For this field trip, we went to ring mountain!!! WOO. The environment characterized by this place is that it is primarily a serpentine grassland. This means that there weren’t a whole lot of trees sitting around. In fact, it was so hilly and grassy I thought that I was in Scotland. There were even houses nearby that sort of resembled castles. I almost felt like I was a serf heading out into the fields as the guards in the castle watch vigilantly over me. We even saw a huge rock that sort of resembled Stonehenge on one part of the trail.
Anyways, one of the defining characteristics of a serpentine grassland is the serpentine! Serpentine rock is the state rock of California and it covers a relatively large portion of the state. It has a characteristic greenish appearance that is caused by all the heavy metals that reside inside of it. In particular, this rock is also known to contain asbestos and is generally not conducive to human or plant health. As a result, we saw many patches of land that had plants of reduced size or none at all. It requires very specific adaptations for plants to tolerate this sort of environment. Unfortunately for us, it also means that not many of the plants are edible :'(
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Purple Vetch
Vetch rhymes with wretch which is what you will probably do if you eat this plant. However, even though we can’t eat purple vetch’s, the purple vetch still helps provide us with food! This plant is sometimes used by farmers in their crop rotations of cereal grains because it helps to increase the fertility of the soil by fixing nitrogen and it can outcompete weeds once established. In addition, Native Americans also had their horses smoke the stuff to increase their endurance. Poor horses :'(.
Plant description: The purple vetch (Vicia americana) has a sprawling sort of habit. Some species in this genus have also been known to be climbers. The stem of the plant has a characteristic rigidness to it with defined edges. The leaf arrangement of the plant is evenly pinnate and their margins are entire with a slightly ovate shape. The tips of their leaves are also pretty distinctly acute. They have a raceme inflorescence. The flowers themselves are purple and around 20 mm long. The fruits are dehiscent and have a stalked base with the classic legume carpel covering.
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Tidy Tips
Tidy tips are perhaps one of the most fun flowers that I’ve seen on our trips. They have a characteristic look on their petals with white tips and a yellow center. It almost looks like a big target that I would hang up at an archery range. No doubt this coloring helps to attract many insect pollinators. Although it might take a lot of effort, the seeds of these plants are actually edible. They are supposedly like sunflower seeds which tidy tips are relatively closely related to. The fact that these two flowers are closely related is not surprising at all. Tidy tips have that classic head inflorescence of an Asteraceae.
One other fun fact about tidy tips is that even though they are native to California, they are actually more popular in British gardens. For whatever reason, the Brits love these things – that is, if they can get them to grow -.
Plant description (Layia Platyglosssa): The habit of this plant is that it is generally herbaceous, erect, and glandular but not smelly. It actually has a pretty variable height from 3 to 70 cm tall, but most of the flowers we saw were pretty short due to the serpentine soils. The leaves of the plant are sessile meaning they have no petiole. They also have an oblanceolate shape and an odd sort of proximally lobed pattern to them. The corolla of the ray flower for each head is distally white and proximally yellow. They have 1 phyllary per ray flower. In addition, the receptacle of the flower is flat and minutely hairy. The fruit is small and generally scabrous and sparsely hairy.
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The last plant that I will be showing you goes by the name of the false babystars. I don’t know why these flowers are false, nor why they resemble a ‘babystar’. I also don’t understand what a babystar is. Is it that giant head that always comes out in the Teletubbies TV show? If so, then that is just downright creepy.
Unfortunately, these flowers don’t have much else significant about them other than there decorative purpose. Pro tip, you can put these smaller flowers on the edge of your garden and they make a nice lining that will complement your other flowers in the center of your garden. They come in such a variety of candy colors that you should be able to find a color that matches your garden well.
Plant description (Leptosiphon androsaceus): This plant is in the Polemoniaceae family. The habit of the plant is that it is a short and hairy annual. Its stem length is around 20 cm although the ones we say are a bit shorter. The leaves had an almost linear appearance but they are actually just very deeply lobed. It has a head inflorescence. The flowers are soft pointed. The corolla can come in many different colors like violet, white and yellow. The petals are also salverform meaning they are sort of fused to form a tube. Lastly, the flowers are usually abaxially glabrous.
