Gee, I thought it seemed too easy to spell the Latin of California poppy, but links popped right up with the former spelling, and I was too lazy to check the Flora. In fact, it has a few more consonants there at the beginning: Eschscholzia californica and no t later in the word with Munz or Peterson, though “t” is there in Parsons’s Wild Flowers of California (Dover). Oh well.
Here’s the scoop on the species:
Eschscholzia is in the Papaveraceae. There are about a dozen species, ranging from the Columbia River to northern Mexico. Nine of them are found in Southern California. The species is named for Dr. J.F. Eschscholtz, 1793-1831, who was a surgeon and naturalist with Russian expeditions to the Pacific Coast in 1816 and 1824. Most species are annual, but the most common, E. californica, can be annual or perennial, flowering the first year. In my garden, under optimal conditions, they can have a persistent root as large as a carrot, and be 2 feet tall or more. (Philip A. Munz, A Flora of Southern California.)
Pygmy poppy (E. minutiflora) has flowers as small as 1/4 inch in diameter, though E. californica has petals 2-6 cm long, while varying in color from cream to yellow, red, or golden-orange (as in the earlier photo). E. lobbii has flowers 3/4″ in diameter that range from yellow to orange.
So it is a genus that encompasses flowers that differ in size, perenniality, color, and even whether the stem has leaves on it or not.
m
At 07:51 PM 4/1/2010, Brian S. Duncan wrote:
Hello Melissa,
It was a joy to see these splashes of colour during our recent travels. Someiimes almost solitary, sometimes in great patches. Sometimes all orange, sometimes yellowish orange with different base colours. very variable in size from population to population – are there different sub-species, varieties or forms recognised by botanists? Is it confined to California – or just more common there? It grows well in Northern Ireland and seeds well each year – a good mulch crop for daffodils.
Brian