Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its genus honours a Greek physician to a North African king, who is said to have treated patients with the milky {latex} of a cactus-like desert plant. Its subspecies name honours Franz Xaver von Wulfen, an eighteenth-century Austrian botanist who collected the alpine flora of the Eastern Alps. Its species name is an old Greek word for a plant of hedgerows and dry, stony ground. Each tiny flower cup holds a single seed-bearing female flower ringed by several pollen-only males, a whole {monoecious} household packed into one cup. Its colour comes not from petals but from ranks of {bract}s glowing an acid, greenish-gold. Narrow blue-grey leaves wear a powdery {glaucous} bloom that rubs off at a touch. Its slender leaves wind up each unbranched stem in a tight {spiral}, packed so densely the stem looks like a bottle-brush. It grows wild on rocky hillsides and dry scrub from Italy and the Balkans through Greece and Turkey. After bloom each flower forms a small three-lobed pod that dries and bursts, flinging its seeds 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 m) from the plant. It is an upright evergreen {subshrub} 3 to 5 feet (0.9 to 1.5 m) tall and wide, holding its blue-grey stems as winter structure. Each stem lives just two years, leafing the first and flowering the second before it dies as new shoots rise to replace it. Gardeners grow it as an architectural evergreen that lifts domes of acid yellow-green over a dry sunny border in late winter, and eye clinics know its milky {latex} from published ophthalmology case series as a cause of severe corneal inflammation in people who cut it back bare-handed.

Accepted Answer

Euphorbia characias ssp. wulfenii

Name That Plant #057