Thursday, April 8, 2010

Taxon of the Day! (8 April 2010)

Layia platyglossa - Tidy Tips
Lovely! This little aster (short for Asteraceae, the sunflower Family) is one of the Carrizo's most famous denizens.

For those who don't know, the "flowers" produced by many members of the Asteraceae (including sunflowers, chrysanthemums, dahlias, and gerberas) are actually made up of many smaller flowers. In the above photo, each tiny star-shaped part in the center is a flower in itself (the disc flowers), and each petal around the outside is of a second, highly asymmetrical type (the ray flowers). The composite nature of the inflorescence inspired an earlier name for the Asteraceae - the Compositae. To this day, many older taxonomists refer to them collectively as 'composites'.                                                        
The family contains a staggering number of species worldwide (23,000 according to the Kew Botanical Gardens), representing succulents, trees, shrubs, annuals, and many commercially important and familiar species (artichokes, thistles, and dandelions in addition to the ones already mentioned).

Layia is named in honor of George Tradescant Lay, a sailor and doctor/scientist on (fittingly) the HMS Blossom. On his 1841 trip to China, Lay wrote this about opium addicts:

"This great metropolis has a choice of wretched and degraded sights, but nothing that I ever see reminds me of an opium-smoker. His lank and shrivelled limbs, tottering gait, sallow visage, feeble voice, and the death-boding glance of his eye, are so superlative in their degree, and so closely blended in their union, that they at once bespeak him to be the most forlorn creature that treads upon the ground."

All of that, the fallout from fiddling with the milky secretions of another attractive wildflower in the Papaveraceae (poppy family): Papaver somniferum.

Tidy tips form really nice pale-yellow blotches on the landscape that can be difficult to pick out from the seas of darker yellow Goldfields (Lasthenia, another Aster) around them:                                               

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