[5] C. pauciflorus is eagerly browsed by livestock and wild ungulates such as mule deer and desert bighorn sheep.

The adaxial surface of the leaf is concave, colored gray-green to yellow-green, and puberulent, becoming glabrous (smooth) in age.

The fruit is a horned capsule a few millimeters wide which bursts explosively to expel the three seeds inside, which require thermal scarification from wildfire before they can germinate.

[8] This species was originally discovered to science by Spanish botanists Martín Sessé y Lacasta and José Mariano Mociño on an expedition to western Mexico in 1790 to 1791.

It was later described as Ceanothus pauciflorus by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1825, based on the illustrations made by Sessé and Mociño expedition.

It was named by Asa Gray of Harvard University in 1853 as Ceanothus greggii in honor of its collector, Josiah Gregg, who found the plant in 1847 at the site of the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican state of Coahuila during the Mexican–American War.