By Cleveland Powell. Many people are familiar with Cenizo, aka “Texas sage” (though not a sage), and how it blooms profusely after summer rain, so much so that the silver leaves are obscured by clouds of purple flowers.
This is a trend with plants native to South Central Texas, since they’re well adapted to our on-again-off-again rain patterns. They know they must take advantage of any moisture that happens to fall.
One such plant doing exactly that right now is a cheerful little member of the sunflower family known as awnless bush sunflower (Simsia calva).
Bush sunflower is an unassuming, herbaceous plant that forms mounds 1-3 feet tall during the growing season and dies back to the ground with hard frost. It blooms well in the spring, producing 1-2 inch yellow on yellow sunflowers at the ends of the multi-branching stems.
In springtime the show is particularly nice because growth is dense, and the clusters of flowers are denser than later in the year. Anytime a summer thunderstorm passes by a new flush of growth will be followed by a flush of blooms.
As the year progresses bush sunflower plants begin to sprawl and spread out leading to a wilder look some might call “scraggly.” The good news is that halfway through the summer you can cut 100% of the foliage off and the plant will regrow from the ground up. And when fall rains come, you’ll be treated to a second spring-like flush of densely clustered flowers.
Don’t worry — cutting it back will not permanently damage the plant. This rangeland plant in the wild would be periodically eaten to the ground by herbivores, so it’s adapted to being cut back like this.
As with all plants that maintain growth during hot and dry summers, bush sunflowers have cool adaptations that allow them to flourish in the face of harsh conditions. The leaves are covered with hairs to act as a kind of sunscreen. When the temperatures are scorching, the leaves will curl in on themselves, providing less surface area for the sun to heat and thus reducing water loss.
But the most surprising adaptation, at least for the size of the plant, is the prodigious tap root that even small bush sunflowers produce. I’ve transplanted specimens from one part of my yard to another with roots 3 inches in diameter and hardly tapering within the top 8 inches.
Bush sunflower is an often-overlooked plant that I think deserves more recognition. Relating it to other commonly used landscape plants, it’s a little bigger than zexmenia in height and flower size and about the same as skeleton leaf golden eye. Look for it in areas around the San Antonio region and you’ll see why it could be a new seasonal star.
Cleveland Powell is a conservation planner for SAWS. He is enthusiastic about grass taxonomy and milkweed propagation. In his free time, Powell enjoys hiking around area parks in search of intriguing bugs, birds and plants.
