Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Every young shoot, leaf underside and flower bud is plated with minute shield-shaped {peltate} scales that give the whole plant a dull metallic sheen and rub off as rusty dust. The flowers carry no petals at all: the fragrant four-lobed cream tube that does the advertising is the {calyx}, and that same tube later thickens into the fleshy coat around a single dry {nutlet}. It runs its own nitrogen supply from root nodules stocked with filamentous Frankia bacteria, an {actinorhizal} partnership rather than the rhizobial one legumes rely on. The genus name splices the Greek word for the olive onto an old Greek name for the chaste-tree, a nod to the silvered, olive-like cast of the foliage. Leaves are set singly along the shoot rather than in facing pairs, and each flower carries both {stamens} and style, so a lone bush fruits without a partner. The species epithet is Latin for sharp-pointed, earned by the stiff woody spines that lurk in the leaf {axils} of older wood. Its leathery {evergreen} leaves, 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) long, have distinctly {undulate} crimped margins and a dull silvery underside freckled with brown scales. It comes from mountain scrub and woodland margins in China and Japan, and in gardens shrugs off salt spray, wind exposure and thin poor soils. Through October and November, when the garden has all but shut down, flowers barely 0.4 inch (10 mm) long pump out a heavy gardenia-sweet scent that most people smell long before they find the source. Its red, silver-flecked fruit does not colour until the following spring, and birds carrying that seed have turned the plant into a forest-edge invader across the southeastern United States. Gardeners in the American South know it by a name that welds its silver scales to its thorns, and curse the reverting all-green shoots that can add more than 3 feet (1 m) in a single season and swamp the gold-splashed foliage they bought it for.

Accepted Answer

Elaeagnus pungens 'Maculata'

Name That Plant #071