Plant Species of the Borrego Desert: Polemoniaceae: Night-Blooming Linanthus species
| 
| |
| Fig. 1. The same plant of Linanthus jonesii, photographed on the same day, 17 February 2023, at two different times. Left: Pix taken at 12:50 p.m. Right: Pix taken at 5:46 p.m., 14 minutes after sunset.
Both plants photographed by Tom Chester on the Alcoholic Pass Trail. Click on the pictures to see larger versions. | ||
Most botanists are familiar with four o'clock, Mirabilis species, which are subshrubs with flowers that open in the later afternoon, at anywhere from 4:00 p.m. to dusk. Those flowers are often open in the early morning as well, and are noticeable even when closed due to the large numbers on the plants. However, very few botanists know that we have tiny annual plants that are almost completely unnoticeable during the day, but are quite noticeable near dusk when they open their flowers.
It is often quite a shock to see plants blooming at sunset that you hiked by earlier in the day without any suspicion those plants were there.
We have two species of night-blooming Linanthus, L. jonesii at lower elevations, and L. dichotomus ssp. pattersonii at higher-elevation. L. dichotomus ssp. pattersonii was only described in 2015!
The rest of this page is incomplete, since the main purpose so far was to show the plant in Fig. 1.