Crowned muilla facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Crowned muilla |
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Muilla coronata, also known as the crowned muilla, is a beautiful flowering plant. This unique plant is a type of wild onion, but it's not usually eaten! It grows naturally in the dry desert areas of eastern California and southern Nevada. The crowned muilla is special because of the interesting "crown" shape found inside its flowers.
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Discovering the Crowned Muilla
The crowned muilla is a small, charming plant that adds a touch of beauty to the desert landscape. It's a perennial, which means it lives for more than two years, coming back to life each growing season.
Where Does the Crowned Muilla Live?
This plant is native to the deserts of eastern California and southern Nevada. You can often find it growing in dry, open areas like scrublands. It also thrives in woodlands where Joshua Trees grow. Sometimes, it even grows on the slopes of nearby mountains. It's well-adapted to these dry, sunny environments.
What Makes This Plant Special?
The crowned muilla is quite small, usually growing no taller than 15 centimeters (about 6 inches). It grows from a special underground stem called a corm. A corm is like a short, swollen underground stem that stores food, helping the plant survive dry periods.
The Crowned Muilla's Flowers
The plant's flowering stem holds a cluster of flowers that look like an umbel. An umbel is a flower cluster where all the flower stalks, called pedicels, come from a single point, like the spokes of an umbrella. Each plant can have up to 10 flowers, but usually, there are fewer.
Each flower has six petal-like parts called tepals. These tepals are usually white. They often have a slight blue tint on the inside and a greenish tint on their outer surfaces.
At the very center of each flower, you'll find six stamens. Stamens are the parts of the flower that produce pollen. What makes the crowned muilla unique is that its stamens have wide, white, petal-like filaments. These filaments are partly joined together, forming an upright, tube-shaped "crown." This is where the plant gets its common name, "crowned muilla."
