NM Rare Plants

The New Mexico Rare Plants Technical Council met on Friday morning.  As with all things impacted by Covid, the meeting was online via Zoom, which means I can eavesdrop from the comfort of home.   

Their website was upgraded this past year and is extremely handy for my monthly column on Facebook.  I highlight a rare or endangered species of NM plant on the last Saturday of each month.  That would be today and I've already uploaded my essay on Mentzelia todiltoensis to the New Mexico Native Plants group page.  Here's a copy for convenience of non-FB types. 

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Mentzelia todiltoensis

This month's rare plant of the month is... Mentzelia todiltoensis N.D. Atwood & S.L. Welsh. It also goes by the common name of Todilto stickleaf or Jemez Mountain stickleaf. It's relatively new to science, being collected in 2004 and described in 2005. SEINet tells us that Mentzelia is named for Christian Mentzel (1622-1701), a German botanist, botanical author, and physician. The specific epithet refers to the Todilto Formation, a geologic gypsum formation to which the species is restricted.

N.D. Atwood refers to Nephi Duane Atwood, born in 1938 and has been botanizing throughout the Southwest for many decades. Duane has been assistant herbarium curator at Brigham Young University in Utah and a former botanist for the U.S. Forest Service. Stanley Larson Welsh (born 1928) is an American botanist. He has worked as professor of integrative biology at Brigham Young University for 44 years and was the founding curator of that university's herbarium, which is named after him. Since M. todiltoensis was collected in 2005, our botanists were 66 and 76 years old at the time. Let's face it, this gives us old grey beards hope that we can botanize into our golden years.

One of the wonders of our interweb connected era is that with a few clicks you can find references to this rare plant on JSTOR and Encyclopedia of Life, among others. There we find the repository of the pressed and dried isotype specimen at NHMUK. That's the herbarium code for the Natural History Museum in the UK. Using their online search, it's just a hop and a skip to the digital entry with its photographs, map, and geo-coordinates. Google Maps does the rest... https://goo.gl/maps/C9fWQ5PjB2amBNBW9 showing us the type location in Torrance County southeast of Mountainair.

Not every rare plant collection will publish detailed locations. Many that I've come across writing this monthly column have the site of collection redacted to protect rare habitat.

The description from NM Rare Plants: Perennial herb; stems several from the base, white, stout, leafy, 2.2-8 dm tall, sparsely covered with minute, reflexed or spreading barbed hairs; basal leaves not persistent; stem leaves entire or with a few short laciniate [edges irregularly and finely slashed] lobes, linear to narrowly oblanceolate [with the more pointed end at the base], revolute or flat, up to 11.5 cm long, 0.5-3.8 mm wide; leaf hairs sparse, bases pustulate [bulging]; inflorescence corymbosely-branched [lower pedicels longer than the upper ones] on upper part of stems with a single flower terminating the several branches; flowers sessile or subsessile, subtended by linear, entire or remotely laciniate bracts; calyx lobes spreading or reflexed in fruit; corolla and stamens sulfur yellow when opening, quickly fading to creamy white when fully open; petals usually 10 (9-12), oblanceolate, 11-13 mm long, 2.5-4 mm wide; staminodia absent or in 1 whorl, abruptly grading to fertile stamens with progressively narrower and shorter filaments; capsules subcylindrical, 8-12 mm long, 5-6 mm wide; seeds lenticular, winged. Flowers open in the evening hours, late June through September.

The gypsum habitat in Santa Fe County is presently being surface mined at Rosario. Todilto gypsum outcrops at the southern populations in Bernalillo and Cibola counties have high quality gypsum that is not presently being mined. This plant also occurs on the low-quality gypsum of outcrop margins where it is unlikely to be impacted by gypsum mining. Additional field surveys are needed to determine the size and extent of known populations and to locate any additional populations. Sounds like a great excuse for a field trip next summer.

Mentzelias are some of my favorite species with their stellate hairs, which is what causes them to stick to your pants or socks if you walk past one. No doubt those hairs on the fruit aid in dispersal. They have a distinctive Velcro-like feel to the touch. Next time you're near the more common M. multiflora, check the surface out under a hand lens.