Jump to content
UltravioletPhotography

ID: Leucophyllum or Eremophila? SOLVED: Eremophila


Andrea B.

Recommended Posts

NOTE:

I initially misidentifed this Australian Eremophila as a species of Leucophyllum. Both genera are in the family Scrophulariaceae and have a lot of similarities at first glance.

 

Our member DaveO noticed that my photographs here matched those of his posted Eremophila hygrophana and was naturally puzzled by my ID. So was I after I looked at the Dave's E. hygrophana here: http://www.ultraviol...ila-hygrophana/

 

In the course of dealing with this missed ID, many conversations ensued some of which include some tips about editing colours in Photo Ninja. There is also a long tiresome traversal of an Eremophila key.

 

My original post next with the misinformation struck out and greyed out ------

 

Blum, A.G. (2013) Leucophyllum Humboldt & Bonpland sp. (Scrophulariaceae) Barometer Bush.

 

Death Valley National Park, Furnace Creek Ranch, Furnace Creek, California, USA

29 February 2012

Wildflower

 

Synonyms:

  • Silverleaf
  • Ceniza

Comment:

The drought tolerant, shrubby Leucophyllum genus, native to the US southwest and northern Mexico, is ideal for xeriscaping in dry areas.

This particular unidentified variety has greyish-green, finely hairy leaves and tubular purple flowers.

In UV the wooly white throat hairs are preserved as UV-white, but the corolla is uniformly UV-dark.

The plant is thought to burst into bloom in advance of oncoming rainstorms, hence the common name Barometer Bush.

 

Reference:

1. Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (2013) Leucophyllum. U. of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. http://www.wildflowe...&newsearch=true

 

Equipment [Nikon D300-broadband + Nikon 105mm f/4.5 UV-Nikkor]

 

Visible Light [f/8 for 1/250" @ ISO 200 in Sunlight with Baader UVIR-Block Filter]

leucophyllumSpVisSun02292012furnaceCreekDvNpCA_34163proof.jpg

 

Visible Light [f/11 for 1/500" @ ISO 400 in Sunlight with Baader UVIR-Block Filter]

leucophyllumSpVisSun022912furnaceCreekDvNpCA_21896origPNres.jpg

 

Ultraviolet Light [f/11 for 1/250" @ ISO 800 with SB-14 UV-modified Flash and Baader UV-Pass Filter]

leucophyllumSpUVBaadSB14_022912furnaceCreekDvNpCA_21914orig01.jpg

 

Infrared Light [f/11 for 1/1000" @ ISO 800 in Sunlight with B+W 092 IR-Pass Filter]

leucophyllumSp092IRSun022912furnaceCreekDvNpCA_21923origPNres.jpg

Link to comment

Compare this to Australian eremophila, especially eremophila hygrophana that I recently posted.

 

Almost a case of "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." I wonder when these two families were last in contact or is it just convergent evolution which seems to be the default explanation when all else fails. The environment that it grows in sounds a lot like our dry hot areas in Western Australia, especially the deserts, where most of our are found. I presume that lots of more erudite scholars than I have remarked on all this before.

 

Dave

Link to comment

Merciful heavens, I've had great difficulty with this ID. :D

 

We initially thought it was some sort of Penstemon (3 lower lobes, 2 upper, tubular). Couldn't find anything matching any Penstemons or any other plant in any of my desert guides and keys including the standard Jepson reference (which covers California).

 

With the silvery-green leaves and lower leaf shapes and purple lobed tubular flowers, I finally went for the genus Leucophyllum, but couldn't figure the species. Our online Flora of North America hasn't yet posted for the native Leucophyllum, so I had no key to work with. (Which is not to say such key don't exist elsewhere.)

 

Many Leuco are native to Texas & New Mexico and Northern Mexico. So this ID made some sense as this plant was growing in a small desert garden at Furnace Creek Ranch in Death Valley National Park, California. Such gardens typically feature native plant xeriscaping to promote water conservation. For example, the little garden contained scads of Encelia farinosa, a roadside staple in the US desert southwest.

 

Well, I could go on like that. But it *never* would have occured to me that we had an Australian import in our photographic sites. And so it goes. Never assume anything at all - just make a proper ID. Anything could be growing anywhere!! :D

 

Apparently I'm not the first person ever to have trouble with the Scrophulariaceae tribes/genus Leucophylleae/Leucophyllum and Myoporeae/Eremophila. Your reference Eremophila and Allied Genera: A Monograph of the Plant Family Myoporaceae by R.J. Chinnock (2007) discusses at length the close relationship. Very interesting. (I looked at this book on Google Books.)

 

Now, can my little mystery purple tubular flower be the same as yours? The colours are different, but the flower structure is so similar.

 

I have to close down for the afternoon. But later this evening I will pursue this further. Meanwhile I've amended the title so as not to mislead anyone.

Link to comment

Sue, my eremophila expert wife, who has green fingers and grows all the flowers I photograph, thinks it could be the grey leaved form of Eremophila macdonellii. Basically, there are two forms of flower structure, this tubular one for insect pollinated eremophilas and a more open one with a pronounced "lower lip" for bird pollinated forms. We don't have an E. macdonelli in flower at the moment and the one I took at our previous property was the usual green leaved form. I'm pleased to see your UV colour is about the same as mine, I was beginning to wonder if all my UV "colours" were CA from my quartz lens. Doing the ID from photos isn't easy of course. Most eremophlia strike well from cuttings so perhaps it came back with a traveler.

 

Dave

Link to comment

Dave, thank you to you and Sue for this input. I have a few other visible light photos which might reveal some ID detail. I'll look at them and try to post some more. Do you know of an online key I could look at for Eremophila? I may not have enough in the photographs to follow a key, but I would still like to look at it.

 

Somewhere I did find a link to a US plant nursery which sells retail landscaping plants. They were offering some Eremophila. So the genus is sold and used in the garden here in the US. The variety shown had a red flower.

Link to comment
I will try to get some of Sue's contacts in the Australian Plants Society and especially their eremophila study group of which Sue is a member to have a look at your post and give their opinions. Here's a wild completely blind guess about the red flowered eremophila, it may be E. maculata or one of the many E. glabra. We don't think you will find an online key.
Link to comment

This was the response from our eremophila expert about Leucophyllum sp.

 

They belong in the family of Scrophulariaceae and there are about 14 species it the genius of Leucophylleae .

Eremophila is no longer in the family of Myoporaceae but in Scrophuliaceae.

I have seen one of the species in South Australia.

Link to comment

After a whole lotta web-searchin', I've come to the conclusion that this flower I photographed is actually the same as your Eremophila hygrophana. E. hygrophana is being sold in the US at some Arizona nurseries as a drought resistant plant similar to "Texas Ranger", a kind of Leucophyllum. The name of the cultivar for sale is E. hygrophana 'Blue Bells'. I do not know whether I have that cultivar in these photos. The point is simply that Eremophila is sold here in the US and could have been purchased for the garden at the Furnace Creek Ranch lodging in Death Valley National Park.

 

Whew !!

 

KEY: 1->14

I made the first step in the key. The sepals are not fused.

leucophyllumSpVisSun02292012furnaceCreekDvNpCA_34197origPNv2Res.jpg

Link to comment

Brilliant work.

 

This is all really creepy, my photos of E. hygrophana were taken very recently as it had just flowered for the first time here, but was a favorite from our previous place where it produced masses of quite large flowers for ages. Then I posted it and you posted your shots of the same thing without realising it, what are the chances of that? I'm struggling with the colors of my visible shots but I will wait until I get my new lens before doing a full profile for PhotoNinja. They all look too red compared to the real thing, your shot of the bush is closer to the real color. We don't have a cultivar, or more likely a selection, of hygrophana namedBlue Bells but when Eremophila become popular here and widely grown the nurseries tend to start using fancy names (the assume all customers are dumb).

 

You are going to have to plan a US-Norway expedition (preferably in September) to see our floral resources for yourselves.

Link to comment

Purples & violets & blue-violets & magentas are very difficult colours in converted cameras -

actually rather difficult in non-converted camera on occasion.

 

What happens with these colours is that they tend to photograph

as showing too much red and occasionally as too light in colour.

 

I have found that even good colour profiling and white balancing does not always

perfectly correct these colours in the converted cam.

So I typically take some reference shots with a small non-converted camera

which has had its white balance set in-camera on scene just before shooting.

That's what I need to do to be as accurate as possible for botanical work.

 

Even then, amazingly, the colour is not always quite correct.

For the Eremophila in the Death Valley garden, I was using a D3S for reference shots.

But you can see that something went slightly awry with the posted single flower shot showing the unfused sepals.

It has a touch too much magenta. Maybe I was in the shade or the light changed or who-knows-what ?? :D

 

I'm not sure of the correct name for the actual colour my Eremophila.

The colour to my eye is a dark blue-violet (or dark-purple) ?

 

The colour problem can be fixed in Photo Ninja without using a colour profile - although that is ultimately the best approach.

It is an edit worth learning for generalization to other colour problems in your photos.

Here's how:

  • Click the Color Enhancement slider.
  • On Color Enhancement page, select Base Style > Plain.
  • On the color patches, click the right-most Magenta patch.
  • Underneath the patches, move the Hue Shift slider to the left (towards blue)
    to reduce the amount of red showing in the Blue-Violet flower.
  • Underneath the patches, move the Lightness slider to the left to slightly darken the BLue-Violet tones.

To summarize in shorthand:

  • Color Enhancement > Base Style > Plain
  • Color Enhancement > Color Patch > Hue > Adjust as needed
  • Color Enhancement > Color Patch > Lightness > Adjust as needed

Other notes on the Color Enhancement sliders:

  • Saturation: This slider is very useful for reducing over-saturated reds & yellows which can obscure detail in flower photos.
  • Reference Hue: This can be used to refine the selection of the colour you wish to adjust.
    For example, in my Eremophila flower I first clicked the Magenta patch and then moved the Reference Hue slider to the left
    until the colour patch matched the (incorrect) colour of the flower. Only then did I proceed to the Hue and Lightness step described above.

Link to comment

What are the odds of us both photographing the same Aussie flower?

Really not too high if you look at the facts. :D

 

I was photographing in a garden a US National Park in a US Southwestern desert area

where the states (California, Nevada, Arizona) and the USNPs promote xeriscaping to reduce water use.

The plant nurseries in those areas promote and sell useful attractive xeriscaping plants.

The plant nurseries would naturally look for various xeriscaping plants worldwide to promote for such use.

Ergo, E. hygrophana 'Blue Bells'.

Actually, I have no idea which cultivar I photographed, but I did find that plant for sale in US nurseries.

 

I suppose I am only a tad surprised that a non-native plant was chosen for this particular garden

because there an ecological movement here in the US to use native plants

in order to prevent possible crowding out of natives.

We, like every other country, have some imported "escapes" which have taken over in some areas

to the detriment of the native flora.

 

Also found this US plant seller:

Australian Native Plants Nursery in California: http://www.australia...om/Default.aspx

Link to comment

Eremophila key: http://keybase.rbg.v...acketedkey/1541

I will try to go down it as far as I can.

 

Some hair terms. A lot of overlap.

  • arachnoid, or arachnose: with many fine, entangled hairs giving a cobwebby appearance.
  • glabrous: no hairs of any kind present.
  • lanate, or lanose: with woolly hairs.
  • pubescent: with soft, short and erect hairs - i.e. "hairy".
  • stellate, or stelliform: with star-shaped hairs.
  • tomentose: densely pubescent with matted, soft white woolly hairs.
  • woolly: with long, soft and twisted or matted hairs.

Some leaf shape terms.

  • Ovate: egg-shaped, widest at rounded base.
  • Obovate: egg-shaped, widest at rounded end.
  • Spatulate: spoon-shaped, widest at rounded end (sort of a longer version of obovate)

  • Lanceolate: long, pointed at both ends, widest in middle.
  • Oblanceolate: long, pointed at both ends, widest at end (sort of a longer version of obovate, but pointed)

FIrst occurence of E. hygrophana @ 86. Also @ 89, 190, 193.

First occurence of E. mackinlayi @ 86. Also @ 87, 190, 191.

 

01 -> 14 Sepals not fused.

14 -> 36 Vegetative parts not scaled. Does not appear to be any flattened segmented hairs.

36 -> ?? The choices are:

  • 37 Branches have branched hairs.
    I'm gonna go with 37 because my leaves appear to be more tomotose/matted/wooly than the 389 choice of pubescent (merely 'hairy'). And, Bjørn reports his photos show definitively branched hairs.
  • 389 Branches are pubescent/tomotose and leaves pubescent.

37 -> ?? Had to think for a while and review hair terms on this step. The choices are:

  • 38 Branches & leaves completely clothed in a fine to coarse tomentum.
    My leaves are def 'completely clothed' as opposed to merely pubescent.
    This choice has a further description of the tomentum as stellate, dendritic or irregularly branched.
    I cannot see that from my photos to confirm, but Bjørn reports stellate hairs.
  • 187 Branches pubescent or sometimes tomentose, leaves glabrous or pubescent.

37 -> 38 From what I can see of the tip of a developing fruit, it also looks tomentose/wooly as opposed to merely pubescent.

38 -> 39 Leaves are either alternate or spiral, not opposite.

39 -> 46 Corolla purple, stamens enclosed.

46 -> 48 Leaves alternate to spiral, not densely spiral. Sepal hairs are not longer than sepal width.

48 -> 84 Leaf shape.The choices are:

  • 85 linear to oblanceolate.
    Easy, I choose 85/oblanceolate because my leaves have a distal point.
    Some might be also lanceolate.
  • 87 ovate to obovate, spatulate or round.

84 -> 85 Leaves are not densely spiral nor linear.

85 -> 86 Leaves not densely spiral nor linear.

86 -> ?? The choices are:

  • Branches/leaves with emergent glandular hairs above tomentum -->> E. hygrophana ?
  • Branches/leaves lacking glandular hairs -->> E. mackinlayi ?
     
    Bjørn reports his photos show no glandular hairs.

86-> E. mackinlayi

 

******

 

Let me check some characteristics mentioned in other paths of the key.

FIrst occurence of E. hygrophana @ 86. Also @ 89, 190, 193.

First occurence of E. mackinlayi @ 86. Also @ 87, 190, 191.

 

84 -> 87

Let's take the alternate path: leaves ovate/obovate, spatulate or orbicular.

I suppose we can go with this choice of obovate or spatulate, but it is a stretch IMHO.

Those leaf tips are just not rounded. But proceed...

87 -> Here come the hair details again.

  • Indumentum of leaves/branches not glandular --> E. mackinlayi
  • 88 Indumentum of leaves/branches a mix of glandular & non-glandular.

87 -> 88

I'll go with the mixed hair types, just to see where it leads.

88 -> 89

Abaxial leaf surfaces are not almost glabrous or less hairy than top side.

My leaves def have 'similarly clothed' surfaces.

89 -> Back to the leaf shapes and emergent hairs.

  • leaves obovate/spathulate, emergent branch/leaf hairs few/absent, some branch hairs glandular -->> E. hygrophana
  • 90 leaves ovate to round, emergent hairs numerous

And so this path also needed a characterization of the hairs as either glandular or non-glandular.

And this path required the leaf choice for either E. mac or E. hygro be obovate/spatulate.

 

***********

 

37 -> 187 Let's take the alternate path: branches pubescent or sometimes tomentose, leaves pubescent.

I can go with the tomentose branches, but the pubescent leaves is a stretch IMHO.

My leaves have a matted hairy look. But proceed...

187 -> 188 Back to the fruit surface.

Fruit stellate/tomentose, surface completely obscured.

188 -> Back to the leaf shape

  • 191 leaves obovate/spatulate (leads to E. mackinlayi, E. hygrophana, E. ovata, E. strongylophylla, E. warnesii.
  • 189 leaves linear to oblanceolate

188 -> 189

Leaves scattered? to spiral and oblanceolate? OK - as opposed to very densely spiral and linear.

189 -> 190 Oh geez. Here is the glandular hair choice again and our choice of E. mackinlayi or E. hygrophana.

 

**********

 

In photos of E. warnesii the leaves seem way too wide.

Also seems to be more spotted in the corolla throat.

 

Photos of E. ovata show the leaf petiole and much less crowded leaves. So no.

 

Photos of E. strongylophylla show the leaves being too round/wide and not as grey-green.

Shrub shape seems too round.

Link to comment

Words of wisdom from Sue, our eremophila expert grower, warnesii is very rare (that means we don't have it and have never seen it on sale even from specialised nurseries), we DO have strongylophylla (another favorite) and I'll try and get some shots. Just to complicate matters some eremophila have a green and grey leaf versions!

 

Back to dumb words from me... hygrophana was first described by Chinnock in 2000 and is not listed in the California website you quoted. As far as I know it has not been given a Common Name here. Another book (Australia's Eremophilas changing gardens for a changing climate N Boschen, M Goods & R Wait, Bloomings Books 2008) says of hygrophana "it is a similar species to E. mackinlayi and E. strongylophylla.

 

Thank you for your notes on color, I make frequent use of the mini Color Checker, I am still learning to make the best of PhotoNinja, having been bred on ACR. You are right about purplish colours being difficult, in fact when I go to print them I usually get "Out of Gamut" greying out of a lot of the blue-purple range. Colour Management makes my head hurt so my acid test is to make a print and hold it by the side of a flower if it's in the garden. But then I remember I have typical male pattern red-green colour deficiency (never could see some titration end-points). Ho Hum.. Looks like I'll have to remember to take my K-7 unconverted body and take comparative visible shots.

Link to comment

If you are really into getting accurate colours, do use a standard (non-converted) camera for reference shots. Take one first with the Passport colour checker then remove the Passport and immediately shoot another frame. In PhotoNinja, use the colour patch image to build a session profile for your camera. The program has built-in support for making the profile so this is a quick and easy adjustment step. Do note you should set incoming light source profile to 'none' when you build and use the profile later.

 

Also note that working in the widest possible colour space until the very last step in which the image is to be viewed onscreen/web or printed.

Link to comment
Bill De Jager

I was photographing in a garden a US National Park in a US Southwestern desert area

where the states (California, Nevada, Arizona) and the USNPs promote xeriscaping to reduce water use.

The plant nurseries in those areas promote and sell useful attractive xeriscaping plants.

The plant nurseries would naturally look for various xeriscaping plants worldwide to promote for such use.

Ergo, E. hygrophana 'Blue Bells'.

Actually, I have no idea which cultivar I photographed, but I did find that plant for sale in US nurseries.

 

I suppose I am only a tad surprised that a non-native plant was chosen for this particular garden

because there an ecological movement here in the US to use native plants

in order to prevent possible crowding out of natives.

We, like every other country, have some imported "escapes" which have taken over in some areas

to the detriment of the native flora.

 

As a Calfornia native plant enthusiast I can offer a little perspective on this. Certainly when I became interested in native plants in the 1970s the native plant movement here in the San Francisco Bay Area was still in a very early stage. We had the California Native Plant Society, founded on a few years earlier, and its annual plant sale in Tilden Park, Berkeley. At that time, native plants were very nearly absent in landscaping except for a very few species such as Monterey (insignis, radiata) pine and Monterey cypress. Meanwhile, exotics were taking over more and more areas of natural land and nothing was being done about it. Few knew that the grasses on the hillsides were nearly all exotic, though that issue goes back around 120-150 years. Even the National Park Service got into the act, planting exotic ice plant (a common coastal exotic here, often assumed to be native) at its new Pt. Reyes National Seashore, resulting in the destruction of large areas of pristine dune vegetation as the exotic spread and formed a large monoculture over time.

 

At the time I was excited about the plants I loved but depressed by their decline and public lack of interest and knowledge on this topic. My refuge was habitats that still had their native flora almost entirely intact, such as the High Sierra.

 

Fast forward 40 years and things have significantly improved. There is much more interest in native plants throughout California and much more awareness that many exotics are invasive in our area. Native plants are more common in the nursery trade but still are very much in the minority. It does not help that many of the more desirable species, being adapted to the Mediterranean climate of most of the state, do poorly in conventional summer-water gardens. Xeriscapes are more common than before but are still a small minority of gardens.

 

On a national level, the federal government has been striving to effectively address the problem of exotics and the National Park Service is probably the best agency in this regard. So is seeing an Australian Eremophila in a national park garden a surprise? Yes and no. If it was planted a few decades ago and has persisted all this time, then no surprise at all. Also no surprise if the concessionaire planted it on their leased property, though the Park Service really should carefully scrutinize such plantings. It the plant is a recent planting by the Park Service then that would be a great disappointment. Perhaps it was mislabeled in the nursery and nobody confirmed its identity independently.

 

Andrea, I suggest you contact Death Valley National Park directly and let them know of this find. They will likely be grateful to you but not pleased with themselves. Thanks for being very persistent and getting this plant ID straightened out!

Link to comment

Bill,

Your experience in California with exotics and the slow rise of the movement to plant endemic species mirrors that here in Australia, the land of disastrous introductions - white men, rabbit, fox, cat, cane toad and pinus radiata plantations! Our "Grow Aussie Native Plants" campaign only really got going about 50 years ago but it makes a lot more sense these days with increasingly dry and hot summers even in the south.

Link to comment

This Eremophila was photographed on the property of the Furnace Creek Ranch in DV Nat Park. This hotel and other national park lodgings are run by a hotel management company (Xanterra in some parks) and not by the National Park Service. So that likely accounts for some non-native landscaping plants in the garden by the swimming pool.

 

To their partial credit, there was some attempt at California natives (previously mentioned Encelia). And it was definitely a xeriscaped garden with succulents, aloes, palms and rocks/pebbles as ground cover.

 

Given that it gets as high as 120*F in Death Valley in the summer, I suppose it is a wonder any garden attempts are made at all around the lodgings there. :D Thankfully we were there at the end of February when it barely went past 70*F. That was still too hot for Bjørn !! :lol:

Link to comment

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...