Nemacladus calcaratus
Encyclopedia
Nemacladus calcaratus is a rare species of flowering plant in the bellflower family
Campanulaceae
The family Campanulaceae , of the order Asterales, contains about 2000 species in 70 genera of herbaceous plants, shrubs, and rarely small trees, often with milky non-toxic sap...

 known by the common name Chimney Creek nemacladus. It is endemic to Tulare County, California
Tulare County, California
Tulare County is a county located in the Central Valley of the U.S. state of California, south of Fresno. Sequoia National Park is located in the county, as are part of Kings Canyon National Park, in its northeast corner , and part of Mount Whitney, on its eastern border...

, where it is known only from Chimney Creek in the southern Sierra Nevada east of Lake Isabella
Lake Isabella
Lake Isabella is a reservoir in Kern County, California created by the earthen Isabella Dam. It was formed in 1953 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Kern River at the junction of its two forks at Whiskey Flat. At 11,000 acres , it is one of the larger reservoirs in California...

. It occurs in woodland habitat on sandy granitic
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

 substrate. It was first collected in 1986 and described to science as a new species in 2008.

This is a petite annual herb with an angular, slightly hairy, sometimes red-tinged stem just a few centimeters long. The lance-shaped leaves are just a few millimeters long, green to red in color, and densely hairy. The inflorescence
Inflorescence
An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Strictly, it is the part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed and which is accordingly modified...

 bears flowers on short, threadlike pedicels
Pedicel (botany)
A pedicel is a stem that attaches single flowers to the main stem of the inflorescence. It is the branches or stalks that hold each flower in an inflorescence that contains more than one flower....

about a centimeter long. The tiny flower has five pointed lobes each 1 or 2 millimeters long, the two lowest fused to form a spur. The flower is white with dark red stripes in the throat.

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