Semi-desert, foothills. Openings, woodlands. Summer, fall.
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument above Yellow Jacket Canyon, October 15, 2006.

Nicotiana attenuata is an annual that can grow tall and compact or, as pictured, shrub-like to several feet tall and wide.  Leaves are long and narrow, as are the flowers.  As the photographs below indicate, the plant is hairy and somewhat glandular.  Just touching  the plant releases the familiar Tobacco smell.

The Nicotiana genus was named by Linnaeus in 1753 for Jean Nicot (1530-1600), the French Ambassador to Portugal.  Although Tobacco was know to Europeans since Christopher Columbus brought the plant to Portugal and Spain (although some historians indicate that Columbus actually threw the dried leaves he had been presented into the Atlantic), it was most often grown as an ornamental.  In 1560 Nicot brought powdered Tobacco to France from Portugal to be smoked by the Queen's son to cure him of his migraine headaches.  The migraines disappeared and Tobacco became a cure-all and then increasingly a socially acceptable pleasure.  Until, of course, the late 1800s research that showed how deadly smoking is.

John Torrey named the N. attenuata species in 1871 from a specimen that he had shortly before collected in Nevada.

"Attenuata" is from the Latin for "thin or weak".

Semi-desert, foothills. Openings, woodlands. Summer, fall.
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument above Yellow Jacket Canyon, October 15, 2006.

Semi-desert, foothills. Openings, woodlands. Summer, fall.
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument above Yellow Jacket Canyon, October 15, 2006.