Acton Encelia

Encelia actoni, known by several names, including mountainbrush sunflower, Acton brittlebush and Acton encelia, is a multi−branched perennial shrub, reaching one to four feet in height. It is a flowering plant in the daisy family featuring yellow flowers.
It is sometimes misspelled E. actonii.
It grows in various types of open habitat, including deserts, chaparral, and grasslands. It is found in the Mojave Desert, Sonoran Deserts, Peninsular Ranges, Transverse Ranges, San Joaquin Valley, and southern Sierra Nevada. The species was named for the Southern California community of Acton, located not too far west across the San Bernardino County line in Los Angeles County, in an ecotone of the Mojave Desert ecoregion and of the montane chaparral and woodlands in the San Gabriel Mountains.
It is found in the Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert, Peninsular Ranges, Transverse Ranges, San Joaquin Valley, and southern Sierra Nevada and is native to California and Nevada in the U.S. and Baja California in México. It grows in various types of open habitat, including deserts, chaparral, grasslands, among creosote bush scrub, in arroyos of Joshua tree woodlands, pinyon-juniper woodlands and shadscale scrub. The plant grows with atriplex canescens, chaenactis spp., haplopappus linearifolius, cucurbita foetidissima, forestiera neomexicana, and prunus andersoni, with and among ephedra californica, eriogonum fasciculatum polifolium, isomeris arborea, yucca whipplei, brickellia nevinii, and opuntia treleasei, as well as in the remnants of blue oak woodlands which were denuded of the oaks 150 years ago when miners of that era burned the trees to make detection of gold easier to achieve.
Encelia actoni’s foliage color is white. Its type is stressdeciduous. Encelia actoni’s flower color is yellow. The branches are lined with oval to roughly triangular leaves a few centimeters long, that are gray-green and woolly in texture. The inflorescence is a solitary daisylike flower head one to two inches in diameter, on a tall, erect peduncle. The head has a center of many yellow disc florets surrounded by up to 25 yellow ray florets. It blooms in the spring. It bears a seed-containing fruit known as an achene, about half a centimeter long, which does not open.
It is a honey plant, supporting diverse pollinators.
The plant reseeds well, and is cultivated as an ornamental plant for drought tolerant and wildlife gardens, natural landscaping design, and habitat restoration projects.
It needs sun, but very limited to no supplemental irrigation after the spring. It will grow in sand.
As a fast-growing compact shrub that tolerates sand and is tough, it is able to withstand hot sun, cold, and wind as long as it has welldraining soil. The plant has a low fuel load, and so has fire retardant qualities in wildfire zones.