Verbesina encelioides ( ) ( )

Asteraceae

• This long season annual has triangular, toothed leaves that are grayish-green in color and fetid in odor. Cronwbeard's ray flowers are a gorgeous yellow-orange, each three-notched at its end. The disk flowers are yellow, and are followed by flattened seeds covered with fine, gray-brown hairs, hence the name crownbeard. This plant colonizes disturbed roadsides and abandoned fields, from deserts clear into pines. One set of these plants germinates early, to flower between March and July. Another, large crop, germinates with the late summer rains and flowers between July through December. "Arizona Highways Presents Desert Wildflowers, 1988"
• Direct sowing/ No treatment needed/Time of planting: autumn. "Arizona Highways Presents Desert Wildflowers, 1988".
• Coarse annual; stem erect, freely branching, to 1 m. tall, striate; herbage more or less canescent; leaves 4-8 cm. long, alternate, deltoid-ovate to deltoid-lanceolate, sinuate-dentate, usually white-canescent beneath, less so and green above, the petioles without wings or auricles, inflorescence of numerous scattered heads on naked peduncles; heads 2-4 cm. wide, radiate, involucre hemispheric, herbaceous, the phyllaries in 2 or 3 series, linear to ovate; receptacle conical, the bracts membranous, becoming chaffy in age, concave and one enfolding each disc flower; ray flowers many, orange-yellow, 1-1.5 cm. long; achenes strongly flattened, more or less silky-pubescent, with 2 thin, wide, corky wings, obovate or oblong, notched at apex between wings; pappus of 2 attenuate, caducous awns arising at inner angle each wing. Weedy plant of waste ground, frequently found on moist summer floodplains of winter streams: possibly only adventive in California; across the United States, mainly in more southern areas and more common in the east. "A Flora of the Marshes of California. Herbert L. Mason".