A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1185 entries
chamise
Chamise is Adenostoma fasciculatum, the shrub that makes up more of California chaparral than anything else. It stands waist- to head-high, carries tiny needle-like leaves in bundles, and goes dark and resinous through the summer. Small cream flower plumes open in early summer, turn rust-brown, and stay on the plant for months. It burns readily and comes back from a woody underground burl within weeks.
Etymology
The name is Spanish, and Spanish speakers in the Southwest hung it on several unrelated shrubs: this one in California, four-wing saltbush in New Mexico, and burned brushwood in general. Nobody has traced it further back than that. English dropped the final vowel and kept the pronunciation, which is why it is spelled like the French undergarment. Chaparral, the habitat chamise dominates, comes from a different Spanish word altogether, meaning a scrub oak.
Notes
A chamise stand of forty or fifty years holds a large fraction of dead material inside each shrub. The burl at the base can be very old even where every stem above it is young.