December 8: Sea-myrtle
Dec. 9th, 2010 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neverspentFor a couple of years I've been noticing a particular shrub with narrow, gray-green leaves and masses of silvery tufts in late summer and autumn. There's a stand of these shrubs in a wasteland area near the hospital where the maintenance crews dump piles of construction and landscaping materials for storage, and there are a lot of them inside the great ape enclosures at the zoo.
There aren't as many sources for identifying shrubs as there are for trees and flowers, so it's harder to do a blind search. I finally found it in my new field guide: sea-myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia). It's a moisture-loving but drought-tolerant plant, also salt-tolerant which is I suppose where it got its name, and the female plants are the ones with the silvery seed fluffs.
This is what the seeds look like when they mature and start flying on the wind. Last year when I approached the chimpanzee habitat in late November, the first thing I saw was fluff in the air, almost like snow.
There aren't as many sources for identifying shrubs as there are for trees and flowers, so it's harder to do a blind search. I finally found it in my new field guide: sea-myrtle (Baccharis halimifolia). It's a moisture-loving but drought-tolerant plant, also salt-tolerant which is I suppose where it got its name, and the female plants are the ones with the silvery seed fluffs.
This is what the seeds look like when they mature and start flying on the wind. Last year when I approached the chimpanzee habitat in late November, the first thing I saw was fluff in the air, almost like snow.