens, like this species does, but sometimes the heads of flowers are smaller.

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June 10, 2012 · 11:34 am

Plant of the day: Scotch broom

This is another badnasty invasive broom species that you’ll see frequently throughout the Bay Area. Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius) has pretty yellow pea-like flowers and long, narrow leaves that press closely against its multi-sided stems. Though it occasionally has some rounded leaflets as well, the overall lean, linear look to its foliage makes it easy to tell from its French broom cousin that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

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In California, French broom is a nastier problem than Scotch broom, but throughout the rest of the country the Scottish Cytisus scoparius is the worst broom around. Even worse, both were deliberately originally introduced as ornamental species!

This plant is so nasty because it is hearty and vigorous, and spreads fast because it produces a LOT of seeds. A single Scotch broom plant can live for up to 7 years, and produce over 150,000 seeds per year. It’s a mind-boggling number! The seeds stay in the ground, ready to sprout, for between 5 and 30 years. These plants grow up to 12 feet tall and smother any native plants that would otherwise have grown where they are. There’s no sharing if you’re a broom species! Scotch broom is a rampant invasive across much of the western and eastern seaboards of North America – from Alaska to Baja and from Maine to Georgia, as well as in other countries like Australia and New Zealand. It’s native to northern Africa and parts of Europe.

There is one more broom species that you might see in the area, and that’s Portuguese broom. It’s not nearly as common, but it does cover about 65 acres in the Marin Headlands where it was planted in the 1960s as part of a landscaping and slope stabilization program – another good idea gone wrong! Portuguese broom looks a lot like Scotch broom, except the seed pods are inflated instead of compressed around the seeds. Also they have 8-10 sided twigs, as opposed to the 5-sided twigs of Scotch broom.

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June 9, 2012 · 10:12 am

Plant of the day: Ithuriel’s spear

Triteleia laxa

Here is another one of the lovely leggy lilies that I wrote about last week. Triteleia laxa sports a loose umbel of trumpet-shaped purple flowers. The color is usually the rich royal purple shown here, but it can be paler as well. The way to tell this beauty from the similar species is to look inside and see that it has six classic-looking stamens.

The young plant is spear-shaped when it first emerges from the earth. Evidently the name is (for you literary types!) a reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the angel Ithuriel finds Satan has approached Eve in the shape of a toad. Ithuriel touched him with her spear and revealed his true form. I think toads are beautiful and charismatic critters, and for me this is the best part of the fable – that a toad is what was chosen to infiltrate the ranks of goodness!

See the six distinct stamens

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June 8, 2012 · 9:17 am

Plant of the day: sneezeweed

A brown golf ball is dressed in a short yellow skirt. Well not really, but that’s what this funny flower looks like: a big round ball, fringed at its very lower edge with dangling petals. I found this patch of Helenium puberulum perched alongside Highway One just south of Stinson Beach.

There are several different kinds of sneezeweed (a.k.a. Helenium) and they all look like variations on this theme.  The “classic” sneezeweed shown here has many flowers per plant, noticeably short petals – they almost look like an afterthought! – and leaves that attach to the stem (the botanical term is decurrent). This combination of traits lets you know you’re looking at plain ‘ol sneezeweed instead of Bigelow’s sneezeweed or yellow sneezeweed. Actually as far as I can tell you don’t even need to look at the leaves or number of flowers – the other sneezeweeds both seem to have larger petals. But it’s always good to ID a plant using more than one feature, since individuals of the same species can show a LOT of variation in its shape, color, size and so on.

The sneezeweeds are in the enormous Asteraceae family, and if you look close you’ll see that the brown ball is made up of hundreds of individual “disc” flowers, and the yellow skirt is the showier “ray” petals.

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June 7, 2012 · 9:58 am

Plant of the day: common catchfly

Common catchfly

This plant is a weed, but I kinda like it. The whole plant is sticky (is that why it’s called catchfly?) and the small pinkish-white flowers are perched atop a vase-shaped calyx. The petals are fused together, with little toothlike projections sticking up like a fringe around the inner edge. There are distinctive stripes running perpendicularly along the calyx (which is all the sepals taken together). The whole thing is a nice bit of floral architecture – if you can forget that it’s an invasive that was introduced from Europe!

Also, Silene gallica is another member of the Caryophyllaceae (a.k.a pink, or carnation) family. So check for the swollen nodes where the opposite pairs of leafs join the stem that I talked about a few posts back!

You may wonder why I always talk about families – the reason is that whether you are keying or looking plants up in a guidebook, being able to confidently narrow your options down to one or two families makes the whole process a lot easier. It also helps train your eye and mind in the detailed way of looking at plants that is needed for good identification.

Silene Gallica

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