Thanks again to Steve Jones for identifying my mysterious yellow flower. It is Xanthisma gracilis aka Slender Goldenweed. I’m also including a few other specimens from yesterday.
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Thanks again to Steve Jones for identifying my mysterious yellow flower. It is Xanthisma gracilis aka Slender Goldenweed. I’m also including a few other specimens from yesterday.
Comments are closed.
Well, SEINet failed me this time – but only slightly. The correct binomial for slender goldenweed is Xanthisma gracile rather than X. gracilis. Picky, picky, picky.
I’d guess the Agave to be A. chrysantha (golden-flowered agave), just judging by the bluish-green cast to the leaves. Murphs have more of an olive drab cast. But to tell the truth, without a scale to see the size, it looks more like the larger, commonly-cultivated species, A. americana. The leaves are wider in the middle portion than is usual for either a murph or a golden-flowered agave. But someone would have had to have planted it there – I’ve never encountered an escaped American agave.
While I have seen one murph in the McDowells (and one patch of Toumey’s agave near Brown’s Ranch), golden-flowered is the most common agave in the area, too.