Vegetative morphology

A gray-leaved plant growing in rock, in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

This plant is a rosette-forming succulent. The rosettes emerge from the apex of the caudex, which may be solitary or apically branched, with anywhere from 1 to 7 rosettes on top. The caudex is 1 to 3 cm wide, less than 4 cm long, but is occasionally elongated. The rosettes are 3 to 25 cm in diameter, and typically with 10 to 25 leaves. The leaves are green and sometimes glaucous, but not farinose, shaped oblong to lanceolate, 4 to 30 cm long by 0.5 to 4 cm wide, and 1.5 to 6 mm thick. The tip of the leaf is acute.^[3][4]

A green-leaved plant

A sand-covered, white-leaved plant at Torrey Pines State Reserve

Reproductive morphology

The peduncle is 15 to 95 cm tall, and is 3 to 12 mm wide. The lower internodes are spaced over 5 mm from each other. There are 18 to 40 bracts, spreading to ascending, and shaped triangular-lanceolate to ovate. The cyme is branched 2 to 3 times, and the next branches may bifurcate. The terminal branches are 2 to 25 cm long, and have 2 to 20 flowers on spreading pedicels. The pedicels are 2 to 12 mm long, becoming erect, and are red or green, and not generally pink. The sepals are 3 to 6 mm large, shaped deltate-ovate. The petals are 10 to 16 mm long, 3.5 to 5 mm wide, shaped elliptic to oblanceolate and fused connately 1 to 2 mm.^[3][4] The petals are usually red or orange, and more uncommonly bright yellow to purplish-red, and very rarely green.^[5]

• Flower variety of Dudleya lanceolata
• 
  Yellow flowers with green sepals
• 
  Red flowers with pink sepals
• 
  Orange-red flowers with gray and glaucous sepals
• 
  Orange-yellow flowers with a Yellow-Faced Bumble Bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) pollinator
• 
  Yellow flowers, gray sepals, and a pink peduncle. Note the circinate terminal branches with budding flowers
• 
  Inflorescence with developing buds, showing detail of interior of a single open flower, Davies Alpine House, Kew Gardens

The chromosome number is typically tetraploid, 2n = 68 / n = 34, but some plants are occasionally octoploid.^[4] Diploid plants in montane regions are in fact Dudleya cymosa.^[5] Flowering is from April to July.^[3][4]