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Cleomella oxystyloides
Spiny caper is a small desert annual in the cleome family, native to the Mojave Desert of California and Nevada. It grows in rocky, sandy, often alkaline soil, and the key to growing it is full sun and very good drainage.
Cleomella oxystyloides is a species of flowering plants in the cleome family, Cleomaceae, which is known by the common name spiny caper. It is native to the Mojave Desert straddling the border between California and Nevada. It grows in rocky and sandy desert habitat, often on alkaline soils. This is an annual herb producing an erect, branching stem which may reach 1.5 meters in height. The leaf is made up of three thick, firm leaflets 2 to 6 centimeters long, borne on a stout, straight petiole. The inflorescence is a dense head of flowers clustered about the stem at the leaf axils, each flower with four small yellow petals. The fruit is a small white or purple nutlet bearing the spine-like remnant of the flower receptacle.
The plant was first described as Oxystylis lutea in 1845, and placed in the monotypic genus Oxystylis.
Narrowleaf rhombopod · Bladder Pod · Shortstalk stinkweed · Chiricahua Mountain stinkweed · Spiny Caper · Mojave cleomella · Slender cleomella · Golden Bee Plant · Twisted cleomella · Jackass Clover · Rocky Mountain Beeweed · Cleomella sparsifolia
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cleomella oxystyloides by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
