I mentioned earlier that it’s a bit hard to find information on Lantana canescens, Hammock shrub-verbena. I guess that goes to show how easy it is to rely on just one or a few sources of information. If I can’t find something on the first couple of Google search results pages, and it’s not in my Osorio or my Nelson, I tend to think it just isn’t out there. But that leads me to ignore other references in my own small library. And one of them is just exactly what I should have thought to use when looking up information about rare Florida plants: Linda G. Chafin’s Field Guide to the Rare Plants of Florida. It’s a small 3-ring binder with glossy loose-leaf 4-color pages published by the Florida Natural Areas Inventory (www.fnai.org), and costs a whopping $15.
The guide tells me that L. canescens is known from only 3 sites, all of them in conservation areas in Miami-Dade county. The illustrations are astonishingly good, showing growth habit, inflorescence, leaf shape, and leaf surfaces; the one photo, by Gil Nelson, shows a leggy plant with a few small flowers on it. Not particularly showy, but relatively interesting.
The guide also tells me how to distinguish it from its relatively common congener, L. involucrata (white flowers in a dense, flat-topped head with many bracts; yellowish stems, oval leaves with broadly pointed tips, purple, fleshy fruit; grows in coastal hammocks and dunes) and the common landscape plants in the genus, which have yellow, orange, purple, or multi-colored flower heads.
And it tells me how to manage this plant in the wild: protect remaining rocklands from development; use prescribed fire to create a mosaic of habitats; allow fire to burn from pinelands into hammock transition zones (manually remove hardwoods if fire is not practical); and last but not least, eradicate exotic pest plants.
Get out there and weed your gardens, people!