Scoliopus bigelovii

I was out on the northern California coast last weekend for the excellent low tide series. Saturday night I camped at Stillwater Cove Regional Park with the plan to head up to Mendocino County the next day. The clear moonless night gave way to a cool morning and I hiked a bit up the redwood-filled canyon in the park.

Down in the forest understory I noticed pairs of variegated leaves, standing stout like small green vases and eventually found some in flower. The distinctive leaves I’d probably seen before, but I’m not so sure about the even more distinctive flower. It seemed like a new discovery. Back home, a relatively quick look through the lilies in the Jepson manual landed me on Scoliopus bigelovii, a monotypic genus of plants found on the northern California coast (Baldwin et al. 2012). Lilies, including Calochortus, have long been one of my favorite families of plants and now I have found another!

The showy flower has parts of three (indicating a monocot) and appears early in the calendar year according to Jepson and the Marin chapter of the California Native Plant Society. That latter source indicates that the plant’s leaves are still rather small when the flower appears on a long stalk that eventually nods towards the ground when the flower has been pollinated. If you're out on the redwood coast during the early months of the year, see if you can find this beauty!