Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter

Small-leaf Monkeyflower, ERYTHRANTHE MICROPHYLLA

from the the May 17, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon:
SMALL-LEAF MONKEYFLOWERS

*UPDATE: In 2024, with many more identification resources on the Internet, I upload this page's pictures to iNaturalist. User "drew_meyer" points out that not only has this genus been reassigned to the Lopseed Family, the Phrymaceae, but also this taxon shifted to the genus Erythranthe. Now our plant is known as ERYTHRANTHE MICROPHYLLA, the Small-leaf Monkeyflower. It grows along the banks of streams and seeps throughout much of western North America, and is invasive in other parts of the world.

If you pay attention to wildflowers in western North America you can't miss the monkeyflowers, by which is meant the genus Mimulus in the Snapdragon Family*, the Scrophulariaceae. California's Jepson Manual profiles about 65 Mimulus species for that state, and they're all colorful, attention-getting wildflowers. A few monkeyflower species occur in the East, but nothing like here.

Like snapdragons, monkeyflower blossoms are bilaterally symmetrical and bugle-shaped. The Latin name Mimulus, applied to the genus by Linnaeus in 1753, derives from mimus, which means "buffoon," because of what Linnaeus considered the flowers' clownish bright colors, frequent spotting and irregular shapes.

In the very bottom of a shallow ditch along a road through the valley below us there's one spot about 20 feet long and two feet wide currently resplendently yellow with hundreds of slender, close-packed, yellow-blossomed monkeyflowers. You can see a small part at the top of this page.

Flower of Small-leaf Monkeyflower, ERYTHRANTHE MICROPHYLLA

Above there's a close-up of a single blossom, noteworthy features of which are: 1) how the floor of the flower's "throat" bulges upward forming a "palate" reducing entry into the corolla's interior; 2) the long, outward-pointing, soft hairs at the throat further restricting entry to small insects, and; 3) the five "pleats" or "wings" running longitudinally along the cylindrical calyx's sides.