SoCal Pacific Coast wildflowers - 1

Grows very close to the tide level, may get tide water for short times. Pic taken at the Soledad Creek lagoon, Del Mar

It looks like Cakile edentula

regards

Carlos

Well ... it certainly fits the environmental characteristics (near the ocean, close above the tide line, size and shape and even flower color but the ones on my pic have much more deeply indented leaves than the one seen on the USDA side. The difference is even more clearly visible on this http://www.ct-botanical-society.org/galleries/cakileeden.html picture of Cakile edentula, moreover the flowering time does not match: my picture was taken in March, while as per info on the latter site C. edentula flowers in July - September

the accompanying picture is a composite of relative sharp sections of my original jpeg at 100%, with a screenshot added from Calphotos

... then again, vastly different looking plants are regarded as Cotyledon orbicularis, so the above difference may mean nothing.

... then YET again, almost identical looking aloes are regarded as different species so who knows what is what in botanics.

You might look at Cakile maritima as well...according to Calflora it and C. edentula are the only Cakile species that occur in CA so most likely it's one of those two http://www.calflora.org/cgi-bin/specieslist.cgi?rel-namesoup=contains&where-namesoup=Cakile&where-prettyreglist=any&rel-upper_elev_ft=gt&where-upper_elev_ft=&rel-lower_elev_ft=lt&where-lower_elev_ft=&where-caltranslifeform2=any&where-native=any&rel-calipc=gte&rel-rarity=invalue&where-rarity=any&where-pretty_plantcomm=any&orderby=taxon