Mad about Madias

Madia elegans, Front yard,
from seed from Berkeley Botanic Garden

What can I say about this perfect little flower with the wonderful smell? This tarweed is out there when all the wimpy spring wildflowers have given up the ghost and is still pushing out flowers until the first fall rains. It's one of my favorites.

It's interesting for so many reasons:

• The pineapply smell that sticks to your legs when you walk through fields of tarweed.
• The resins trap insects and attract other insects who eat insects. 
• The great color and petal variations in my area: white/yellow, white/red, yellow, white.
• How did a seed or seeds of a plant of the subtribe Madiinae from the West Coast of the Americas (California?) make it to Hawaii and evolve into so many other plants.

Grace Hudson's Tarweed Gatherer
from here

Interesting places to read about the tarweeds:

• Fellow blogger who is also interested in the Madias and also dislikes stinkwort!
• Sherwin Carlquist on Tarweeds and Silverswords
• Tarweeds & Silverswords: Evolution of the Madiinae, Sherwin Carlquist, Bruce Baldwin, Gerald Carr
• Gallery of Genera of Madiinae
• Hawaiian Silversword Alliance "What are silverswords and who cares about them?" and click on adaptive radiation.

• Billy Krimmel "Divergent antiherbivore syndromes in the tarweeds" really intereseting talk from 2015 about these "sticky plants". Glandular (fall) and eglandular (spring) forms! 

From Dr. Krimmel's lecture showing who eats what and whom!

• Bug Squad.
• Judith Lowry "Tarweeds and the Fifth Season"
• Wayne's Word even got interested in the Silversword Alliance. His article on seed drift.
• Restoration Landscaping Company encourages use of tarweed.
• Edible Seeds and Grains of California Tribes and the Klamath Tribe of Oregon in the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology Collections, University of California Berkeley
• REMARKABLE VARIATIONS IN TARWEEDS 1924 Many Abnormalities Found in Plants Long Domesticated Appearin First Generation Raised in Garden, Ernest B. Babcock. Hayfield tarweed, but interesting someone was looking at variations back then. Journal of Heredity 15 (3): 132-144. March, 1924
• Flower essences?