PlantFiles: Mountain Misery
Chamaebatia foliolosa

I'd like to find someone refining the resin exudate into an essential oil, for fragrance usage. Does any one know someone doing this? Or maybe someone *willing* to do this, with access to the plant?

Please email me at:
paul{dot}kiler{at}gmail{dot}com

Thanks,
Paul

I'm adding this plant because it is a favorite memory of mine growing up in the California foothills. We called it Mountain Misery, but I believe the Native American word for it is kit-kit-dizze. I know it as a spreading groundcover (stoloniferous maybe) beneath oaks in dry shade, about two feet tall, in zone 7 where we never (that I can recall) dropped below 20F. The foliage is pungent, hard to describe, a little like deerbrush (ceanothus interrigimus) flowers maybe, but dry and kind of musky. The leaves are also sticky and thick, almost gummy, hairy and somewhat fernlike and quite similiar to desert fernbush (chamaebatiaria millefolium) but smaller . If you ever walk through the hills of the Gold Country you'll come across this plant eventually, with interior live, blue,canyon,and black oaks, digger pines, buckbrush, and manzanita.