salt bush ~ 10/09/13 ~ Elkhorn Slough

 salt bush/fat-hen among pickleweed

Atriplex prostrata among Salicornia pacifica

Chenopodiaceae (aka Amaranthaceae)

When fellow bloggers post seasonal pictures from their neck of the woods, like the common milkweed, I'm reminded of how much I absolutely loved autumn in Ohio - the vibrant colors, the damp woodsy smell, the crisp chill in the air.  Sigh.  It's taken me a while to appreciate autumn here on the coast of CA.  I tend to seek out places, like Garzas Creek, that remind me of Ohio.  Amazingly, autumn colors occur in the slough, too, where salt water meets fresh water.

I try to take full advantage of nature center displays and will often take pictures before a hike as a take-along ID guide.  I love it when they have sample plants with identification tags... that is until what they show cannot be confirmed anywhere else.  Erg.  Assigning names for this post was a bit of a challenge since there have been recent changes among different classification systems.  Same or different species?  Who knows? Other names associated with this particular salt bush are:  A. triangularis ssp. hastata (as shown above), spearscale, A. patula ssp. hastata.  Even fat-hen refers to different kinds of plants.  Then, there's the question of is it native (as shown above) or naturalized?  Other names associated with local pickleweed are:  Pacific swampfire, S. virginica, glasswort, S. depressa.  And finally, Jepson, our CA plant bible, sticks with Chenopodiaceae as the family name.  Phew.