Plant Wiki

The open plant encyclopedia

Know any plant.
Grow it well.

Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.

  • 13,000+plants with full pages
  • 365,000+plant species worldwide
  • 220+countries covered

Common in

See all

The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.

What do you want to do?

Popular plants

Browse all plants

See them in 3D

All plants in 3D

Browse plants

Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.

Plant Wiki › Browse plants

Dwarf dwarf-cudweed

Hesperevax caulescens

Also called Hogwallow Sea Star

Dwarf dwarf-cudweed
Photo: Ken-ichi Ueda, CC BY 4.0

A small annual wildflower of California's vernal pools, forming a flat, star-shaped rosette that grows in seasonally wet mud along pool edges as the pools dry. It is a delicate native that needs seasonally wet, then dry, conditions and is not commonly grown in gardens.

Family
Asteraceae (Daisy family)
Grows as
Annual
Light
Full sun
Water
Grows in seasonally wet mud that dries out by late spring; in cultivation, keep moist during growth and let dry down later.
Soil
Seasonally wet, clay-rich or muddy soil that dries out in late spring.
How easy
Hard
Native range
California

About

Hesperevax caulescens is a small flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. One common name for the plant is hogwallow starfish, as it is a somewhat flat, star-shaped plant which grows in mud. Another common name is dwarf dwarf-cudweed, as the three members of genus Hesperevax are known as dwarf-cudweeds and this species is smaller than the others. It may also be called involucrate evax, since its former Latin name was Evax involucrata. This annual plant is a member of the vernal pool plant community in California, where it is possibly an endemic species, although its range might extend into Baja California. The hogwallow starfish radiates pale green spoon-shaped leaves in a basal rosette and extends a short erect stem. The flowers are less than two millimeters wide. This species grows along the outskirts of vernal pools in areas which have dried.

Other Hesperevax plants

Stemless dwarf-cudweed · Erect dwarf-cudweed · Dwarf-cudweed

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Hesperevax caulescens 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.

Credits & terms

Identify a plant

Point at a leaf or flower and snap. One plant in frame works best.

Your photo
Starting camera…