History
The Monterey Peninsula, discovery site of Potentilla hickmanii is in a native grassland opening within the Monterey pine forest. The Monterey Peninsula is influenced by a marine climate that is pronounced due to the upwelling of cool water from the Monterey submarine canyon. Rainfall is 40 to 50 centimeters per year, but summer fog drip is a primary source of moisture for plants that would otherwise not be able to persist with such low precipitation. Some taxa, such as the coastal closed-cone pines and cypresses are relict stands, e.g. species that once extended more widely in the mesic climate of the late Pleistocene period, but then retreated to small pockets of cooler and wetter conditions along the coast ranges during the hotter, drier early Holocene period between 6000 and 2000 BC.
Alice Eastwood discovered P. hickmanii in the year 1900 on the Monterey Peninsula, a region then considered the fringe of civilization. The Big Sur wilderness lay just beyond, unpenetrated by any roads at that time. Eastwood, Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco was a pioneer biologist in exploring this remote area. On an expedition to amass specimens of rare plants from this southern reach of Monterey County, she retrieved a specimen of this previously unrecorded plant and named this species after J. B. Hickman. Hickman was her brother and guide on that collecting trip, and was the Horticultural Commissioner of Monterey County.
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