Wild Buckwheat
Eriogonum Fasciculatum, Bentham. Buckwheat Family
Shrubby; very leafy. Leaves.—Alternate; nearly sessile; narrowly oblanceolate; acute; tomentose beneath; glabrous above; three to nine lines long; much fascicled. Flowers.—White or pinkish; in densely crowded compound clusters; several perianths contained in the involucres. Involucres.—Campanulate; five- or six-nerved and toothed; two lines high. Perianth.—Minute; of six nearly equal segments. (See Eriogonum umbellatum.) Hab.—Santa Barbara and southward; east to Arizona.
The wild buckwheat is a characteristic feature of the southern landscape. It is a charming plant when in full bloom, and its feathery clusters of pinkish-white flowers show finely against the warm olive tones of its foliage. It is a very important honey plant, as it yields an exceptionally pure nectar and remains in bloom a long time. Growing near the sea, it is often close-cropped and shorn by the wind, and then it quite closely resembles the Adenostoma, or chamisal.
Another very widely distributed and common species is E. nudum, Dougl. Every one is familiar with its tall, green, naked, rushlike stems, bearing on the ends of the branchlets the small balls of white or pinkish flowers. Its leaves are all radical, smooth green above and densely white-woolly beneath.