184 ERYTHEA. 
nia—a tall coarse clammy weed with inconspicuous flowers, 
and involucral bracts deciduous with the ripe seed—is the 
true M. sativa, and not native. This plant is thoroughly 
domestic in its behavior; is never found at all in the mount- 
ain districts, nor even on uninhabited islands in the Bay. 
Moreover, from those plants undoubtedly Californian to 
which it is most related it differs in having a much later 
flowering period. I have long considered this plant a for- 
eigner in California. But there is a native species so much 
like it in general appearance that no one since Nuttall seems 
to have distinguished the two. They do not grow together. 
The native is of the north, coming down from Oregon into 
Sonoma and Solano counties. Itis stout and strict, like M. 
sativa, but is vernal rather than sstival in its flowering 
period, and its fruiting bracts are persistent, so that the most — 
mature herbarium specimens retain them. I suppose this 
plant to be the M. congesta of Nuttall. At all events, it is a 
native tarweed, and one that grows preferably in the wildest 
lands, never particularly affecting waysides or cultivated 
fields; and it belongs to the open country, not to the wooded 
or hilly districts. 
A third species once mixed with M. sativa is of the wood- 
lands, an open freely branching and somewhat bushy annual, 
having the deciduous fruiting bracts of true sativa, but never 
associated with that species at all, a thorough native in all 
its manners, and flowering early in the year. This was pub- 
lished in the old Flora of North America as M. dissitiflora, 
and, after having been suppressed in the State Survey, was 
rightly restored to the rank of a species in Dr. Gray’s Syn- 
optical Flora. 
