Per Jan Emming owner of the Destination:Forever Ranch and Gardens, a 40 acre desert botanical garden and sustainable living homestead in ...Read Morethe Arizona desert with a nursery:
Yellow bush snapdragon (Keckiella antirrhinoides) is a very cool shrub found in California, Arizona, and Baja Mexico. Closely related to the Penstemons, a genus in which it was formerly included, bush snapdragon has 3/4 inch long flowers in a pleasing shade of pale to medium yellow suffused with orange highlights on many buds. This plant is generally found in the chaparral zones of its habitat, although it also inhabits the upper margins of both the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts on more shaded northerly slopes, usually amongst rocks, where it reaches 3 to 6 feet tall. The fragrant flowers are attractive to many insects, but are especially well-adapted to be pollinated by bees. There are two subspecies, with the smaller-leaved K. a. ssp microphylla being more common in the Arizona portion of the range. I am pleased to have a few of these plants up on Archway Ridge here at D:F Ranch, where I enjoy seeing their April flowers most years.
The three fused lower petals create a landing platform for insects seeking to visit the flower for nectar. The pistil and fertile stamens curve along the top lobe of the flower, with the end of the pistil being the white structure arching towards the infertile stamen called a staminode. This hairy staminode is found in the penstemons as well, and gives them another common name of "beardtongue". I am not sure if this is correct, but it appears that the bristling staminode forces visiting insects to scramble around a bit in the flower, helping to ensure contact with the both stamens and the pistil above, which is when pollination occurs in the next flower when the insect repeats the process. Beardtongues make the pollinators work for their nectar rewards - ingenious.
Per Jan Emming owner of the Destination:Forever Ranch and Gardens, a 40 acre desert botanical garden and sustainable living homestead in ...Read More
Keckiella antirrhinoides .. is also known as, Yellow Bush Beard-tongue