Atriplex serenana |
Atriplex fruticulosa |
|||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
bracteate orach, bractscale, saltscale, stinking orach |
ball saltbush, ballscale, little oak orach |
|||||
Habit | Herbs, annual, erect or sprawling, usually branched often forming tangled mats to 10 × (3–)5–20 dm, ascending branches sparsely scurfy. | Herbs, perennial, decumbent-spreading to erect, fruticose at base, 0.5–3(–5) dm. | ||||
Stems | simple or much branched, scurfy, finally glabrate. |
|||||
Leaves | many, subsessile or very short petiolate; blade subconcolorous, lanceolate to oblong, elliptic, or oval, (8–)10–30(–40) × 3–12(–15) mm, margin sharply dentate to entire. |
numerous, proximal ones mostly short petiolate, distal ones sessile; blade narrowly lanceolate to elliptic, 5–15(–20) × 2–4 mm, mostly acute at both ends, margin entire, densely gray scurfy. |
||||
Staminate flowers | in glomerules in terminal spikes or panicles 3–20 cm, or reduced to solitary, rounded, terminal glomerule. |
in short, dense, interrupted terminal spikes. |
||||
Pistillate flower(s) | in small clusters, axillary. |
in small, axillary clusters. |
||||
Seeds | brown, 1–1.3(–1.5) mm. |
dark brown, 1.4–1.7 mm. |
||||
Fruiting | bracteoles sessile or subsessile (stipe to 1 mm), cuneate-orbicular to obovate, somewhat compressed, 2.1–3.5 × (1.7–)2–3.7 mm, united 1/2 of length, margin sharply and often slenderly toothed beyond middle, faces often rather strongly veined, smooth or with 1 or more slender or flattened appendages. |
bracteoles sessile or subsessile, broadly obovate to suborbicular in profile, slightly if at all compressed, 3–5 mm and almost as wide, united to middle, narrowly margined and acutely dentate beyond middle, sides tooth-crested or muricate, ± indurate. |
||||
2n | = 18. |
|||||
Atriplex serenana |
Atriplex fruticulosa |
|||||
Phenology | Flowering summer–fall. | |||||
Habitat | Clay or alkaline soils, open site, shrublands | |||||
Elevation | 700+ m (2300+ ft) | |||||
Distribution |
CA; NV; nw Mexico
|
CA
|
||||
Discussion | Varieties 2 (2 in the flora). (Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.) |
H. M. Hall and F. E. Clements (1923) indicated a close relationship between Atriplex fruticulosa and A. coulteri. Both species are described as being perennial by D. Taylor and D. H. Wilken (1993), wherein A. coulteri was inadvertently left out of the key. Perhaps the size of the fruiting bracteoles, 3–5 mm in A. fruticulosa and 2–3 mm in A. coulteri, is diagnostic. Hall and Clements pointed to differences in habit of the plant, which vary from the erect woody forms represented by the type collection (and known only from them?) to the evidently more common phase in which the leafy stems are spreading or prostrate, and herbaceous throughout except at the very base, where they are attached to a more or less woody root crown. In some fruiting bracteoles the faces are bicristate as in the thornberi phase of Atriplex elegans, in which the teeth radiate around much of the bracteole margin, not mainly from above the middle as in the present species. (Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.) |
||||
Key |
|
|||||
Source | FNA vol. 4, p. 361. | FNA vol. 4, p. 363. | ||||
Parent taxa | Chenopodiaceae > Atriplex > subg. Obione > sect. Obione > subsect. Arenariae | Chenopodiaceae > Atriplex > subg. Obione > sect. Obione > subsect. Arenariae | ||||
Sibling taxa | ||||||
Subordinate taxa | ||||||
Name authority | A. Nelson ex Abrams: Fl. Los Angeles, 128. (1904) | Jepson: Pittonia 2: 306. (1892) | ||||
Web links |