Epilobium brachycarpum
Annual fireweed
Family: Onagraceae · Type: annual · Native
Annual fireweed is a California native annual found in the California Floristic Province (excluding the Channel Islands), the Modoc Plateau, and the White and Inyo Mountains in dry or seasonally moist open woods, meadows, and prairies, especially along roadsides and streambanks at elevations up to 3,300 meters. Flowering from June to September, this plant produces white to rose-purple flowers 2 to 15 millimeters long in panicle or raceme formations. Growing with slender stems 20 to 200 centimeters tall, it is glabrous and peeling at the base while becoming strigose and glandular-hairy toward the top. Its leaves are early-deciduous, linear to narrowly elliptic, 10 to 55 millimeters long, often folded along the midrib and nearly glabrous. The fruit is 15 to 32 millimeters long, with a hair-tuft that readily detaches from the seed.
Habitat: Common. Dry or seasonally moist, often disturbed ground in open woods, meadows, prairies, esp on roadsides, streambanks
Bloom period: Jun-Sep
Elevation: < 3300 m
Bioregions: CA-FP (exc ChI), MP, W&I
California counties: Alpine, Amador, Mono, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Lake, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Napa, San Diego, Siskiyou, Fresno, Mendocino, San Mateo, Butte, Marin, Nevada, San Francisco, Tulare, Kern, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, Humboldt, Alameda, Plumas, San Benito, Trinity, Modoc, Lassen, San Luis Obispo, Mariposa, Tuolumne, Ventura, Merced, San Joaquin, Madera, Solano, Tehama, Del Norte, Stanislaus, Sutter, Riverside, El Dorado, Orange, Colusa, Sacramento, Inyo, Shasta, Monterey, Glenn, Yuba, Calaveras, Placer, Yolo, Sierra, Contra Costa, Kings
Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.