Composite Family
Gaillardia, Gaillardia aristata, PURSH
Flower head, 3 inches or more across, is formed of a central red disk made up of many minute tubular flowers (florets), surrounded by an outer circle of long flat golden rays cleft at tips into 3 teeth. Plants are 2 feet or more high of several rough stems usually erect, but sometimes contorted. The dark green leaves are lance-shaped and rough. Grows in foothills. Blooms June-July.
Do you have one just like this in your garden? Cultivation has changed the gaillardia less than it has most native plants. It was born a handsome, showy flower. There is charm in its notched rays and in the way the red of the central disk flowers runs outward into the gold of the rays, as though the painter had been careless with his brush and lavish with his colors. It grows far beyond the limits of Colorado. In the rough breaks of the Montana hills several separate plants will spread out and interweave as a colorful mass, giving it there the name “blanket-flower.”
Composite Family
Rabbit Brush, Chrysothamnus nauseosus, H. AND C.
Individual flower heads are about ¼ inch across and double that in length, each formed of a dozen or more tubular bright gold florets closely compressed at their bases into a green involucre. Numerous such heads are clustered loosely together into round-topped groups (cymes) at the ends of stems and branches. Plant is a wide-branching, woody shrub 2-4 feet high with small, green-gray, linear leaves. Grows on dry plains and lower foothills, especially common in western Colorado. Blooms September-October.
Most of the better known composites have spreading rays—each of which is really a flower, though usually sterile—surrounding a disc of less conspicuous tubular flowers, these latter being normally the fertile ones. Sunflowers are familiar examples. Throughout some genera of this great family, and in various species of additional genera, the rays are totally absent. Rabbit brush is one of the composites whose flower heads have no rays. They are showy only because so many of them cluster together, and because each small flower contributes a speck of bright gold. They are distinctly plants of desert lands, and in the fall season each big clump is a perfect mound of color. As winter nears, the color pales and fades, though flowers hang on a long time. Rabbit brush is not a sagebrush, even though both grow on the same dry plains and both are members of the composite family.
Composite Family
Easter Daisy, Townsendia sericea, HOOK.
