Tree or shrub with large fuzzy brown flowers: can you identify?

Seen in a median strip in Santa Clara Valley, Northern California. Seems to be in bloom right now (mid-June – early July).

It’s a treelike shrub, or, if a tree (what’s the difference, anyway?) it branches very low. Height is maybe 8 or 10 feet. It has very dark green leaves, some appearing brown or reddish in the sun. Overall impression is that they are brown all over.

The most notable feature, the great oddity, is that it has long stalks sticking out all over it with brown fuzzy-looking balls on the ends. Up close they are not really fuzz but a kind of globular network of tiny very fine branches with seeds clinging to them. From a little distance they look like semitransparent balls of puffy brown mesh, cotton-candy shaped, sticking out all over a largish shrub of brown leaves. It’s because of the seeds that I am guessing these are flowers in a botanical sense, faintly resembling what happens to asparagus when it goes to seed (though much smaller and browner), but in no other way do they resemble flowers—nothing petal-like about them.

I have never seen anything like this plant anywhere ever before. It almost looks like something I would expect to see in Africa or Australia (not that I have ever been to either place) than North America.

Any clue?