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

Woolly desertdandelion

Malacothrix floccifera

Woolly desertdandelion
Photo: Joe Decruyenaere, CC BY-SA 2.0
Family
Asteraceae (Daisy family)
Grows as
Annual
Native range
California to Nevada

About

Malacothrix floccifera is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae known by the common name woolly desertdandelion. It is native to many of the northern and central mountain ranges of California, including the Sierra Nevada, where its distribution extends into Nevada. Its habitat includes forests, woodlands, and chaparral. It is an annual herb that produces a hairless flowering stem reaching a maximum height of up to about 42 centimeters. The fleshy oblong leaves are cut into teeth or lobes and have cottony patches of woolly fibers. The inflorescence is an array of flower heads lined with hairless phyllaries. The ray florets are up to 1.5 centimeters long and are often white, but sometimes yellow.

Other Malacothrix plants

California desertdandelion · Cleveland's desertdandelion · Snake's head · Smooth desertdandelion · Dunedelion · Santa Cruz Island desertdandelion · Junak's desertdandelion · Cliff desertdandelion · Sowthistle desertdandelion · Santa Cruz desertdandelion · Stebbins' desertdandelion · Desertdandelion

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Malacothrix floccifera by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.

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…