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Tetradymia stenolepis
Mojave cottonthorn is a spiny, woolly-branched desert shrub of the Daisy family, native to the deserts where Arizona, Nevada and eastern California meet. It is a wild native rather than a common garden plant, so it is grown mainly by people restoring desert habitat.
Tetradymia stenolepis is a species of flowering plant in the aster family known by the common name Mojave cottonthorn. It is native to the deserts around the intersection of Arizona, Nevada, and eastern California, where it grows in woodland and scrub habitat on sandy and gravelly substrates. It is a bushy shrub with many branches coated in woolly white fibers and growing to a maximum height just over a meter. The narrow leaves are 2 or 3 centimeters long and harden into straight, sharp spines. Clusters of woolly leaves grow near the spines. The inflorescence bears up to 7 flower heads which are each enveloped in four or five woolly phyllaries. Each head contains up to four or five tubular yellow flowers each around a centimeter long. The fruit is a hairy achene which may be nearly 2 centimeters long, including its pappus of long bristles.
Striped cottonthorn · Longspine horsebrush · Spineless horsebrush · Hairy horsebrush · Littleleaf horsebrush · Nuttall's horsebrush · Shortspine horsebrush · Fourpart horsebrush · Horsebrush
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tetradymia stenolepis 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.
