There are two species of the New World genus Hudsonia, or false heather, on the Cape: a woolier one with fuzzy leaves and flowers that don’t have much of a stem, and the pine-barren false heather, pictured here, whose leaves aren’t hairy and whose flower pedicels are (relatively) long. While both species resemble Calluna vulgaris, the heather found in heathlands across Europe, the shrubs in the Hudsonia genus bloom yellow, not pink.
Identifying the species in its hibernation means getting up close to look for last year’s flower stalks. In the damp gray of a rainy day at the Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary, the emerging leaves of Hudsonia ericoides look electric and otherworldly, like acid-green suckers on brown tentacles, or like a constellation of neon stars shining through a dust cloud.
