Tag Archives: Marin

July 12, 2012 · 9:28 am

Plant of the day: Spanish broom

With flamboyant, showy flowers, Spanish broom is probably the most beautiful of all the evil brooms. It is still evil, though. Don’t be fooled by the big yellow flowers with their many exuberant stamens and pretty wing-like petals.

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This plant has the lean, linear look of Scotch broom but with even fewer leaves. The California Invasive Plant Council lists Spanish broom (Spartium junceum) as a species that can cause serious problems for native ecosystems. It can grow up to 15 feet tall and form dense stands that smother all other plants in the area. According the IPC, it is native to Spain, Morocco and other parts of southern Europe. It was introduced to California in 1848 as a decorative plant, and in the 1930s was planted along mountain highways in Southern California. Oops.

In Marin, it is one of the least common brooms. I saw the ones pictured here clinging to the slopes of what looks like an old rock quarry owned by the Marin Municipal Water District.

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July 11, 2012 · 3:57 pm

Plant of the day: pride of Madeira

You’ll see these towering purple spikes looming from road cuts and clifftops. This is pride of Madeira, or Echium candicans. It’s a common sight – especially in more coastal areas. It grows to more than seven feet tall, and is very striking with its gray-green leaves and massive heads of flowers (easily over a foot long).

Sadly, this plant isn’t native to the US. It’s another escaped ornamental species that’s still commonly used in landscaping. Birds and butterflies love it, and deer don’t. In inland areas this isn’t a problem but in the coastal climate it spreads on its own, gradually creeping into wild areas. Because it spreads slowly it is only considered to be moderately invasive, but it’s still not recommended for local gardens.

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July 10, 2012 · 9:46 pm

Plant of the day: coyote mint

A purple crown of flowers above dusty gray-green leaves: here is a coyote mint in bloom. In the center of the exuberant lilac ring of flowers, a round green bulge of unopened buds looks like a clown’s pate peeking through. Each flower is tube-shaped, its sprawling petals accented by many long stamens. The entire flower head approaches two inches across, and the plant grows one to two feet high, slightly sprawling.

One very charming thing about this coyote mint (Monardella villosa) is that it sports a twin pair of tiny leaves at the base of each pair of larger leaves.

This flower grows only in Oregon and California, and is a great addition to a well-drained garden since it attracts bees and butterflies. You can tell it’s in the mint family by taking a look at the square, four-sided stem. Every time I’ve seen it I’ve forgotten to take a sniff, but I hear that it has a characteristic toothpaste-like aroma as well… It was used by the Spanish as a cure for sore throats.

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July 9, 2012 · 10:24 pm

Plant of the day: oxeye daisy

Hiking across a remote meadow, I suddenly find myself in a knee-high field of daisies. This is the invasive oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), a striking flower with stark white petals around a yellow center.

This bloom was introduced from Europe and is now widespread throughout Marin and much of California. It has a cousin, Shasta daisy, which is less common and has (very slightly) larger flowers and leaves. Oxeye daisy is a moderately problematic invasive, growing so densely in places that it excludes other native vegetation. It also is known for giving cows’ milk an unpleasant taste if they eat it.

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July 6, 2012 · 5:06 pm

Plant of the day: trail plant

Adenocaulon bicolor

With distinctive arrow-shaped leaves, trail plant is a common sight while hiking. The tiny white flower is much easier to miss – I mostly notice the leaves without blooms. When it does flower, this perennial herb shoots up a long, mostly bare stalk from the low cluster of leaves.

The small flowers initially appear in a series of tiny heads, each on their own branch off the central stalk. But as the plant ages and the seed pods elongate, one flower will stay perched on the end of each seed/ovary as it matures. This gives the head an interesting multi-storied look, with some flowers still clustered in the center and some perched above them atop their green pedestals.

Adenocaulon bicolor seeds get sticky and cling to socks, pants, and fur – a handy way to disperse but a pain in the neck to walk through. Still, I’ve always been fond of this unassuming plant. The leaves are a cheerful green (with a cottony white coating underneath) and the flowers are quirky. Good enough for me!

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July 5, 2012 · 4:41 pm

Plant of the day: yarrow

Achillea millefolium

Knee-high clumps of creamy flowers stand atop a narrow stalk. Each yarrow flower has a sweetly classic daisy shape to it – and like a daisy, it is actually many flowers. If you look close you’ll see the demure inner “disc” petals surrounded by the flashy outer “ray” petals.

In the southwest, yarrow is sometimes called Plumajillo, or little feather, because of its delicate plume-shaped leaves. It is listed as being mildly toxic by the California Poison Control system, but historically has been used as a tea to treat colds, nausea, cramps, hives, measles and kidney ailments. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) also was used externally to treat cuts, stop nosebleeds, and as a hair wash to prevent baldness!

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July 4, 2012 · 9:44 am

Plant of the day: huckleberry

Vaccinium ovatum

One of my favorite Fourth of July memories is eating my great-aunt Martha’s huckleberry pie when I was a kid. We’d gather at the family campground by a little river, and eat California delicacies like abalone, venison, and this wonderful pie. Huckleberries are a wild-tasting fruit, tart but sweet. They taste of pine forest and long days with picking buckets. The little fruits hold their texture even when cooked, they  pop in your mouth with a satisfying burst: perfect when blended with sugar and a flaky crust.

Huckleberries (Vaccinium ovatum) grow all along the west coast – from Canada to Alaska – but not many people cook with them often since they are so small that picking enough for a pie takes a long time. Look for them  in forests and clearings, often on slopes. The shrubs are attractive, with dense shiny foliage of small oval leaves. White lantern-shaped flowers give rise to small, round, dark purple fruit that looks like a small blueberry.

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July 3, 2012 · 1:30 pm

Plant of the day: oceanspray

This graceful shrub has soft scalloped leaves and creamy white sprays of flowers. It is happily in bloom right now, and a fun one for drive-by botanizing since it thrives on roadside banks. Usually oceanspray (or cream bush, aka Holodiscus discolor) is a medium-sized shrub, but on exposed hills it can become a low-growing mat, according to the Marin Flora.

This is a good one for gardens since it can grow in a wide range of soils from wetlands to dry and well-drained. The beautiful flowers with their many long stamens are typical of its family, the Rosaceae or rose family. This big clan contains a wide spectrum of species from cherries and plums to roses to silverweed. It’s one of the biggest plant families there is.

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July 1, 2012 · 2:03 pm

Plant of the day: rattlesnake grass

The brown hills of California are far from monochromatic. Look closely and you’ll see a complex tapestry of colors, textures, shapes, sizes–and sounds! Do you hear that rustling rattle as you brush through the grass? Look close and you’ll see graceful stalks of rattle-shaped grass heads.

This is rattlesnake grass, or Briza maxima—one of my favorite plants of the summer. Sadly this nice-looking plant is also fairly invasive (introduced from Europe, and occasionally planted as an ornamental). It’s now become naturalized in the Coast Range and in scattered other parts of California, which is why you see it almost everywhere.

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June 28, 2012 · 10:01 pm

Plant of the day: California everlasting

Like dried flowers in a storebought display, California everlasting has crispy, white, straw-like petals. But actually these petals are bracts – you have to look close, and at the right time, to see the real (yellow) petals peeking through from the flower inside. When done flowering, the bracts open wide around a dandelion-like puff of seeds.

Pseudognaphalium californicum is a native that’s found in most parts of North America. It’s in the Asteraceae family, along with dandelion, chamomile, burdock and daisy. It dries out as nicely as its name suggests!

There are several similar-looking species to this one, including others in the Pseudognaphalium family.  But I first mistook this plant for the very similar lookalike: pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritaceae – thanks to Doreen for setting me straight!). I’m still trying to figure out a good way to tell the two apart – in the key, the main difference is that California everlasting has a taproot while the roots of pearly everlasting are fibrous. I think that the flowers of the first are either bisexual (a typical flower, with both male and female parts) or only female, while the latter has separate male and female flowers. But since they are in the aster family, with little teeny tiny flowers, this is a hard difference to spot.

Just from looking at the photos, it seems that California everlasting has a much sleeker, smoother look to the shape of the bracts, while pearly everlasting seems to have a spiky look to each flower head, with the many pointy tips of the bracts bent backwards a little bit.

I’ll offer more tips on how to tell these two apart, as I come up with them!

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