Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Dozens of separate {stamens} crowd the centre of the bowl, and the {petals} around them open creased, as though they had been folded away under pressure inside the bud. Each spent flower leaves a single dry {capsule} that opens from its tip and lets out hundreds of dust-fine seeds. The genus name, published in 1845, honours an Irish astronomer and clergyman who directed the Armagh Observatory. The epithet salutes the Irish physician-botanist who collected the type in California in the 1830s and whose surname also hangs on a big-coned Californian pine. It holds dry {chaparral} slopes, canyon sides and sandy washes in the Transverse and Peninsular Ranges of southern California and northern Baja California. Its seed can lie dormant in the soil for years until chemicals from wildfire smoke wash down with the first winter rains, when it germinates in quantity. Deep {rhizomes} push it outward season after season, so one plant becomes a thicket 6 to 10 feet (1.8 to 3 m) across that resents any attempt to move it. Woody-based stems carry {glaucous} blue-grey blades 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 cm) long, cut deep into lance-shaped {lobes}. The lightly fragrant bloom, 4 to 9 inches (10 to 23 cm) across, is the largest flower of any plant native to California. Its unopened bud is smooth and hairless, while the closely related species that shares its canyons carries a coat of stiff appressed bristles there. Gardeners nickname it for a breakfast dish, a yolk of golden {stamens} ringed in white, while its usual common name recalls a Chumash leader remembered in a Ventura County canyon.

Accepted Answer

Romneya coulteri

Name That Plant #097