We collected seed last year in the Little River Canyon and Fern Valley personnel grew this beautiful flat of flowering plants in less than a year! You can see this tough little beauty at Soldier's Delight Environmental Area west of Baltimore. Its growing in dry chemically inhospitable conditions there as it was in Alabama at the Dolomite Barrens. We collected it from a more benign site but it is still a resilient plant and I like that! I hope that I can grow it in my own garden in Adelphi where sand and gravel enforce a dry regime. It is a relatively undemanding plant and a good candidate of hot dry areas. It doesn't live too long, but seeds about in a non-invasive fashion.A quick glance at Plants Database tells me that this plant is another victim of taxonomic reevaluation and is now more accurately, Phemeranthus teretifolius. Hey, it happens in the best of families.
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I first saw them growing on a flat granite outcrop near Rolesville NC while on a field trip from NCSU in 1972. Today I found them growing on a rock outcrop near my home, not two miles away. How many years have they grown there, and I did not know it? You have to be there at the right time, as they only open for a few hours in the heat of the day.
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