Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its nearest relative on Earth grows more than 6,000 miles (9,700 km) away in the mountains of the Caucasus, the two of them all that is left of a lineage once spread across the northern forests. The flowers wear no petals at all: pollen sheds from slack {catkins} while separate seed-bearing flowers on the same {monoecious} shrub each ripen into one hard {nut} cradled in a woody cup of fused scales. It holds ground on {serpentine} soils whose magnesium and heavy metals shut most other woody plants out. It is {endemic} to the Klamath-Siskiyou mountains of northwestern California and southwestern Oregon, on rocky slopes between about 2,000 and 7,000 feet (600 to 2,100 m). Its winter buds crowd together in a cluster at the very tip of each twig instead of standing one to a shoot. Silky {stipules} up to an inch (2.5 cm) long clasp each new shoot in spring and glint like gold foil before they wither away. The leathery blades run 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 cm) long with a dozen or more pairs of straight {veins}, each one running unbranched to a coarse tooth on the margin. It stays a low spreading {shrub} 2 to 6 feet (0.6 to 1.8 m) tall, creeping outward by underground {rhizomes} into broad thickets, while almost all its relatives grow into trees. Its genus name is simply the word Roman writers used for the tree itself, carried unchanged into botany. At a glance the foliage reads as sweet chestnut, toothed and parallel-veined, not like the lobed blades its own kin usually carry, and that is how field botanists pick it out of the mountain scrub. Its everyday name pairs the hoofed browser that hammers its thickets hardest with the tree group it belongs to.

Accepted Answer

Quercus sadleriana

Name That Plant #051