Nicotiana quadrivalvis

Four-valved tobacco

Family: Solanaceae · Type: annual · Native

Four-valved tobacco is a California native annual found in the Central California Coast Ranges and Desert Ranges in open, well-drained washes and slopes at elevations below 1,500 meters. Flowering from May to October, this plant produces white flowers with green or violet tints, shaped like a star or pentagon, 20 to 50 millimeters wide. Growing 30 to 200 centimeters tall with sticky, glandular-hairy stems, it has a distinctive branching habit. Its leaves vary from elliptic to ovate, with basal and lower stem leaves short-petioled and 4 to 15 centimeters long, becoming smaller and sessile toward the stem tips. The fruit is an elongated capsule 10 to 25 millimeters long, producing tiny seeds less than one millimeter in size.

Habitat: Open, well-drained washes, slopes

Bloom period: May-Oct

Elevation: < 1500 m

Bioregions: CA-FP, D

California counties: Kern, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Riverside, San Bernardino, Sonoma, San Diego, Orange, Contra Costa, Butte, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, Siskiyou, El Dorado, Monterey, Sacramento, Lake, Tehama, Colusa, Napa, Humboldt, Mendocino, Mariposa, Tuolumne, Alameda, Tulare, San Benito, San Joaquin, Imperial, Trinity, Amador, Santa Clara, Yolo, Fresno, Madera, Calaveras, Merced

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