Common pronunciation of Gutierrezia: Goo-ter-EASE-e-uh
Spanish and scientific Latin pronunciation of Gutierrezia: Goo-tea-air-RAY-see-ah 

    Gutierrezia elegans is a new species that Peggy Lyon and I discovered August 4, 2008 in Lone Mesa State Park north of Dolores, Colorado.  Click to read the complete description which was published in the December, 2008 Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.

    Lone Mesa State Park is a new Colorado State Park which will be open to the public in several years after all planning and development is completed.

    Click for a full page photograph of this new Gutierrezia and click again for photographs of the terrain that Gutierrezia elegans grows in and the details about how the plant was discovered.

   Discovery and naming of several species of Gutierrezia: 

   From a specimen collected by Sesse and Mocino on their 1787-1803 Spanish Royal Expedition to New Spain, Mariano Lagasca (1776-1839), botanist, and later Director, with the Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid, named a new species, Gutierrezia linearifolia, creating the new genus, Gutierrezia. Lagasca described this new species in his 1816 Genera et Species Plantarum.  (Click to see the Plantarum and go to page 30 to read about G. linearifolia.  The "N.H." at the end of the description indicates that the plant was collected somewhere in, "Nova Hispania", the lands of present day Mexico and western United States.)

   From a specimen collected in 1804 by Meriwether Lewis on "the plains of the Missouri", Frederick Pursh (in 1814) named a new species, Solidago sarothrae.

    In 1887 Britton and Rusby re-examined the plants named by Lagasca and Pursh and realized that they were the same species and should be in the Gutierrezia genus.  Since Pursh's description was published first (1814 versus 1816) the species retained sarothrae as its specific epithet.  Thus the accepted name for both Sesse and Mocino and Lewis' discovery is Gutierrezia sarothrae.

    The origin of the genus name, Gutierrezia, is unknown. In his description of Gutierrezia linearifolia, Lagasca did not specify who he was honoring with the genus name.  For some reason, though, it has been assumed that the name honors Pedro Gutierrez, variously described in modern literature as a Spanish nobleman, traveler, or Real Jardin correspondent.

    Naming of the new Gutierrezia species shown on this page:   

    The new species that Peggy and I discovered shows the characteristics of the Gutierrezia genus; we gave it the specific epithet “elegans” because the word summarizes so many of the most obvious visual characteristics of this new species: Gutierrezia elegans is delicate with masses of tiny, brilliant yellow flowers topping gracefully arching stems that form into a low, domed symmetry. In short, the plant is elegant.

   So how do you pronounce it?   Gutierrezia:  Goo-tea-air-RAY-see-ah.

    More biographical information about Gutierrez.