Duration: Perennial

Nativity: Native

Lifeform: Vine

General: Herbaceous perennials, stems 1-many, trailing or climbing, often clambering over other low shrubs, tendrils branching or not, usually 1 per node, herbage glabrous, plants arising from a thick root.

Leaves: Simple, alternate, deeply palmately lobed and heart-shaped (cordate) to square in outline, the lobes narrow, with entire or sparingly dentate margins, the central lobes longest, upper surfaces palmately veined and dotted with white glands (pustulate), blades petioled.

Flowers: Yellowish-white and fragrant, rotate or shallowly cup-shaped with 5 lanceolate lobes, corollas 1.5-3 mm wide, calyx 0-5 lobed, stamens 3-5 or appearing 1-3 from fusion, anthers often larger than the filaments and twisted together, styles 1-3, stigmas large and lobed, ovaries inferior with 3-5 chambers, placentas parietal and growing into chambers, infloresences with staminate flowers in small axillary clusters and pistillate flowers solitary with 1 per node.

Fruits: Berries, obovoid, 5-6 mm in diameter, prickly with short, stout spines, dry and indehiscent with a long beak, the beak genereally as long as the body. Seeds 1 per berry.

Ecology: Found on sandy soils in canyons, washes, flats, and sandy slopes, from 0-3,000 ft (0-914 m); flowering January-May.

Distribution: Arizona, California; Mexico.

Notes: This vine with its pretty white flowers can get quite large with thick masses of stems, sometimes entirely covering the plants its growing on. Look for this species in Arizona along washes in Maricopa, Yuma, Pinal, and Pima counties.

Ethnobotany: Unknown.

Etymology: Brandegea is named for Townsend Stith Brandegee (1843-1925), a pioneer western botanist who collected throughout California, Baja and western Nevada, and bigelovii is named for Dr. John Milton Bigelow (1804-1878), a professor of botany at Detroit Medical College, who collected in the West under Whipple in the Pacific Railroad Survey of 1853-1854.

Synonyms: None

Editor: LCrumbacher2012