FRIENDS OF EDGEWOOD NATURAL PRESERVE
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FRIENDS OF EDGEWOOD NATURAL PRESERVE
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A CLOSER LOOK AT TIDY TIPS By Bob Young This is the eighteenth of a series of articles describing the flowers pictured in our wildflower brochure. —ed.
Tidy Tips (Layia platyglossa) is shown in the brochure “Common Native Wildflowers of Edgewood,” published jointly by the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society and Friends of Edgewood Natural Preserve. In Mary Elizabeth Parsons’ book, The Wild Flowers of California, she writes “…among the most charming of our flowers are the beautiful tidy-tips.” Layia platyglossa is an annual plant in the Sunflower family. Its daisy-like flowers are 1 ˝ to 2 inches across with yellow petals that have white tips. It blooms in Edgewood grasslands in April and May, varying in height from a few inches to about six inches. It is found from northwestern to southwestern California, and into the Central Valley, under 6000 feet elevation. The specific epithet platyglossa comes from two Greek words: platy, meaning wide, flat, or broad and glossa, meaning the tongue or language. In Helen Sharsmith’s book Spring Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Region, she refers to platyglossa as “flat tongue, for the ray-flowers.” The genus name honors George Tradescant Lay, an early 19th century English plant collector. He was a naturalist on the English sailing ship Blossom that left England in 1825 and returned in 1828. The Blossom was on a voyage of exploration, and also was in support of another English party that was searching for the fabled Northwest Passage. Lay and others on the ship collected extensively on South Pacific islands, Hawaii, Alaska, California, China, Mexico, and South America. A few years after the return of the Blossom, Lay was back in China, not as a naturalist but as a missionary. Shortly before his death in 1841, he published a book about the moral, social and literary character of the Chinese. |
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