California brickellbush is a much-branched, puberulent to thinly tomentose, perennial shrub that is woody at the base and from 20" to 40" tall.  The leaves are alternate on short petioles, simple, deltoid-ovate, and gland-dotted with crenate to serrate margins, woolly on both surfaces and much reduced above.  The yellowish-green flowering heads are discoid in leafy panicles, clustered at the tips of branchlets, and about 1/2" high.  The heads contain 8 to 18 flowers with green or slightly purplish 3-5-veined glabrous to subglabrous phyllaries, and the disk flowers all have 5-toothed cylindrical corollas with pappi of numerous white hair-like bristles.  The fruit is an achene about 1/8" long.  California brickellbush is a common shrub of dry soils on slopes and in washes in chaparral and coastal sage scrub below 8000', mostly in cismontane areas of California but occasional on the desert.  It blooms from August to October.

Click here for Latin name derivations: 1) Brickellia 2) californica.
Pronunciation: brik-EL-ee-a ka-li-FOR-ni-ka.
Click here for Botanical Term Meanings.