Tamarix

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall yucca, fern and leather leaved globemallows, bird of paradise, alfalfa, scurf pea, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, cultivated sunflower, bachelor button, purple coneflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, hairy golden and strap-leaf spine asters, Queen Anne’s lace, muhly ring, blue and side oats grama grasses; first corn tasseling; Russian olives forming; áñil del muerto germinating.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, zucchini, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, bouncing Bess, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on cut-leaf coneflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, Saint John’s wort, zinnia, cosmos; buds on rose of Sharon; raspberries still ripening, lanterns forming on tomatillo.

Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, blue veronica, Shasta daisy; buds on caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; first edible tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Hot and sometimes muggy with late afternoon winds; rain last Sunday; 15:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: They moved the post office. No longer do I pass wisteria and roses. Instead, I can cross the north bridge where tamarix is blooming.

Tamarix is one of those trees that was invading riparian environments in the southwest even before it was used to reclaim land left barren by the drought of the 1930's on the Great Plains. In New Mexico, it’s more common in the warmer, southern reaches and lower elevations of the Rio Grande, than here in the north. Those who wanted to restore the Bosque del Apache, in Socorro County, had to use fire, chains, and chemicals to kill mature stands before they could re-introduce native species.

In Española, the shaggy barked trees seem concentrated on the south side of the upper bridge where a gravel operation works the other side. The right bank, between the middle and lower bridges, has middling-aged cottonwoods with some Siberian elms and Russian Olives. The city’s water treatment facility is on the down river left bank of the lower bridge. The local village and prairie arroyos have only scattered specimens.

The difference in modern vegetation is probably due to the activities of the current land owners. Someone is keeping the area under the cottonwoods cleared of burnable underbrush, and leaving the land fallow. Someone else is keeping the area bordered by tamarixes cleared of everything but grasses or cattails and marsh plants. Crops and horses share the general area.

In their native China, members of the tamarix family are valued as ancient ancestors. In 1992, the Turpan Eremophyte Botanic Garden established a special Tamaricaceae collection in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur to study the "formation and evolution of the flora of an arid region" and determine how to best utilize its diversity.

In this country, John Gaskin and Barbara Schaal found one reason the trees became dangerous is that varieties from different parts of China interbred. It’s not clear if, in fact, the tamarixes had actually evolved into different species there or were local variants that could only be differentiated by the shapes of their nectary disks.

The variety common in New Mexico, chinensis, is found along the rivers and shores of the provinces edging the Yellow Sea and between the Hwang Ho and Yangtze rivers. The other species, ramosissima, grows near water in the western states bordering Mongolia and Afghanistan and farther towards Europe.

Chinensis has been grown in southeastern gardens since it was introduced in 1827. Cultivars of ramosissima are more common today in the nursery trade. My Summer Glow is a sport of another selection found in France in the 1930's. Gaskin doesn’t rule out the possibility that ornamental varieties could perpetuate tamarix, but he found they don’t now share much of the DNA with existing wild hybrids.

Such mutability has become the hallmark of the water-table seeking tap roots that support woody stems of trees, but fall in the same subgroup as the carnivorous plants within the order of carnations. The leaves have glands that excrete salt the roots absorb from the soil, much like the glands of their sister leadworts remove chalk and the carnivores produce sticky, trapping substances.

The leaves have the same herringbone tightness of the short, narrow leaflets as cedar, but are deciduous. Like junipers, the flowers initially look like pink tinted continuations of the blue-green stalks. Salt cedar blooms actually begin as dark round buds that open with long stamens and anthers that catch the light and make the dense racemes look like fluffy caterpillars. Yesterday the wild flowers were pale pink and insectless, while the five petals of my ornamental Summer Glow were darker and buzzed with narrow black and yellow bees.

Their honey isn’t particularly flavorful, but the nectar keeps the bees fed until more desirable flowers open, much like the trees retain soils when water and salinity patterns change and native species aren’t nimble enough to adapt.

Notes:
Gaskin, John F. and David J. Kazmer. "Comparison of Ornamental and Wild Saltcedar (Tamarix Spp.) Along Eastern Montana, USA Riverways Using Chloroplast and Nuclear DNA Sequence Markers," Wetlands 26:939-950:2006.

_____ and Barbara A. Schaal. "Hybrid Tamarix Widespread in U.S. Invasion and Undetected in Native Asian Range," National Academy of Science, Proceedings 99:11256-11259:2002.

Jacobson, Arthur Lee. "Plant of the Month: Tamarisk," June 2005, available on his web-site.

Missouri Botanical Garden and Harvard University Herbarium eFloras project. Flora of China
on-line entries for Tamarix chinensis and Tamarix ramosissima.

Pan Borong. "Turpan Eremophyte Botanic Garden, Academia Sinica, China," Botanic Gardens Conservation International BGC News, December, 1996.

Photograph: Wild tamarix near northern Española bridge, 11 July 2009.

Lance-Leaf Coreopsis

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, tall yucca, fern and leather leaved globemallows, tumble mustard, bird of paradise, alfalfa, scurf pea, white sweet and purple clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, nits and lice, datura, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, bachelor button, purple coneflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, hairy golden and strap-leaf spine asters, blue grama grass; corn 2' high.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker peaked, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, butterfly weed peaked, zucchini, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums; sand cherries turning dark red; catalpa pods forming.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, cheddar pinks, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer peaked, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on cut-leaf coneflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, Saint John’s wort, zinnia; buds on tomatillo.

Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, lady bells, sea lavender, white beardtongue, white spurge, perennial four o’clock; buds on Shasta daisy.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; first green tomato formed.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, gecko, different kind of bee on white beardtongue, sulfur butterfly, hummingbird moth, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Hot all week, with howling winds Thursday night and high humidity yesterday; last useful rain 6/20/09; 15:50 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Sometimes a phrase sticks in my mind and I lose my ability to see the world except through its prism. In James Thurber’s short story, Walter Mitty imagines himself called into an emergency room to complete a dangerous operation. When the attending physician updates him on the patient’s condition, he warns "coreopsis is setting in."

Now I can never see that yellow composite without hearing Thurber. The solid, round buds protected by shiny, yellowish-green bracts emerge the end of May - coreopsis is setting in. The erect disk flowers open in June surrounded by ungradated yellow rays - coreopsis is setting in. The bracts reclose on the reproductive parts in a turban with darkened flags of dying petals - coreopsis is setting in.

Lance-leaved coreopsis is a native wildflower that can be found anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies, but which has fairly specific requirements within that range. In the Great Lakes area, Coreopsis lanceolata inhabits glacial remains that get at least 30" of rain a year and are slightly acidic.

In Michigan, the short rhizomes grow in sandy lands along lakes Michigan and Huron, and on the sandy glacial outwashes supporting relic oak barrens of inland Jackson, Livingston and Oakland counties. I grew up on a spit of better land between those areas less affected by the last glacier where Coreopsis lanceolata only grew as a garden plant that could easily escape.

In Illinois, the rough black seeds grow on south-facing hill prairies composed of loess and sand that had once been forested. Students at the Chicago Botanic Garden found the shortest exposure to smoke that could come from nearby a fire increases their ability to germinate.

When Thurber was living in Columbus the notched petals were commonly mentioned by garden writers, but also grew in the counties along route 62 that followed the south side of the watershed between the Great Lakes and Mississippi from the state capital to Canton. In New Mexico in those years, the wild form was found in open fields east of the Santa Fe and Las Vegas mountains. Even today, it’s restricted to San Miguel and Torrance counties.

In my garden coreopsis is transient. I never worry about dividing it every three years. I’m lucky individual plants live so long. Instead, I let the golden-yellow flowers go to seed, and cut off dead stalks in the spring. By then those stems have become inflexible shrub-like appendages connected to woody crowns that can yank out the roots if accidentally levered.

I also buy fresh seed each year to throw out in the spring and late summer, and let the spoon-shaped seedlings wander about the north-facing bed. With the variously aged plants, I don’t have to worry about keeping a single plant blooming all summer. Something is usually open somewhere. From the accumulated variations of repeated sowing, occasional semi-doubles appear or flowers with red spots at the bases of their rays.

The perennial’s accommodating nature makes it a favorite ingredient in commercial wildflower mixes. Someone down the road had several, simultaneous visions of his land. One was the modern suburban house with an immaculate green lawn maintained by flood irrigation. Another was a cottage in a forest opening surrounded by evergreen trees.

Some ten years ago, either the man or his wife thought a wildflower meadow would be nice, until the flax, blanket flowers, and coreopsis started blooming in the middle of their green sward while they had the house for sale. Each year the thoroughly naturalized flowers come back, and each year he or the new owner mows them down.

When I drive by and see the emerging humps of dark green in spring break the level plane of winter-grayed grass, my car turns into a rider mower, my sweat pants into chaps, and my garden hat into a Stetson. I look out over the range and mutter "coreopsis is setting in."

Notes:
Forsberg, Britt, Lara V. Jefferson, Kayri Havens, and Marcello Pennacchio. "Prairie Seed Response to Smoke Cues," Chicago Botanic Garden Posters, 2004.

Michigan Natural Features Inventory. "Natural Community Abstract for Oak Barrens," 2001, by J. G. Cohen.

Robertson, Kenneth R., Mark W. Schwartz, Jeffrey W. Olson, Brian K. Dunphy, and H. David Clarke. "50 Years of Change in Illinois Hill Prairies," Illinois Natural History Survey website

Thurber, James. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," 1939.

United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. "Coreopsis lanceolata L.," in Plants Profile database, maintained by John T. Kartesz; includes county distribution maps for Ohio and New Mexico.

Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 3, 1996

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.

Photograph: Lance-leaf coreopsis with buds and spent turban, 4 July 2009.

Maltese Cross

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, prickly pear, tall yucca, lilies, fern and leather leaved globemallows, bird of paradise, tumble mustard, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, white sweet and purple clover, licorice, Russian sage, milkweed, oxalis, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, nits and lice, datura, creeping and climbing bindweed, purple mat flower, alfilerillo, wooly plantain, bachelor button, purple coneflower, fleabane, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, hairy golden and strap-leaf spine asters, native dandelion, needle, rice, and brome grasses; goat’s head up; apples visible.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Fragrant catalpa, Dr Huey and miniature roses, red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, cheddar pinks, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on tomatillo.

Looking south: Pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, daylily, sweet pea; buds on zinnias; raspberries edible.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, white beardtongue, white spurge, white mullein, perennial four o’clock; buds on Shasta daisy and sea lavender.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, large black harvester and small dark ants, cricket in well.

Weather: Clouds dropped little rain during the week, but kept the nights warmer so zinnias grew; last useful rain 6/20/09; 15:56 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The Maltese cross blooming outside my porch window is the strongest red in the garden, surpassing even the zinnias of late summer.

The balls of club-footed florets have none of the blue that moderates the red of the roses and hollyhocks, and too little yellow to matter. When I look out in the evening, through the hollyhock stalks dotted with spots of burgundy, they beckon like gems buried in the forest, tease like spots on the wall after pictures have been taken down.

When I see the two-foot high perennial at noon with California poppies, it picks out their golden color without being subsumed. Its color comes entirely from its anthocyanin pigments, not from the light that vitalizes the poppies. Nineteen-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett called them London Pride, and they now grow with yellow heliopsis in her restored garden in South Berwick, Maine.

Such a solid, assured red is rare in nature. The Egyptians knew gold would produce red glass, but it was centuries before Andreas Cassius found a way around 1685 to set the color with tin. Even then the ruby red was a bit blueish.

Iron oxide was more commonly used to produce a dull red, especially in painters’ ochres. When the iron deposit also contained aluminum, the pigment was chemically stable. Otherwise, like many other reds used in house paint and stucco, the color was fugitive and darkened or faded in light as molecules responded to heat.

Madder set with alum was the common British red dye plant imported by the bale through Southampton from Venice or Genoa. Bristol, a port on the west coast of England with a textile industry that dated back to the 1100's, was believed by William Horman to produce the best red fabrics in 1530 because of its water. The river Frome drained the chalk hills of the Cotswolds that would have leached into the water.

It’s ironic that a color so difficult to produce is so disregarded. By the early 1500's, Bristol’s textile trade had been reduced to the cheapest cloths, and Bristol red was worn by the lowest classes. Around 1517, John Skelton described an ales-wife near the royal palace, Nonesuch, wearing a 'kyrtyll' or tunic of 'bristowe read" while a rival poet, Alexander Barclay, distinguished the pleasant, medium Bristol red from London scarlet.

The brilliant red flower apparently reached England sometime after Bristol merchants first tried to exploit the expansion of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman by ignoring the Italian middlemen in the 1540's. John Gerard is the first Englishman we know who grew Lychnis chalcedonica in 1593. He called the member of the carnation family Bristowe Red, Nonesuch, and Campion of Constantinople.

Many assume the common name, Maltese cross, means the plant was introduced during the Crusades. However, the earliest known reference to the flower, transported from the grassland steppes of Russia, Siberia and Mongolia, was made by Ulisse Aldrovandi who established the botanic garden in Bologna in 1570. It’s hard to believe a color this dramatic would not have appeared in some graphic form, a tapestry, a manuscript, a painting, if it were available before. After all, John Parkinson posed with the "glorius flower" in his dictionary of usable plants in 1621.

More likely the common name comes from the shape of the five petals which are forked like the four-armed cross, but it was the color that mattered to the cottagers who named it Scarlet Lightening, the New Englanders who called it London Pride, and to John Gerard who saw Bristol Red. Only specialists grow something for the shape of the petals; my friends would welcome Big Red.

Notes: References are repeated by multiple sources, a number of whom used the Oxford English Dictionary.

Barclay, Alexander. Fourth Eclogue, written between 1509 and 1514.

Gerard, John. Herball or Generale Historie of Plants, 1597.

Horman, William. Vulgaria, 1530.

Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, 1629.

Skelton, John. "The Tunnynge of Elynoare Rummynge," written around 1517 and posthumously published in 1550.

Wetzel, Nancy Mayer. "London Pride," 2003, Coe College website, on Jewett.

Photograph: Maltese cross with California poppies and pink evening primroses, 21 June 2009.

Lapins Sweet Cherry

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, prickly pear, yucca, lilies, fern and leather leaved globemallows, tumble mustard, alfalfa, scurf pea, white sweet and purple clover, licorice, milkweed, oxalis, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, nits and lice, datura, bindweed, bachelor button, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, hairy golden and strapleaf spine asters, native dandelion, needle, rice, brome and crab grasses; wild morning glories up; hay baled; cherries for sale along main road last Friday afternoon.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Fragrant catalpa, Dr Huey and miniature roses, red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums; cherries ripening.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, coral bells, few cheddar pinks, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on sidalcea and tomatillo.

Looking south: Pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, daylily, sweet pea.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, blue salvia, purple and white beardtongues, white spurge; buds on Shasta daisy and sea lavender.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, brown and tan patterned snake again, geckos, hummingbirds on coral beardtongues, bumble bees on catmint, bees on rugosa, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Warmer temperature highs and lows early in week encouraged warm weather seedlings like cosmos and morning glories; rain yesterday; 15:57 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The first cherry tree I remember was huge, even by childhood standards set by oaks. It stood so tall in my high school chemistry teacher’s yard that the lowest branches were beyond my reach.

I have no idea now what I was doing in that yard around 1960. Science was dangerous in those years. Specialists were still recording the delayed effects of massive radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while Hollywood was channeling our fears into safer areas. In 1954 The Creature from the Black Lagoon told us it was dangerous to explore the past in far distant places. I Was a Teenage Werewolf reminded us in 1957 it was perilous to study our own psyches.

However, by the time I was facing my first cherry tree we could no longer subrogate genetics. Thalidomide was producing birth defects in Europe and guys were using the word mutant as a derogatory slam.

While we were being frightened by civil defense warnings, scientists at the John Innes Institute in Hertford were bombarding plants with gamma radiation. They found many mutations lasted only the lifetime of the treated plant, but a few could be passed on. The one Dan Lewis and Leslie Crowe found most intriguing was the S gene that determined if a plant could fertilize itself or was programmed to accept pollen from only a plant outside its kinship group.

Cherries were particularly interesting because sour ones, derived from Prunus cerasus, can fertilize themselves while the sweet, descended from Prunus avium, exist in at least 27 exogamous groups. To produce an edible sweet cherry, you needed two trees the size of that one in my teacher’s backyard.

In 1954, Lewis and Crowe produced a self-fertile sweet cherry seedling, JI2420, by crossing the pollen from an irradiated Napoleon bud with the seed of an Emperor Francis. They and other biologists then focused on defining precisely what part of the S gene they had altered and observed the biomechanics of pollination.

Karl Lapins was less theoretical in British Columbia. Farmers devoted at least a tenth of their land to what was, at best, furniture wood, and their income depended on bees that stayed home in bad weather. The first variety the Summerland breeding program had released in 1951 was Van, a 1942 selection of an open-pollinated Empress Eugenie made by A. J. Mann that could make all the land productive by both bearing acceptable fruit and pollinating the then popular Bing.

Lapins treated different cultivars with JI2420 pollen to discover which were compatible. In 1968, the Canadian government released his Stella, the first commercially viable self-fertile cherry that had resulted from a match with a Lambert. Farmers were freed from the tyranny of the bee.

By the time I was planting my cherries in 1997, mail order catalogs offered trees that were both dwarfed and self-compatible. I gambled on a sour Montmorency and a sweet Lapins, which Summerland had released in 1983 as a Stella improved by mating with Van. The unnamed sour root took over, while the sweet on Geissin 148-2 stock remained a sapling for years.

The sour pair produced flowers and fruit the next year. They skipped the cherries in 1999, but have produced something every year since, while the more desirable tree has limped along. There finally were some flowers in 2004, but no fruit. This April I noticed the bees preferred the white rootstock flowers. Mainly flies visited the white Lapins. If a bee came over, it returned to the other tree. I thought I’d found the answer to my fruitless tree - men may have made it unisexual but they’d bred out its ability to flirt in the process.

When I was investigating the bright red Montmorency pie cherries last weekend, I discovered there actually were some cherries on the other tree well hidden under the leaves, so dark they couldn’t be seen. They were what I’d wanted twelve years ago, neither sour nor sweet, but cherry flavored and firm.

I was obviously wrong to impute infertility to genetic manipulation; the problem probably laid in the germplasm that hadn’t been altered. Although catalogs gloss over it with advice about root stock, specialists know sour cherries will grow almost anywhere, but the sweet are fussy. In Michigan they only prosper to the north around Grand Traverse Bay on the Lake Michigan side of the lower peninsula. Most come from the Pacific northwest.

My old science teacher might have explained my haphazard luck by pointing to our weather. This year the Lapins bloomed about two weeks after the last snow, when morning temperatures still fell below freezing. The first fruit appeared when the weather warmed the first of May. Now they’ve had unusual rain clouds for several weeks, not enough to split skins when the pulp absorbed water, but enough to keep them humidified.

Their genetics are fine. They just need Michigan’s climate, not New Mexico’s.

Notes:
Bekefi, Zs. "Review of Sweet and Sour Cherry Incompatibility," International Journal of Horticultural Science 12:111-116:2002.

Kappel, Frank. "‘Van’ Sweet Cherry," Fruit Varieties Journal 52:182-183:1998.

Lapins, Karl O. and David W. Lane. "Apple Tree Named ‘Creston’," US patent PP10739, 1998, describes their methods at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland, British Columbia.

Photograph: Lapins sweet cherries, 20 June 2009.

Rugosa Rose

What’s blooming in the area: Russian olive, tamarix, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, prickly pear, yucca, daylily, fern and leather leaved globemallows, tumble mustard, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, purple clover, licorice, milkweed, oxalis, Indian paintbrush, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, stickleaf, nits and lice, datura, bindweed, bachelor button, perky Sue, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, hairy golden and strapleaf spine asters, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, brome, crab and three awn grasses; juniper berries; stickseed and needle grass seeds becoming a nuisance; more hay cut, some corn up.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Fragrant catalpa, Dr Huey and miniature roses, red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Moonshine yarrow; buds on butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan and Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: Floribundas, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink going to seed, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort peaked, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on bouncing Bess.

Looking south: Pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrids, German iris, sweet pea; raspberries forming.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, blue salvia, purple and white beardtongues; buds on lilies and sea lavender.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, brown and tan patterned snake, hummingbird, bird taking a cherry to eat, bumble bees, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Rain began Wednesday before dawn and again last night; afternoon winds and low morning temperatures continue; 15:56 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: White rugosa roses blooming in my backyard have the simplest flowers, five petals surrounding concentric rings of yellow stamens. It’s hard to believe we have them from the Chinese who so artfully bred size and fullness into camillas and peonies, or that the Japanese who imported them from the mainland centuries ago left them alone.

Europeans, of course, began exploiting the crinkly-leaved shrubs as soon as hybridization became known in the 1880's with predictable results. The red F. J. Grootendorst my mother grew, a cross between a rugosa and a polyantha made by de Goey in the Netherlands, had little scent when it was released in 1919. A pink eponymous match between a rugosa and a wichurana nurtured by Max Graf was sterile when it was sold by his Pomfret Center, Connecticut, employer, James Bowditch, in 1919.

Perhaps the Chinese realized creating magnificent flowers often sacrificed other attributes and treated their useful plants differently than their ornamentals. In 1911, the American Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai published George Stuart’s report that mei gui had a cooling nature and was used to treat liver, spleen and blood problems. When he died, Stuart had been revising the 1871 work of Frederick Porter Smith who, in turn, had translated the herbal collection of a sixteenth century Ming physician and naturalist, Li Shi Zhen.

The rugosa is native to the flat, sandy shores of Lianoning and Shandong provinces, whose peninsulas separate the Bo Hai inlet from the Yellow Sea, and up through the lands north of Lianoning to Jilin, the Korean and Kamchatka peninsulas and some coastal islands including Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Li lived inland along the Yangtze river in Hubei, sandwiched between the two Bo Hai peninsulas.

In Korea, people still use haedangwha roots to treat diabetes, especially when simple protocols don’t work and treatments become complicated. Earlier, Charles Pickering reported the Ainu on the northern Japanese islands ate the red hips.

The cultural patterns that led different Asian groups to use or shun particular plant parts continue to stimulate research. Chinese biologists have found flower extracts indeed improve the liver and whole blood of deliberately aged mice, while some Hokkaido scientists have verified that pulverized hamanasu petals inhibit the growth of salmonella and E. coli in the intestine. Others working in Japan have found that rugosa extracts reverse liver and kidney damage in diabetic rats at the same time they improve "abnormal glucose metabolism that leads to oxidative stress."

Many believe the critical contribution of the rugosa is its ability to counteract the oxidant damage that occurs with aging and diseases like diabetes. Two Koreans have identified the active ingredient to be a special tannin found in the roots. Japanese researchers, who don’t believe the Hokkaido fruit of the minority Ainu is "fit to eat," have experimented with teas made with leaf tannins to introduce the plants’ antioxidants into the general diet.

Perhaps sometime in the distant past the Chinese did try to improve the magenta-colored species by selecting the largest flowers, the rarer colors of the recessive white Alba and the dominant red Rubra, maybe even nurturing the most fragrant, tastiest or most efficacious. They and others may also have expanded the original range to include places like Shandong, Hokkaido, and Korea.

Whatever they may have tried, the roses retained their fertility and rebred with their own and other nearby species to restore anything that may have been lost. The ones imported for the sandy wastes surrounding New England resorts like Newport, Nantucket and coastal Maine in the late nineteenth century are now spreading on their own and crossing with the local Rosa blanda along the Saint Lawrence. Even a Max Graf in Wilhelm Kordes’ nursery found a way to recover its virility by mating with a tea rose and doubling its offspring’s chromosomes.

A great deal can happen in a thousand years that leaves undisturbed the surface of white cups shimmering in the afternoon sun.

Notes:
Cho, Eun Ju, T. Yokozawa, HyunYoung Kim, N. Shibahara, and Park Jong Cheol. "Rosa rugosa Attenuates Diabetic Oxidative Stress in Rats with Streptozotocin-induced Diabetes," American Journal of Chinese Medicine 32:487-96:2004

Jeon, K. Y. and S. P. Mun. "Anti-hyperglycemic, Anti-hypertriglyceridemic and Stimulatory Effect on Glucose Transporter 4 Mrna Appearance of Hydrolysable Tannins (Rosanin) of the Rosa rugosa Root in the Streptozotocin-injected Diabetic Rats," Korean Journal of Medicine 58:180-188:2000.

Manjiro, Kamijo, Kanazawa Tsutomu, Funaki Minoru, Nishizawa Makoto, and Yamagishi Takashi. "Effects of Rosa rugosa Petals on Intestinal Bacteria," Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry 72:773-777:2008.

Li, Shi Zhen. Ben Cao or Pen Ts'ao, 1578.

Nagai, Takeshi, Taro Kawashima, Nobutaka Suzuki, Yasuhiro Tanoue, Norihisa Kai, and Toshio Nagashima. "Tea Beverages Made from Romanas Rose (Rosa rugosa Thunb.) Leaves Possess Strongly Antioxidant Activity by High Contents of Total Phenols and Vitamin C," Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment 5:137-141:2007.

Ng, T. B., W. Gao, L. Li, S. M. Niu, L. Zhao, J. Liu, L. S. Shi, M. Fu and F. Lu. "Rose (Rosa rugosa) - Flower Extract Increases the Activities of Antioxidant Enzymes and the Gene Expression and Reduces Lipid Peroxidation," Biochemistry and Cell Biology 83:78-85:2005.

Pickering, Charles. Chronological History of Plants, 1879, cited by Edward Lewis Sturtevant in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1972.

Stuart, George Arthur. Chinese Materia Medica, 1911, reprinted by Gordon Press, 1977.

Uhm, Dong-Chun and Young-Shin Lee. "A Study of the Application of Folk Medicine in Patients with Diabetes Mellitus," East-West Nursing Research 1:72-81:1997.

Photograph: Rosa rugosa ‘Alba’ around 3:30 in the afternoon, 7 June 2009.

Indian Paintbrush

What’s blooming in the area: Russian olive, tamarix, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume peaked, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, prickly pear, yucca, daylily, red hot poker, hollyhock, fern-leaf globemallow, cheese, tumble mustard, stickseed, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, purple clover, milkweed, oxalis, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, nits and lice, bindweed, perky Sue, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hairy golden and strapleaf spine aster, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, brome, crab and three awn grasses; buds on stickleaf; first hay cut.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Catalpa, Dr Huey, Lady Banks and miniature roses, privet, German iris, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Moonshine yarrow; buds on butterfly weed and Parker’s Gold yarrow; cherries turning red.

Looking east: Floribunda and Persian yellow roses, peony, oriental, California and Shirley poppies, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on coral beardtongue.

Looking south: Beauty bush, weigela, pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, raspberry, sweet pea; morning glories beginning to come up.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, purple beardtongue, baptista; buds on sea lavender, blue salvia, white beardtongue.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, gecko, bumble bees, mosquitoes, large black harvester and small red ants, small grasshoppers on other side of road, blue egg shell between front porch eave and peach.

Weather: Storms hovered in area but left no rain since 5/30/09; 15:51 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Indian paintbrushes pose a riddle, a flower that’s not a flower, a root that’s not a root, a leaf that punishes predators but assumes the plumage of pollinators, a product of the temperate north that survives the arid southwest, created once but still replicating.

Although I’d never seen one, I knew it last June as soon as I spotted the exotic scarlet petals that are really narrow bracts reflexed like squirrels’ tails from beneath lime-yellow snapdragon-style flowers. Some species of Castilleja appears in every field guide.

The one I saw yesterday may be the same plant. Both were growing in the middle of a widened arroyo where chamisa has been colonizing an area now outside the main flow of water. It’s not like it easily reproduces. The perennial integra’s a self-incompatible parasite with a low germination rate.

Both were solitary specimens, while whole-leaved paintbrushes usually appear in groups from Colorado down through Guerro in central México. In southern Colorado, enough plants exist for it to be the fourth largest component of the summer diet of white-tailed jackrabbits.

Verne Grant believes Castillejas were part of the northern temperate Arcto-tertiary flora that originally had yellow bracts and were pollinated by insects. When temperatures warmed in the Eocene, plants moved south and tropical hummingbirds migrated north. Based on the number of red species, he believes the genus was one of the first to adapt to new conditions.

When Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley documented the flora of New Mexico in 1915, they found twenty varieties, many in environments like those posited by Grant. Six were found primarily in the wet meadows and marshes around Chama, two in the Arctic-alpine zone of Truches Peak, and four in the Santa Fe mountains. Only Castilleja integra was described as common "throughout the State" in the "dry hills and plains."

The ruddiness intensifies on individual plants from the lower, greyish leaves tinged with purple to the uppermost bracts. However, those leaves, smooth on top and hairy beneath, no longer nourish the plants: the taproots put out lateral shoots that attach to nearby roots and transfer supplemental nutrients through the xylem.

Diethart Matthies grew four species, including integra, with and without parasitic hosts, and found they all could grow. Two could even flower. However, the ones without a host were very much smaller. Most don’t usually survive beyond the seedling stage if the roots don’t affix themselves to another.

The local Castilleja integra is quite indiscriminate in its choice. Santa Fe Greenhouse grows seedlings with fringed sage. Plants of the Southwest mixes the netted, brown seeds with blue grama grass. In Colorado they grow with liatris, penstemons, and lupines. The plant I saw was next to a chamisa with many dead branches and surrounded by broom snakeweed sprouts.

The roots apparently absorb whatever the host makes available, including alkaloids that can be toxic to butterfly larvae that feed on their leaves. They also can ingest selenium, but it’s not clear if they take it from the soil or a host like snakeweed.

The random presence of chemicals explains why the plant has been used medicinally by some and others have found it dangerous or useless. Leonora Curtin found Spanish-speakers in northern New Mexico used boiled flor de Santa Rita and sugar as a diuretic. When Michael Moore tried the tea for water retained by changes in weather and temperature, he found it only moderately useful.

Such contrariness is the crux of a riddle. David Tank and Richard Olmstead found Castilleja began as an annual and one mutation in California produced all the perennials that exist. Since that time it has developed an ability to produce unusual numbers of chromosomes, and that polyploidy has led to the large number of species, some of which can interbreed with others to spawn unclassifiable hybrids. Even the stable integra may have either 24 or 48 chromosomes.

For those who wish to use the plant as well as those who wish to understand it, the local Indian paintbrush remains a paradox, the most flamboyant presence in the arroyo, but the most mundane on the genus.

Notes:
Websites for Santa Fe Greenhouse and Plants of the Southwest.

Bear, George D. and Richard M. Hansen. Food Habits, Growth, and Reproduction of White-tailed Jackrabbits in Southern Colorado, 1966, cited by George A. Feldhamer, Bruce C. Thompson, and Joseph A. Chapman, Wild Mammals of North America, 2003 second edition.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Grant, Verne. "Historical Development of Ornithophily in the Western North American Flora,"
National Academy of Science Proceedings 91:10407-10411:1994.

Matthies, Diethart. "Parasite-host Interactions in Castilleja and Orthocarpus," Canadian Journal of Botany 75:1252–1260:1997.

Moore, Michael. Los Remedios: Traditional Herbal Remedies of the Southwest, 1990.

Tank, David C. and Richard Olmstead. "Geographic Disjunction or Morphological Convergence? The Evolutionary Origin of a Second Radiation of Annual Castilleja Species in South America (Subtribe Castillejinae: Orobanchaceae)," Botany and Biology Conference, 2005.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.

Photograph: Indian paintbrush growing in the prairie arroyo, 6 June 2009.

Rock Soapwort

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, catalpa, Austrian copper, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, fern-leaf globemallow, cheese, tumble mustard, stickseed, sweet pea, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, milkweed, oxalis, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, bindweed, perky Sue, blanket flower, fleabane, goatsbeard, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, brome and three awn grasses; buds on stickleaf; datura visible; large brown patches of dead tansy mustard and cheat grass.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Dr Huey, Lady Banks and miniature roses, privet, German iris, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, chocolate flower, coreopsis, Moonshine yarrow; buds on butterfly weed, anthemis and Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: Floribunda and Persian yellow roses, peony, oriental poppy, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on hollyhock.

Looking south: Beauty bush, weigela, pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, raspberry; buds of daylily; mushrooms sprouted.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, baptista; buds on sea lavender and white beardtongue.

Bedding plants: Both moss rose and sweet alyssum still sparse after transplanting.

Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Cottontail, hummingbird, gecko, bumblebee on pinks, small bee on rugosa, fly in Persian yellow, mosquitoes, large black harvester and small red ants; robins near village; Jack rabbit came in from the prairie Wednesday.

Weather: Hard rain last Sunday night left water in the prairie and the needle grass immediately turned a brighter green. Rain continued off and on since, while the furnace came on when morning temperatures fell into the low 40's; 15:43 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Rock garden has been used to describe everything from alpine beds that reproduce conditions above the timberline to rocks strewn among bedding plants. They all have their roots in the Romantic movement that preferred scenes of dramatic nature to the orderly classicism of formal beds.

In one of the first alpine manuals, published in 1870, William Robinson suggested Saponaria ocymoides would fall "over the face of rocks" and was "excellent for planting on ruins and old walls." In this country, Laura Beebe Wilder believed "no edging is prettier than large irregular stones sunk part way in the earth" with plants like Saponaria ocymoides creeping and tumbling over them.

American interest in rock gardens had increased when steam engines made it possible for them to visit the Alps, the Mediterranean coast and Italy in the nineteenth century. Plants became souvenirs that showed they not only had done the Grand Tour, but had absorbed a superior aesthetic.

In 1886, the Scientific American told its readers the low-growing soapwort could be seen "hanging from the rocks by the roadside" when they drove out from Luchon in the Pyrenees. This year a tour group promises visitors they will see them blooming in May at roadside stops when they climb up from a Catalonian monastery near les Avellanes.

I know I was tempted after I saw pictures of lavender pink flowers spilling down a wall in one of the inexpensive catalogs that promote them as Mediterranean or Cote D’Azur Pinks. I installed my first plants in late summer of 1995 at the far south end of my retaining wall where they could fall over the edge. They didn’t survive the winter. I tried again in 2004, and this time planted two seedlings in spring farther north and below the wall. I added three more two years later that didn’t survive.

The winds are severe in both places, but the one area has more shade. Despite those pictures of perennials basking in the Mediterranean sun, they don’t like the heat and drought of early summer. Each year they begin blooming the end of April, first of May and stop in mid-June. Some years the leaves turn brown. Alan Armitage says they won’t survive southeastern humid summers, but here, after the monsoons have mediated the climate, they produce scattered flowers until the end of August.

The member of the carnation family is native to the lower elevations from the Pyrenees to the Austrian Alps, and grows down to the coast and on the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. The reason so many tourists notice them is they are one of the first plants to colonize disturbed land like that created by their carriage roads. Researchers found they were abundant the second year after a fire in the Swiss Alps around 4000' while Angelika Schwabe’s team thought grazing might explain their increase since the 1930's in the Inner Alps of northern Italy.

The Saponarias, with their open heads of long-tubed five-petaled flowers, may not need rocks to flourish, but they must have winter. If they disdain the south, a Belgian team found they can grow nearly 1,500 miles north of their natural range. Jelitto tells growers if the dark brown seeds don’t germinate within three to four weeks, to cool the flats, and that young plants need three to ten weeks of cool temperatures to bloom. In my west facing eastern bed, the persistent leaves turn maroon in cold weather.

It doesn’t much matter if one plants these long-blooming flowers to create a rugged subalpine garden or if one simply wants a groundcover that can fill lots of bare ground, sooner or later the aesthetic and pragmatic converge. I might have wanted a Mediterranean look with soapworts hanging over the retaining wall, but they were going to survive where conditions best fit their needs and I could either figure that out by planting them in different places or fill my empty spaces with something else.

Notes:
Catalogs for Van Bourgondien (Cote d’ Azur Pinks) and Spring Hill Nurseries (Mediterranean Pinks); website for Jelitto Staudensamen GmbH.

"Alpine Flowers in the Pyrenees," Scientific American Supplement, 561:110-114:2 October 1886.

Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Moser, B. and T Wohlgemuth. "Which Species Dominate Early Post-fire Vegetation in the Central Alps and Why?," International Conference on Fire Research, 2006.

Naturetrek Tour Itinerary. "Catalonia - Eastern Pyrenees," 2009, available on-line.

Robinson, William. Alpine Flowers for English Gardens, 1870.

Schwabe, Angelika, Anselm Kratochwil, and Sandro Pignatti. "Plant Indicator Values of a High-phytodivesity Country (Italy) and Their Evidence, Exemplified for Model Areas with Climatic Gradients in the Southern Inner Alps," Flora 202:339-349:2007.

Van der Veken, Sebastiaan, Martin Hermy, Mark Vellend, Anne Knapen, and Kris Verheyen. "Garden Plants Get a Head Start on Climate Change," Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:212-216:2008.

Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilder. My Garden, 1916.

Photograph: Rock soapwort growing in front of a railroad timber retaining wall, 28 May 2009.