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Chinese Houses

© Gregg Pasterick

On more than one occasion I've written about some wildflower I had seen in a field guide and, because I was so immediately and ridiculously smitten with it, I just knew I would never be lucky enough to see it face-to-flower. And always, unexpectedly, I would round a corner and there it would be, the current wildflower of my fickle dreams. Once such dreamboat of a blossom are Chinese Houses (Collinsia heterophylla).

Chinese Houses are members of the Figwort, or Snapdragon Family (Scrophulariaceae), found from northern Baja California up into the southern two-thirds of California. It grows in sandy soil on slopes and shaded flats. Individually, the flowers are a lovely sight; together they grow in perfect rings around the mostly leafless stem, forming a pagoda; hence the common name.

The upper petal is bi-lobed, curving upward and sweeping back, if only slightly. It ranges in color from white to pale blue-violet to lavender, with maroon dots at the base. The bottom petal has two violet-pink lobes sticking out like my daughter's pouting lower lip, with a middle lobe folded up between them. This bottom folded middle lobe and its whorls of flowers climbing the stem bring to mind lupine, making it easy for novices to mistake it for a pea.

My first few Chinese Houses snuck up on me a couple years ago, as I was racing by at about 55 MPH. Naturally I stopped, had a look, and did my New Wildflower Two-Step-Jig along the side of the road. But that was a slow waltz compared to the Disco Break Dancing I did last spring, when I found a roadside hill covered in Chinese Houses, coreopsis and a few Fairy Lanterns. A heavy rain had just blown through, the sun peeked out from behind the departing clouds, and this hillside of white and pink and yellow, wet with rain, glittered like jewelry. It was one of those lovely and unforgettable sights I was treated to in California; it was a special moment.

A few weeks later, driving in the southern Sierra Nevada Mts., high above the Kern River, I pulled over to investigate what looked like white Chinese Houses but not quite. The flowers grew in the same pagoda whorls about the stem, but the upper petals were smaller while the lower were longer. And its Snapdragon family resemblance was a little more obvious to me than what I saw in Chinese Houses. I paused to do my New and I Don't Know What the Hell it is Wildflower Two-Step-Jig, flailing about with joy.

Chinese Houses

Tincture Plant

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