Common pronunciation of Gutierrezia: Goo-ter-EASE-e-uh
Spanish and scientific Latin pronunciation of Gutierrezia: Goo-tea-air-RAY-see-ah 

    Gutierrezia elegans is a new species that Peggy Lyon and I discovered August 4, 2008 in Lone Mesa State Park north of Dolores, Colorado.  Click to read the complete description which was published in the December, 2008 Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas.

    Lone Mesa State Park is a new Colorado State Park which will be open to the public in several years after all planning and development is completed.

    Click for a full page photograph of this new Gutierrezia and click again for photographs of the terrain that Gutierrezia elegans grows in and the details about how the plant was discovered.

    Naming of the Gutierrezia genus: 

    From a specimen collected in 1804 by Meriwether Lewis on "the plains of the Missouri", Frederick Pursh (in 1814) named a new species, Solidago sarothrae. 

    From a specimen collected by Sesse and Mocino on their 1787-1803 Spanish Royal Expedition to New Spain, Mariano Lagasca (1776-1839), botanist, and later Director, with the Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid, named a new species and gave it a new genus name, Gutierrezia linearifolia, in his 1816 Genera et Species Plantarum.  (Click to see the Plantarum.  You can read about G. linearifolia on page 30.) 

    The location in which the Sesse and Mocino Gutierrezia plant was collected is unknown.  The Spanish Royal Expedition to New Spain collected not only in New Spain, i.e., Mexico, but also in nearby Central American areas, in the Caribbean, and north of Mexico into California and Alaska. The type specimen could have been found in several of these areas.

    The origin of the genus name, Gutierrezia, is also unknown. In his description of Gutierrezia linearifolia, Lagasca did not specify who he was honoring with the genus name.  For some reason, though, it has been assumed that the name honors Pedro Gutierrez, variously described as a Spanish nobleman, traveler, or Real Jardin correspondent.

    In 1887 Britton and Rusby re-examined the plants named by Pursh and Lagasca and realized that they were the same species.  They also realized that the plants were not Solidagos, as Pursh had thought, and did deserve the new genus name, Gutierrezia, which Lagasca had given.  Thus we now have Gutierrezia sarothrae.

    Naming of the new Gutierrezia species:   

    Our new species shows the characteristics of the Gutierrezia genus and we gave it the specific epithet “elegans” because the word summarizes so many of the most obvious visual characteristics of this new species: Gutierrezia elegans is delicate with masses of brilliant yellow flowers topping gracefully arching stems that form into a low, domed symmetry. In short, the plant is elegant.

   So how do you pronounce it?   Gutierrezia:  Goo-tea-air-RAY-see-ah.

    More biographical information about Gutierrez.