The Siskiyou Wild Rivers area in southwestern Oregon is one of the few regions in the lower 48 with such extraordinary biodiversity. Look closely, this week's featured wildflower is actually a collection of hundreds of flowers.

California Coneflower, Rudbeckia californica var. glauca

From the Umpqua River Valley and well south into its namesake state, California Coneflower (Rudbeckia californica var. glauca) graces southern Oregon serpentine fens and wet meadows in mid summer, in some years extending well into August in the higher elevations.

One outstanding place to view Coneflowers as late as August is Snow Camp Meadow, located on the Gold Beach Ranger District in the Windy Valley Roadless Area, in the uppermost headwaters of southwest Oregon’s Pistol River.

Because of its larger size, a close up view of this flower well reveals how the “individual” sunflower is really a collection of multiple (even hundreds) of smaller, fertile flowers as contained on the thimble, or cone-like head. Look really close, as these small flowers also have petals! The petals are but an outer sleeve or ring with five tiny lobes that appear as tiny pentagons when you look at the disc flowers straight on.   Additionally, the obvious petals that most people only observe, are also individual “ray” flowers—but are sterile in this species of sunflower, and thus these particular ray flowers, do not produce pollen or seeds. In this species the number of bee attracting ray flowers (yellow petals) ranges from 8 to as many as 21!

As somewhat romanticized by Lewis J. Clark in his classic 1976 Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest:

"The generic name ‘Rudbeckia’ recalls a pleasant bit of history.  The young (Carl) Linnaeus, as an impoverished student, was taken into the household of the Professor of Botany at Uppsala, Olaf Rudbeck.  The kindly old professor found a tutoring job for the ragged and hungry young man, and later launched him on his remarkable career--initially as a plant collector in Lapland.  Many years later, when Linnaeus had carved an immortal name in science, he honored his old benefactor by naming the genus of attractive plants, Rudbeckia."