tammor's Favorites

Syd Magner 0107

Plant collected by California State Parks (Colorado Desert District) botany staff.

This was a very strange one for me. Some of these ferns were a lot hairier on top than your typical M. covillei. Plants were stuffed in some pretty exposed gabbro cliffs, some individuals being more "gray" than others as a whole. I'm assuming that the darker (more typical of M. covillei) and lighter leaves were all the same plant. After running them both under the scope, it turned out that the darker leaves were sporing and the lighter ones weren't, so I'm not sure if there's an age difference between them where they start out lighter and start to lose their hairs as they age. Last photo shows a lighter individual above with a more typical one below it.

Photos #14 and #15 show one of the darker leaves and #'s 16-18 are from the lighter leaves (#18 is a photo of one of the costal scales).