This is growing right near the gorse I posted a few days ago, along the seawall across from the Rowing Club in Stanley Park. Is it Hawkweed, and if so, which one (and if not, what is it)? My current guesses are Hieracium caespitosum or Pilosella caespitosa, or are they the same thing? None of the descriptions I have found match exactly. And the leaves have so many different shapes.
Many Hieracium have been moved into Pilosella. The Conservation Data Centre's BC Species Explorer has the latest updates.
Thank you. What I have learned so far from that site is that Pilosella caespitose is the current name for Hieracium caespitosum. What I have learned from the key on that site, at https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/e...native_hawkweeds_in_the_pacific_northwest.pdf, is that first off, at the very top, I need to know if there are stolons. That seems to be the defining feature of Pilosella. And I need to take a loupe and learn what "star-shaped (stellate) hairs, dark glandular (gland-tipped) hairs, and/or stiff, bulbous-based (conical) hairs" look like. From the name and the drawing and description, the one called Hieracium murorum, wall hawkweed, looks like a good match, but photos I have found so far for that name do not look the same.
I had the loupe with me, but didn't remember that I wanted to use it to look at hairs, but I remembered I was to look for stolons. This was complicated by my not knowing that they can be underground and I would not see them. That must be the case for these, because the ID options on that hawkweeks page referenced above are: This plant has no stem leaves; the only stolon option then, if it's a hawkweed, is that there are stolons. Actually, the leaves don't seem to match anything on that page, being not narrow and not tapering to the stem. Here are a few more photos. I can see in the photos that the hairs on the upper stems and phyllaries are glandular.