🌼 Lemmon’s Beggarticks

What it looks like

No verifiable Wikimedia Commons photo of Bidens lemmonii could be secured at drafting time, and this guide will not substitute a photo of the wrong plant. Lemmon’s beggarticks is a small annual herb in the aster family, Asteraceae, growing (10 to) 15 to 25 (to 30 or more) centimetres tall, which is to say it is ankle-high on a good day and shorter on most days. It carries flower heads singly or sometimes in open, branching clusters, each head holding yellow disk florets and usually white ray florets, the classic beggarticks daisy in miniature. The leaves are divided, sometimes deeply, with narrow ultimate lobes, and the whole plant has the wiry, spare look of a wildflower that grows where the soil is thin and the water comes and goes. It is not showy. It is not bred. It is a wild plant doing a wild plant’s job on a rocky mountainside, and it does that job well enough that two butterflies have built their lives around it.

The details that separate it from its beggarticks cousins are small and technical, which is exactly how beggarticks identification usually goes. The flower heads sit on peduncles 10 to 20, sometimes up to 90, millimetres long, and the little cup of bracts beneath each head, the calyculus, carries one to four spreading bractlets that are spatula-shaped to linear and often longer than the bracts they accompany. Botanists use those bractlets the way birders use wing bars: a small mark that settles an identification when the big picture is ambiguous. For everyone else, the field marks are simpler: a small, white-rayed, yellow-centered daisy, growing in a wet spot on a rocky slope, in Arizona or New Mexico, in late summer and fall. If you are standing in a seep at 5,000 feet in the Chiricahuas in September and you see it, you are probably looking at Lemmon’s beggarticks, and you are also probably standing in metalmark country.

Its range tells the story of a plant that likes edges: wet spots in dry mountains. It is native to the southwestern United States, Arizona and New Mexico, and to Mexico, from Sonora and Chihuahua south through Durango and Sinaloa to Michoacán, and into both Baja Californias. In the United States it grows in wettish spots on rocky slopes, and its flowering season runs September to October in the Flora of North America account, which is monsoon-and-aftermath timing: the summer rains fill the seeps, the plant grows, and it blooms as the season turns. The species is named for John Gill Lemmon, a nineteenth-century botanist who collected widely in the American West with his wife, Sara Plummer Lemmon, also a botanist, and whose name ended up on a small constellation of western plants. This one is among the smallest and the least famous, which seems fitting for a plant whose main claim to fame is feeding caterpillars that most people have never seen.

Florida note: Lemmon’s beggarticks is not a Florida plant in any sense. It is a cool, high-elevation, seasonally wet seep plant of the Southwest, and Florida’s heat, humidity, and low elevation are the opposite of its habitat. Do not try to grow it in Florida, and do not expect to meet it in a Florida garden. Its place in this project is as the host plant behind two butterfly guides, and its conservation value is in its home mountains, where its seeps and its metalmarks still occur together.

How to grow

Here is the honest version of this section: Lemmon’s beggarticks is not a garden plant, it has no nursery trade, no named cultivars, and no published cultivation protocol, and this guide will not invent one. What can be said is what its habitat implies, and it implies a very particular set of conditions. It grows in wettish spots on rocky slopes at 1,400 to 2,100 metres elevation in Arizona and New Mexico, which means full sun, thin rocky soil, water that arrives seasonally and drains away, and cool nights at altitude. A gardener attempting it would need to mimic a mountain seep: gritty, rocky substrate, seasonal moisture rather than constant wetness, and a climate with cool nights and a monsoon rhythm. That is a rock-garden challenge for a specialist in the Southwest, not a bedding-plant project, and in most of the country it is simply the wrong plant for the climate.

Propagation in the wild is by seed, as with other annual beggarticks, and the seed carries the genus’s signature: barbed achenes that hitch rides on fur, feathers, and socks. A plant that makes its living by sticking to passersby does not need a gardener’s help to move around, and in its home range it finds its own seep pockets without assistance. If you live in its range and want to support it, the useful action is not planting it but protecting the habitat it already uses: rocky seeps, intermittent streams, and the slopes above them, left ungraded, undiverted, and unsprayed. A seep that keeps its water keeps its beggarticks, and a seep that keeps its beggarticks keeps its metalmarks.

For gardeners outside its range, the right move is substitution by function rather than by name. If you want white-rayed beggarticks for pollinators, grow the Bidens species that belong in your region, and if you want to help the metalmarks that depend on this species, support the conservation of its mountain habitat rather than ordering seed that will not survive your climate. A plant guide that tells you to plant something everywhere is not a good guide. A plant guide that tells you where a plant belongs, and where it does not, is doing its job.

Water & feeding

In its habitat, Lemmon’s beggarticks gets its water the way mountain seeps deliver it: seasonally, from summer rains and seepage, in rocky ground that drains fast and never stays waterlogged for long. It is a plant of wet spots, not of ponds, and the distinction matters: the soil is moist when the plant is growing and flowering, but it is rocky and free-draining, not muddy and stagnant. A gardener mimicking that would water to keep a gritty mix moist through the growing season and let it dry between waterings, never keeping it soggy, and would expect the plant to finish its annual cycle as the season dries, set seed, and die, which is what annuals do.

Feeding is not a consideration for this plant, and that is worth saying plainly. Wild annuals of thin rocky soils do not want fertilizer, and feeding one would produce soft growth at the expense of the wiry toughness that lets it survive a mountainside. In a rock-garden attempt, lean mineral soil and no supplemental feeding is the honest prescription. In its real habitat, the only feeding that matters is the feeding it does for others: nectar and pollen for pollinators in September and October, and foliage for the caterpillars of the Arizona metalmark and the fatal metalmark, which is the plant’s real ecological job and the reason this guide exists at all.

Common problems

• It is not available, and that is not a problem to solve by substituting: No nursery trade exists for this species, and seed is not a catalog item. Do not substitute another beggarticks and call it Lemmon’s, since the metalmarks that use this species use it specifically, and a garden full of the wrong Bidens does not feed them.
• Wrong climate: Heat, humidity, and low elevation are the main obstacles outside its range. A plant from a 5,000-foot Arizona seep will not thrive in a Florida summer or a Gulf Coast garden, and no amount of watering fixes an altitude mismatch.
• Habitat loss at home: The real threat to this species is not gardeners but the loss and degradation of its seep habitat: diverted water, graded slopes, and development in mountain canyons. Protecting a seep protects the plant and the butterflies together, which is more useful than any planting.
• Confusion with other beggarticks: The genus Bidens holds roughly 200 to 230 species, many of them small, white- or yellow-rayed daisies, and telling them apart takes the bractlet and leaf details described above. A beggarticks in Arizona is not automatically Lemmon’s, and a beggarticks in Florida is certainly not.
• Annual disappearance: As an annual, it vanishes after seeding, which looks like failure to a gardener expecting a perennial. It is not failure. It is the life cycle, and the next generation is in the seed bank, waiting for the next season’s seep water.

Harvest

There is no garden harvest for Lemmon’s beggarticks, and this guide will not dress one up. It is not a food plant, not a cut flower, and not a crop, and its flowers are too small and too scattered for bouquets in any case. The harvest that matters is ecological and observational: in September and October, in its home mountains, its flowers feed pollinators at a season when many desert plants have finished, and its foliage feeds metalmark caterpillars, which is a harvest measured in butterflies rather than baskets.

For seed, the botanical note is that the achenes are barbed, like other beggarticks, and they travel on animals and clothing, which is how a seep plant colonizes the next seep. Collecting wild seed is not recommended for a plant whose populations are tied to fragile seeps, and it is unnecessary for gardeners outside its range, where the seed would not thrive anyway. The best harvest a visitor can take from a Lemmon’s beggarticks seep is a photograph, a careful identification, and the knowledge that a plant most people would step over without noticing is holding up two butterfly species. That is a good return on a very small flower.

Saving seeds

Lemmon’s beggarticks is an annual, which means seed is not a side project — it is the whole future of the plant. A single plant that flowers well can leave behind hundreds of seeds, and in the wild those seeds wait in the soil for the next season’s seep water. In the garden, your job is simply to catch them before they catch a ride on your socks.

Let the flowers finish and the seed heads dry on the plant. The achenes — the slender, barbed seeds that give beggarticks its name — are ready when they are dry, dark, and detach with a light touch. Snip the dry heads into a paper bag, and wear long sleeves and gloves while you do it, because the barbs do exactly what evolution designed them to do. A shake and a rub frees the seed from the heads, and a sieve or a gentle winnow takes out the chaff.

One caveat matters here: beggarticks species cross with each other where they grow together. If Spanish needles or other wild bidens are blooming nearby, some of your seedlings may be hybrids rather than true Lemmon’s beggarticks. For the truest seed, save from a garden stand growing on its own, away from other flowering bidens. The seedlings will still be beggarticks, and still useful to pollinators — but if you want the species itself, isolation is the price.

Sowing is easy. The seed needs no cold treatment to fuss over: sow in fall where winters are mild, or in spring after the last frost, barely covering the seed and keeping it moist until it sprouts. Seedlings come up fast in warm soil. Thin them to give each plant room, and let a few plants go to seed each year to keep the patch going — a beggarticks patch that is allowed to reseed is a self-renewing one.

A word on ethics, because this is a rare native: collect seed only from plants in your own garden. Never strip wild populations, and leave plenty of seed on your garden plants for the birds and the soil seed bank. For storage, dry the seed thoroughly — Florida humidity will mold damp seed in a closed jar — then keep it in a paper envelope inside a cool, dry jar. Dry seed stored this way stays viable for a couple of years, but seed sown the following season is always the surest bet.

Varieties

• No named varieties or cultivars: No varieties or garden cultivars of Bidens lemmonii are documented. It is grown, where it is grown at all, as the wild species, and this guide lists no invented variety names.
• Its genus, for context: Bidens is a large genus of roughly 200 to 230 species, covered by the Bidens genus guide on this site, which includes the garden bidens, Spanish needles, and other wild beggarticks. This species guide covers Bidens lemmonii only; the genus guide does not substitute for it, and it does not substitute for the genus guide.