Category Archives: Plant of the day

June 6, 2012 · 7:29 am

Plant of the day: cow parsnip

This is a fearsome plant. It’s rough, tough leaves are larger than my head: pointed and creased like thick green origami. Its stem is hollow and thick as a hose, and it can heft its dense umbel of flowers as much as seven feet in the air. I prefer the scientific name—Heracleum maximum—to the common name “cow parsnip”. That is far too pedestrian for this beast. Cows are placid, parsnips are passive underground things. This is a vigorous creature of light and growth. The implied size is appropriate, but that’s about all.

Right now it is out in abundance and it’s hard to hike (or drive) near the ocean without seeing it. It clusters along stream-banks and hangs over the curves on Highway One. There is nothing else that looks like this plant; it’s the only one of its genus around here. It has a vague similarity to its other cousins in the carrot family like Queen Anne’s lace or poison hemlock—but all the others have divided, lacy leaves whereas our bovine parsnip boasts solid, maple-like leaves as large as dinner platters.

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June 5, 2012 · 8:06 am

Plant of the day: Douglas’ sandwort

On a barren, rocky slope is a tremendously delicate little plant. Five tissue-thin petals veined with tiny lines surround a cluster of delicate yellow stamen. The reddish stems are threat-thin and sparsely decorated with green needlelike leaves.

Douglas’ sandwort (Minuartia douglasii) is fairly common, but it’s so small you might never have noticed it before. It is strongly associated with serpentine, which is where I saw it.  The paired leaves clasp around the stem, and if you look close you’ll see that this joint (or “node”) is swollen slightly—it bulges out from the rest of the stem. If you’re keying plants, this is an excellent hint that what you are looking at is in the Caryophyllaceae, or pink, family. The common store-bought carnation is a common example of this family; so is the garden flower rose campion. Look at their stems to see how they all have the swollen nodes in common!

There are several other species of sandwort in the San Francisco Bay Area, but though they seem really similar in the key, they don’t look at all similar to this one in their actual growth form. At least not as far as I can tell. But I might have to wait until a while to keep looking for different growth forms – I took these photos of the sandwort about a month ago, and they are now pretty much done blooming. We might not be seeing any more until next spring.

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June 4, 2012 · 8:04 am

Plant of the day: marsh tritileia

True to its name, this flower prefers to grow in wet places. Triteleia peduncularis is a graceful beauty, growing up to three feet tall, and is often found near serpentine. The flowers are whitish with a striking purple midvein. Six stamen are tucked away inside the trumpet- or funnel-shaped mouth of the flower.

There are two other triteleia species in the area: wild hyacinth and wally basket. They all are unique looking, as the hyacinth is white but bowl-shaped and the wally basket is purple throughout. Neither have the sleek elegance of the marsh triteleia.

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June 3, 2012 · 5:03 pm

Plant of the day: selfheal

These small sturdy towers of purple flowers are usually found in meadows and wet places. Though it only grows to be about five inches tall, it’s a hardy and versatile little plant – Prunella vulgaris is found in every state in the continental US as well as in Europe, Asia and many parts of Canada.

As the name suggests, this is also a traditional medicinal plant that has been used in teas, in stews and for compresses.The square stem and two-lipped flower reveals this flower as a member of the mint family.

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June 2, 2012 · 9:43 am

Plant of the day: dwarf brodiaea

In grassy meadows and along open hillsides, these low-growing flowers open their purple petals to the sun. Each plant has one or two medium-sized flowers that have the classic lily family form. Six gracefully pointed petals fade to white towards the center. Three flat, white, tongue-like spurs (which are actually sterile stamen called staminodia) sit at the base of alternating petals. These staminodia in turn alternate with an interior cluster of flat, fertile stamen dusted with yellow pollen, which at first look like a stout, three-sided pistil.  To see the actual pistil, you have to gently tug on the petals to draw the stamens apart.

The easiest way to tell this from similar species is that it is so low to the ground, with the flower only rising a few inches off the ground. It truly is Brodiaea terrestris.

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June 1, 2012 · 9:47 am

Plant of the day: rose clover

There are so many clovers around that they can be daunting to identify. But this little one has long caught my eye—partly because of the pretty pink color of its petals, combined with the many long green teeth of the calyx. But mostly I just like how it invariably has one little leaf coming directly off the flower. It may be strange but I find that adorable. Of course it turns out that botanically speaking the leaf isn’t actually part of the flower, it just appears to be so. In science-speak, the “heads are sessile above the uppermost leaves and stipules”. But that is good enough for me.

Rose clover (Trifolium hirtum) is native to Europe, not California. But it is now so ubiquitous as to be described by the authorities as “one of the most common” of the European species that have naturalized here.

You can pretty much tell rose clover from other species of clover because it has all of the following features: (a) It is hairy but doesn’t get cottony when it goes to seed; (b) Its showy, rosy flowers; (c) It’s an annual not a perennial; (e) That cute little leaf.

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May 31, 2012 · 9:17 am

Plant of the day: wild hyacinth

A flash of white against the frog-colored palette of a wet meadow. A loose cluster of white flowers atop a long, smooth stem. Each flower is an open bowl with the petals fused at the base, then tapering into six delicate points. This is wild hyacinth, or Triteleia hyacinthina. It grows in wetlands and along creeksides, as well as in grasslands and forests throughout much of the state.

The six stamens alternate in height, and flatten out so their bases nearly meet, making what looks like a crown set inside the bowl of petals. Green ribs run up the middle of each fleshy white petal.

There is another pale-colored Triteleia in the area (marsh triteleia, which can be whitish but is purple tinged – at least at the midrib if not elsewhere). You can tell the two apart because the wild hyacinth is bowl-shaped when seen from the side, while the marsh triteleia is narrower, shaped more like a funnel or a horn and the stamens are harder to see, hidden deep inside this vessel.

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May 29, 2012 · 9:03 am

Plant of the day: wild radish

Masses of delicate easter-colored flowers fill fields and hillsides, standing as tall as your waist or even shoulder. These pale yellow, purple, and white flowers are wild radish, or Raphanus sativus. You can see a fantastic showing of them along the first part of the Pierce Point trail on the Point Reyes Penninsula.

These flowers also taste good—take a trailside nibble or add flowers and pods to a salad for a spicy radish taste. And there are those four simple petals again! That’s right, the wild radish is in the Brassicaceae, or mustard, family that I wrote about last week.

According to the Marin Flora, the local wild radish is actually a hybrid between R. sativus and its cousin, R. raphanistrum.

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May 28, 2012 · 2:54 pm

Plant of the day: buckeye

It’s buckeye season – one of my favorite stages of spring. These spreading trees with their tall, pinkish-white spires of flowers can be seen along roadsides, streamsides, in mixed woodlands and even at the edge of pebbly beaches on Tomales Bay. I’ve seen Aesculus californica growing so close to the water that the lower branches were draped with streamers of dried eelgrass.

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This lovely tree is unique to California, and can be found across much of the state. It has loads of character, with knobby, gnarled trunks and wide palmately compound leaves. It leafs out during the winter, offering cool shade on hot days into the early summer, and then it goes dormant. In the fall it drops beautiful shiny chestnut-colored nuts (ok, actually they are “capsules” since the hard exterior contains several seeds). I like to gather them and use them for decoration. But don’t eat any! They are toxic, known to depress the nervous system, cause abortions in cattle and be toxic to bees. Native Americans would use extract of the seed topically (for hermerrhoids?!). In tough times the seeds were sometimes eaten (after careful preparation to leach the poison out). Buckeye also provided food in a different way: pouring a ground-up powder of the seed into a stream would stupify fish for easier catching!

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May 27, 2012 · 5:54 pm

Plant of the day: fairy lantern

This is one of the most beautiful flowers of the Bay Area. It’s aptly named, with its complex blossom looking like a delicately wrought lantern nodding on a slender stem. The three upper sepals curve upward like a pagoda roof, while the fringed petals below curl inwards as if to protect a flame. It’s not hard to imagine them as fixtures in a tiny magical kingdom. Keep your eye out for these little plants, and when you find one, look close!

The fairy lantern (Calochortus amabalis) is endemic to northern California, and is pretty much restricted to the coast range north of San Francisco bay. As such, Marin County is toward the southern-most end of the species’ range, and it is a rare sight here. These photos were taken in Sonoma county, where it is much more common.

Because all the parts are in threes, you can tell it is in the lily family, like the irises and blue-eyed grass.

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