salt bush/fat-hen among pickleweed
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.
