This page last modified on 26 April, 2006

While yellow to orange California Poppies (Eschscholzia californica) are a very common sight throughout San Diego County from the mountains to the coast in springtime, their two cousin species with smaller flowers - though also common - are a less obvious feature of the desert.   In March-April of 2004 and 2005 I took photographs of a few of these small-flowered plants in several parts of Anza Borrego Park, but then was slow to post examples on this website because of difficulties in identifying the species using the keys and descriptions in the Jepson Desert Manual (JDM).

Because of very light rainfall during the normal 2005-2006 rain season, there are very few examples of the usual annual flowering plants often seen in the Borrego area in years of above average rainfall.  Even so, I found quite a few (generally isolated - not in dense groups) examples of plants with quite small yellow poppy flowers. Given the very dry 2006 spring season, it was tempting to conclude that these might just be California Poppies that were barely showing very small mature flowers for lack of environmental resources. But armed with somewhat better appreciation of what's needed to identify plants in this family, I did take poppy photographs in three locations. In fact the flowers, leaves, etc that appear in the 2006 photos are so much like comparable aspects of photos taken in March of 2004 and 2005 that I made another attempt  to key the species using the JDM pages 399-400.

Because the JDM material was consistent with either E. minutiflora or E. parishii, and the SDNHM Plant Atlas database data shows examples of both in the areas where I took these photos, I went searching for more detailed clues. As in a number of similar situations, I looked for comments in the website page "Comments on the Jepson Manual and A Flora of Southern California by Munz". That page includes both original analysis by Tom Chester and Wayne Armstrong, and updated comments from Curtis Clark who authored the JDM section on Papaveraceae.  Their principal conclusion was a revision of the relevant couplet in the JDM key for Eschscholzia  on page 399, i.e.:

4. Petals 2-6 mm; lf segments gen obtuse; seeds gen oblong to elliptic ..... E. minutiflora
4'. Petals 8-30 mm; lf segments acute; seeds gen round ... E. parishii

Possibly most significant for the San Diego County deserts is that the Petals size ranges do not overlap (as they do in the JDM version). But the examples in my photographs had petal sizes spanning the range 5.5 to 8 mm. Moreover, on most of the plants, the leaves exhibited both obtuse and acute tips. After I questioned Tom Chester about this, he emphasized that all of the plants he has found in San Diego County with small petals are E. minutiflora, while all of those identified as E. parishii have petals large enough to be easily confused with E. californica.  He referred to the descriptions of E. minutiflora and E. parishii on Clark's website at
   http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/poppy/
in which the petal length range for E. minutiflora  is stated to be 3-10 mm, while that of  E. parishii is 15-30 mm. On careful reading of Clark's website overview for Eschscholzia  I found that the descriptions posted there were written after he submitted the material for publication in The Jepson Manual, and thus can be regarded as updating  the material found in JDM. 

In practice, it seems that neither the leaf tips nor the seeds are very useful in distinguishing between E. minutiflora  and E. parishii.  My photos now include examples of the fruit and seeds obtained in Rockhouse Canyon on 20 April, 2006. As may be seen, the fruit is not fully dried.  Clark describes the seeds of both species as "reticulate" (i.e. crinkly surface), yet I found that the seeds from my sample were smooth and almost perfectly spherical. But after drying for several hours in direct sunlight, they took on the crinkled appearance shown in my photograph posted here.

Finally, a distinction one finds on reading the descriptions of the species is that for E. minutiflora: "petals ... base sometimes orange-spotted", whereas for E. parishii this feature is not mentioned (implying absence??). But there were orange spots on some petals on each of the small-petal plants I photographed.

The JDM description of E. minutiflora uses the general term "Variable", whereas Clark's website description refers to several subspecies found in different zones of the California desert regions.

All of this reinforces the idea that all of the small-petal plants I photographed in the Anza Borrego Park were actually E. minutiflora.