Commonly known as golden bartonia or Lindley’s blazingstar, Mentzelia lindleyi is an annual species native to California’s Coast Ranges near San Francisco.
Last Friday, the UBC Horticulture Training Program students were treated to a lecture about Eurasian medicinal plants and a tour of the physic garden with Ukrainian botanical pharmacologist Anastasiia Dushyna. Pulicaria dysenterica was not one of the plants highlighted on the tour, but it likely would have been, had we been growing it in the Garden.
Common names range from the poetic to the descriptive to the eminently practical. A number of common names for Kalmia angustifolia land in the latter part of the spectrum: lambkill, sheepkill, and even calfkill.
The aptly-named mayfly orchid is considered locally common in some parts of its native eastern Australia. That said, it is never so abundant as some species of its namesake: “The 2014 hatch of the large black-brown mayfly Hexagenia bilineata on the Mississippi River in the US was imaged on weather radar; the swarm flew up to 760 m (2500 feet) above the ground near La Crosse, Wisconsin, creating a radar signature that resembled a “significant rain storm”, and the mass of dead insects covering roads, cars and buildings caused a ‘slimy mess'” (mayflies via Wikipedia).
Like its close relative, the previously-featured Brunsvigia josephinae, Brunsvigia orientalis is also known as candelabra lily. Other common names for it include: red candelabra flower, king candelabra, chandelier lily, chandelier plant, and sore-eye flower.
Although first collected in 1894, Adiantum shastense wasn’t described as a distinct species until 2015. It is native to the “mesic forests of the Eastern Klamath Range, close to Shasta Lake, on limestone and metasedimentary substrates”, where a number of locally-endemic species have been recognized in the past few decades.
