Wild Buckwheat—Eriogonum racemosum.
Alpine Smartweed—Polygonum bistortoides.
There are two kinds of Grayia, named after Asa Gray; low shrubs; the stamens and pistils in separate flowers, on the same or on different plants.
Hop Sage
Gràyia spinòsa
(G. polygaloides)
Greenish, with red bracts
Spring
Calif., Nev., Utah, Ariz.
An odd and beautiful desert shrub, about three feet high, very dense in form, with interlacing, angular, gray branches, spiny and crowded with small, alternate, toothless leaves, pale-green and thickish, but not stiff. The flowers are small and inconspicuous, but the pistillate ones are enveloped in conspicuous bracts, which enlarge and become papery in fruit, something like those of Docks, and often change from yellowish-green to all sorts of beautiful, bright, warm tints of pink, or to magenta, and the branches become loaded with beautifully shaded bunches of these curious seed-vessels, giving a strange, crowded look to the shrub, which in favorable situations, such as the Mohave Desert, makes splendid masses of color, especially when contrasted with the pale gray of Sage-brush.
There is only one kind of Cycloloma; leaves alternate, smooth or downy, irregularly toothed; flowers perfect or pistillate, with five sepals, five stamens, and two or three styles; fruit winged horizontally.
Tumbleweed
Cyclolòma atriplicifòlium
Purple or green
Summer
West of Mississippi River
Very curious round plants, six to twenty inches high, usually purple all over, sometimes green and rarely white, giving a brilliant effect in the fall to the sandy wastes they inhabit. They are a mass of interlacing branches, with hardly any leaves, except at the base, and very small flowers. When their seeds are ripe, and they are dry and brittle, the wind easily uproots them and starts them careening across the plain, their seeds flying out by the way. They turn over and over and leap along, as if they were alive, bringing up at last against a wire fence, or some such obstacle, where perhaps a traveler sees them from the train and wonders at the extraordinary-looking, dry, round bunches. There are other Tumble-weeds, such as Tumbling Mustard, Sisymbrium allissimum, and Amaránthus álbus, not of this family.
Hop Sage—Grayia polygaloides.