Rock Star 

Cliff-Aster

malacothrix saxatilis

          Illustration by Mary-Anne King

Carolanne Sudderth

Mirror Staff Writer

   Cliff-asters (Malacothrix saxatilis) are a common sight to anyone who does much canyon driving, especially through Topanga. These are the little white flowers 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch in diameter that are blooming now on nearly leafless stems which are narrow and twiggy enough to be almost invisible. The small white flowers dance like stars on wires in the wake of passing vehicles.
   Like the cliff-aster’s bluer and better-known cousins, the tiny flowers are a cluster of petals (or ray flowers) bundled together and mashed open wide. Each petal is an eighth of an inch wide, square tipped and “pinked” on the end, as though your mom had taken her good sewing shears to them. The back of side each petal is jauntily adorned with a hot-pink “racing stripe.”
   Like other members of the sunflower family, (which includes chicory and the ever-popular lettuce), cliff-asters bolt as they bloom. The plant starts out as a bunch of coarsely dentate leaves, two to four inches long and approximately an inch wide. In their toothiness, the leaves are not unlike dandelion leaves, but the “teeth” of the cliff-aster are proportionately longer and finer. 
   As it get close to bloom time, the plant begins to bolt, unreeling its leaves on elongating stems like a load of wash on a wadded up clothesline. The plant tries to it put itself where it will be most visible to passing customers, in the flowers’ case, passing bees, so 
it attains heights of between two and six feet. The stems are twiggy and multi-branched.
   The species’ name, saxatilis, means “of the rocks”. Cliff-asters grow near the rocks, but not on them. They prefer their soil dry and disturbed. The plants are perennial. Common denizens of the chaparral, they thrive near the coast, and populate the canyons of coastal mountain ranges from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara.