Lessingia. COMPOSITE. 307 



alveolate. Anthers included, tipped with a setaceous-subulate appendage. Branches 

 of the style tipped with a very short and obtuse or truncate appendage which is 

 thickly covered with hispid bristles in a tuft, and often with a central cusp, or else 

 with a longer subulate and less strongly hispid appendage. Akenes all fertile, 

 silky-villous, turbinate or cuneiform, more or less compressed. Pappus simple, 

 mostly shorter than the corolla (especially in the marginal flowers), of numerous 

 unequal rigid scabrous bristles, usually turning reddish-brown. Annual or bien- 

 nial (probably never truly perennial) herbs, all Californian, with slender branches, 

 clothed (at least when young) with flocculent more or less deciduous wool. Leaves 

 alternate, thickish, those of the branches sessile. Heads rather small. Flowers in 

 the original species yellow (sometimes turning purple in age), in most if not all the 

 others blue-purple or white. (Nerves of the corolla-lobes deeply intramarginal, the 

 aestivation induplicate up to the nerve.) Cham, in Linnsea, iv. 203 ; Gray in 

 Benth. PI. Hartw. 315, in Proc, Am. Acad. vii. 351, & viii. 634. 



1. Limb of the corolla more or less obliquely or palmately 5-parted, at least in tJie 

 marginal flowers : branches of the style very obtuse and ivith a brush-like tuft 

 of bristles, in which the minute setiform appendage (when there is any) is 

 nearly hidden. 



1. L. Germanomm, Cham. Low, much branched, spreading on the ground, 

 at first whitish-tomentose, soon greener : lower leaves spatulate and pinnatifid ; the 

 upper oblong or linear and sparingly incised or toothed, or on the branchlets small 

 and bract-like, and occasionally granulose-glandular, as are the spreading green tips 

 of the involucre : heads terminating slender divergent branchlets, 15 -25-flowered: 

 corollas yellow, the marginal ones conspicuously enlarged, palmate and forming a 

 kind of ray, their stamens sometimes abortive. Torr. Bot. Wilkes Exp. 336, t. 7, 

 (style wrongly delineated.) 



Hillsides and open grounds, rather abundant from San Diego Co. to San Francisco. Head with 

 flowers expanded about half an inch in diameter, the larger and palmate marginal corollas form- 

 ing a Centaurea-\ik.e ray. 



2. L. ramulosa, Gray. Erect and diffusely paniculate-branched, a span to a 

 foot or two in height, white-woolly, becoming naked and usually glandular with 

 age : cauline leaves oblong or lanceolate, thickish, entire or serrulate ; those of the 

 branches small, ovate or oblong, closely sessile by a cordate partly clasping base, 

 gradually reduced to minute bracts : heads terminating slender diverging branchlets, 

 10 20-flowered : scales of the involucre acute and the greenish tips appressed : 

 corollas violet-purple, the marginal ones a little enlarged and slightly oblique. PI. ' 

 Hartw. 1. c. ; Bot. Wilkes Exp. 1. c. 



Plains, &c., from near San Francisco to Mendocino Co. Heads rather smaller than of the 

 preceding. A slender and diifuse form, with smaller heads (var. tenuis), occurs from Monterey ? 

 (Douglas) to Peru Creek, at 5,100 feet, Rothrock. 



3. L. nana, Gray, 1. c. Dwarf and depressed, 1 to 3 inches high, very woolly : 

 simple or clustered stems thickly beset with the spatulate or lanceolate entire leaves : 

 heads terminal and axillary, closely sessile, 10 12-flowered : scales of the invo- 

 lucre linear-lanceolate, chartaceous and with scarious margins ; the innermost con- 

 spicuously acuminate, almost cartilaginous when dry, equalling the disk : corollas 

 (apparently purplish) little exserted, mostly regularly 5-lobed. Bot. Wilkes Exp. 

 1. c. t. 7. 



On the Sacramento, Dr. Pickering, Rev. Mr. Fitch. Foot-hills of the southern Sierra Nevada, 

 J. Muir, Dr. Rothrock. A singular little plant, with the heads comparatively large, i. e. half an 

 inch long ; the purple pappus nearly equalling the corollas, and conspicuously contrasting with 

 the white wool. It is poorly figured in the work referred to. 



