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Bahia dissecta Foothills,
montane. Disturbed
areas, meadows. Summer, fall. Bahia dissecta is fairly common in late summer and early fall growing along roadsides and on dry, gravelly or sandy, open sites in the lower mountains. It has an open, airy growth pattern, grows from 8 to 36 inches tall, and has bright golden/yellow flowers, almost always with rounded, short overlapping ray flowers and a large mound of disk flowers. "Bahia" is for Juan Francisco Bahi, Professor of Botany in Barcelona, Spain in the 19th century. (More biographical information.) "Dissecta", "cut into pieces", refers to the finely cut leaves which occur sparsely along the red/brown stems and more noticeably at the base of the stem. The basal leaves in the picture at left are in their fall maroon.
The genus was named in 1816 from a specimen collected in Chile, and Augustus Fendler collected the first plants of this species of Bahia near the Mora River in New Mexico in about 1846. This species was at first named Amauria dissecta by Asa Gray in 1849; in 1889 Britton named it Bahia dissecta. |
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Bahia dissecta Foothills,
montane. Disturbed
areas, meadows. Summer, fall. The spreading and arching of leafless flower stems is typical of Bahia's growth pattern. |
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Bahia dissecta Foothills,
montane. Disturbed
areas, meadows. Summer, fall. Gently rounded petal tips are slightly notched. Ray flowers overlap and each ray flower is just a bit shorter than the central disk of flowers. The flowers pictured at left are typical of Bahia dissecta; the ones below (more yellow, longer ray flowers, spaces between the ray flowers) are less common and show the wide variety that life forms can take. |
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Bahia dissecta Foothills,
montane. Disturbed
areas, meadows. Summer, fall. Fine hairs cover much of Bahia dissecta. All the plants growing in the area of this photograph had narrower and longer rays and were more yellow than most Bahias.
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