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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
entry dated August 22, 2022, issued from near Tequisquiapan, elevation about 1,900m (6200 ft), N20.565°, W99.890°, Querétaro state, MÉXICO
LAZYDAISY
In a large, gently sloping, very overgrazed and eroding abandoned field with thin, rocky soil, here and there little islands of spiny mimosa and mesquite saplings survive awhile, until the firewood gatherers get them. Amid the lower branches of these spiny islands, herbaceous plants get established where daily herds of wandering sheep don't poke their snouts. In a certain small cluster at one edge of the desolation, the above wildflowers competed for space with grass and other herbs.
With flowering heads, or capitula, composed of "eyes" of many tiny, cylindrical, close-packed disc florets, and bearing flat, petal-like ray florets along the perimeter, the daisy-like flower structure indicates that these plants are members of the largest of all plant families, the Composite or Aster Family, the Asteraceae. The capitula of this species arise atop relatively long stems, or peduncles, and the white ray florets' rays seem particularly vulnerable to disarrangement and bruising, and early fading.
About 300 yellow disc florets occupy the typical capitulum's "eye." In the above picture, the central disc florets haven't opened yet, while the marginal ones have. About 30 white ray florets radiate from the margin.
From below, the green, bowl-like involucre is seen as densely hairy. The scale-like phyllaries constituting the involucre bear long, sharp, brownish tips, and the phyllaries' margins are thin and transparent toward their tips. The phyllaries are of different lengths, and overlap one another. All these details can be important for identification purposes.
However, still at this point we're not even close to figuring out our plant's genus. With the picture shown below, of a broken open capitulum, we start seeing basic anatomical features needed for knowing the genus.
The yellow disc florets arise from a hill-like receptacle, not a flat one or a very tall, slender one. The disc flowers are not separated from one another by papery, scale-like palea partially wrapping around the developing ovaries. Not having palea completely disqualifies our plants from belonging to various large, species-rich tribes of the Aster Family, so this is a big deal.
Looking deeper into the broken-open capitulum, we see another feature just as diagnostic as the missing paleae. The green, barrel-like, somewhat square-cornered items below the tubular disc corollas are immature, one-seeded, cypsela-type fruits. The corollas of some of the florets have broken off, leaving flat scars atop the cypselae. And atop these cypselae there are no conspicuous pappi -- no scales, no hairs, no pointy crown and no spines. There's a very low, tentative crown of very short scales, hardly a pappus at all. This reveals a lot. Also important is that apparently both disc and ray florets produce fertile cypselae.
Finally, above we see a typical leaf, deeply lobed, and appearing alone on the stem, with no other leaves arising opposite them. The leaf and stem are short hairy.
These details and more lead us to the genus Aphanostephus, the name derived from classical Greek, aphanes meaning obscure, and stephanos, crown. The name is thought to allude to the missing, or obscure, pappi. The important Swiss botanist de Candolle in 1836 gave us that name. Aphanostephus as currently defined is a small genus comprising only four species, all found only in the US and Mexico.
Species in the genus often are referred to in English as lazydasies or dosedasies, maybe because their stems spreading from taproots sometimes halfway lie on the ground. In our semiarid, highland region of central Mexico, only one species is known, and that's APHANOSTEPHUS RAMOSISSIMUS, distributed from the southwestern and south-central US south to central Mexico. Of three recognized varieties, in our area we have the variety ramosus.
Aphanostephus ramosissimus in the US usually is referred to as the Plains Lazydaisy. However, most of the species' distribution is in Mexico, and Mexico lacks the Great Plains, plus our variety occurs in habitats from weedy areas and pastures to pine and oak-pine forest, so it's best just to call it Lazydaisy.
In Gerardo García Regalado's 2015 online Plantas Medicinales de Aguascalientes, our plant -- in the book called Árnica blanca, the name Árnica being applied to many species -- is considered an important medicinal plant. The whole plant is used to relieve ulcers, tumors, hernias, muscle inflammation, swelling, stomach pain, kidney inflammation, pain in the back and legs, to relieve vaginal discharge, heal skin infections, and much more. A "tea" is made with hot water and drunk or used to wash the skin, though in the book it's unclear which problem is solved by drinking the tea or by washing with it. Definitely, though, for hemorrhoids, one sits in a pool of Lazydaisy tea.
Our Lazydaisy is such a small, unspectacular species that one might wonder what it's good for. To my mind, its main service is that of occupying challenging environments such as spiny little mimosa and mesquite islands in a vast, utterly overgrazed and abused field. It's trying to heal a great wound in the fabric of Life of Earth, in the process reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a global warming gas, while producing life-sustaining oxygen. And when it dies, whether eaten by sheep, or bitten by frost in the winter, its body will contribute enriching and stabilizing organic matter to the soil.
I hope I can manage an exit as elegant and generous as that.