A nod of appreciation to Dale Hameister (Dale Hameister@Flickr) for sharing today's photograph (original image | via the BPotD Flickr Group Pool). Thank you, Dale!

This California and Oregon native has an interesting common name: prettyface. I have a hard time believing this name was used commonly until the modern era – an alternative common name, golden brodiaea, seems more likely to me to be the “traditional” common name for this taxon.

The Flora of North America page for Triteleia ixioides suggests there are five subspecies, but notes “although readily recognizable as a rule, [the five subspecies] often cannot be separated by constant characters”. I interpret this to mean that any one single feature of the plant cannot reliably be used to distinguish the subspecies. Instead, a combination of morphological features must be taken into account.

Triteleia ixioides is a geophyte, a term used to describe plants which store food underground (in organs such as bulbs, corms, tubers). In the case of Triteleia, the storage organ is a corm, or a thickened underground piece of stem tissue.