cwbarrows's Favorites

Hundreds in the immediate area mixed with A. aridus. Smaller individuals did not seem to have 10 or more ovules/seeds, but larger individuals did. Mainly in sand, but also gravelly margins of sand. Plantago ovata and Cryptantha costata are also abundant.
Jepson eFlora key steps: 1', 2', 3', 4 -> Group 2
Group 2: 1', 3', 4, 5', 6', 9', 15, 16'

Followup to this post:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/147508667

The "white stuff" on the leaf does not rub off on fingers like mildew would. It instead appears to be made of a number of fine hairs, or cells (it is very hard to tell what they are for sure with just a 30x microscope).

It appears that all the leaves on this single plant were affected by this condition.

The leaves in this observation were untouched by my probe except in the last pix, where I opened a hole in the leaflet so that one could see a cross-section of the leaf.

Pix #6, 7 and 8 were taken through the eyepiece of my 30x microscope, with pix #7 and 8 being full-resolution crops.

Followup to this post:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/147508667

The "white stuff" on the leaf does not rub off on fingers like mildew would. It instead appears to be made of a number of fine hairs. And there are very small black things inside those hairs!

The first pix is is a 30X microscope view, with the camera pix through the eyepiece enlarged. I've scraped back some of the white hairs with a microscope probe, which revealed this black "surprise". The diameter of the black "surprise" is 0.25 mm. It turns out the black surprise was just minute soil particles, except for the first pix which indeed was just a hole in the leaf; see comments below.

I looked at some other leaves yesterday morning at 9:00 a.m., and when I looked at them again at 10:00 p.m. that night, 13 hours later, similar black dots had emerged from the small white hairs as the leaf dried and shrank. Those turned out to be soil particles too.