Lomatium utriculatum

Bladder parsnip

Family: Apiaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Bladder parsnip is a California native perennial found in the California Floristic Province and Desert Mountains in open grassy slopes, meadows, and woodland at elevations of 50 to 1,550 meters. Flowering from February to May, this plant produces yellow flowers in compound umbels with 5 to 20 rays spreading up to 12 centimeters wide. Growing with slender stems 10 to 50 centimeters tall, it has a taproot and spreads with leafy stems that are glabrous to densely puberulent. Its pinnately dissected leaves have multiple linear segments 2 to 25 millimeters long, with wide-sheathing petioles up to 10 centimeters long. The fruit is an oblong to obovate structure 5 to 15 millimeters long with thin wings wider than its body.

Habitat: Open grassy slopes, meadows, woodland

Bloom period: Feb-May

Elevation: 50-1550 m

Bioregions: CA-FP, DMtns

California counties: San Bernardino, Los Angeles, San Benito, Tuolumne, Lake, Kern, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Tulare, Plumas, Ventura, Inyo, Riverside, Santa Barbara, Fresno, Madera, Orange, El Dorado, Amador, Placer, Calaveras, Yolo, Nevada, Colusa, Sonoma, Marin, Napa, Sacramento, Merced, Solano, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Butte, Trinity, Tehama, Stanislaus, Glenn, Yuba, Mariposa, Siskiyou, Alameda, Humboldt, Shasta, Santa Cruz, Mendocino, Contra Costa, Del Norte, San Diego, Sutter, Lassen, Mono, Modoc, San Joaquin

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.