Limestone dudleya

Dudleya calcicola Bartel & Shevock, Madroño 30: 210, fig. 1. 1983

Caudices simple or 2-50-branched, 1-2 cm diam. Leaves: rosettes 1-50; blade oblong-lanceolate or tapering from base, subterete, 1-8(-10) × 0.3-1.3(-1.6) cm. Inflorescences: floral shoots 3-18(-25) × 0.1-0.5 cm; proximalmost leaf blades 4-20 mm; branches 2-4, often simple, sometimes 1-2 times bifurcate. Pedicels 1-8 mm. Flowers: calyx 3-7 × 3-7 mm; petals connate 1-3 mm, straw yellow or pale yellow, red-lineolate or not, 9-15(-18) × 2-4.5 mm, tips strongly outcurved. 2n = 34.

Flowering late spring-early summer. Limestone and metamorphics in chaparral and pinyon-juniper woodland; 500-2000 m; Calif.

Subspecies calcicola is known from a dozen or more places in Inyo, Kern, and Tulare counties, in the southern Sierra Nevada, and appears not to be rare. It forms clumps to 1.5 dm in diameter.

Although cyme branches in wild plants commonly are simple, as in most other subspecies, K. M. Nakai (1987) found that in cultivated plants they became one to two times bifurcate in subsp. calcicola but not in the other subspecies.