Nature Abhors a Garden

Goldenrod

2009-11-01T04:15:00.004-07:00

What’s still blooming: Chrysanthemums still have color from a distance, but up close many of the petals are stained brown.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

What’s turned/turning red: Bradford pear, pasture rose, spirea, raspberry.

What’s turned/turning yellow: Most of the area yellow tree leaves turned brown; sour cherries, peach, rugosa rose, Apache plume, some iris leaves, Rumanian sage, catmint, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.

Animal sightings: Mice have been trying to move into the house.

Weather: First snow landed on frozen rain on low leaves and stems in Monday morning dark; rain early Wednesday, then snow late; Tuesday morning in the high 20's, Thursday down to low 20's, and Friday.in mid 20's with raw wind; yesterday weather back to normal sunny 30 degree temperature swing; 10:01 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There are things I know, objectively, to be true, but have never experienced.

I know horseweed has tiny white flowers, although I’ve never seen one. I see buds and I see seed heads, but I never see the petals opened. The closest I’ve come was a dull day with clouds hiding a bright sun. In the special half light that extended into afternoon, I saw some flowers partly opened, almost daisies.

It’s often at such special times, like All Hallows’ eve, when conditions aren’t quite normal, that the usually invisible is revealed.

I know goldenrod is a member of the composite family, but all I’ve ever seen were yellow knobs on curving stems, usually from a distance. In Michigan in the 1970's, the rhizomes grew in large stands with white yarrow on land abandoned when I-94 was built in the early 1960's. This summer one large and at least three small patches rose from sides of irrigation ditches along the village periphery.

This year’s rain patterns were unusual. Showers continued into July, when it’s usually dry. Then, there was no rain in the usual monsoon season. There was more water than usual part of the summer, and little the other part. Few sunflowers or purple asters bloomed. We had no fall. It wasn’t their world.

My goldenrod, however, had larger flowers than usual and I could actually see the golden rays ringing flattened domes. Now the heads look like thistles. The white awns anchored to seeds are visible within the prongs of receptacle bracts that remain when the fluff has flown, like cotton bolls before the gin removes the debris.

Two weeks ago, the white balls reflected light. A week ago, after two days of rain and two days of cold, the pappus hairs that had once surrounded the florets were more dispirited, the browns more prominent. Yesterday, after more rain, more cold, and even some snow, the receptacles still clutched their remaining winged achenes.

One reason I could see my flowers so clearly this summer is they are stiff goldenrod plants I bought from Wisconsin’s Prairie Nursery in 2005. The major difference between Solidago rigida and the more common canadensis is that, while they have similar numbers of ray petals (6-13 versus 8-14), my species has 14 to 35 disc florets rather than the 3 to 6 found on the common perennial.

The sheer need for space for the disc flowers pushes the petals apart, making the center more visible. The fact the rigida disc corollas are also two to three times the size of canadensis only emphasizes the difference.

Some taxonomists have argued large flowers like mine aren’t really goldenrods and should be moved to another genus, tentatively called Oligoneuron. However, geneticists found rigida not only shares the same DNA with canadensis, but its subtribe appears to be an older, more basal member of the group.

Apparently, goldenrod began like any other composite, a daisy in a large cluster, somewhere east of the Mississippi. As conditions changed, the flowers shrank, but nature compensated by creating more to produce the same reproductive effort. However, rather than create great clusters like yarrow or horseweed to accommodate the increased number of florets, nature created the classic goldenrod form by extending the stem into a gooseneck and spreading the flowers along one edge.

Today, the USDA website has distribution maps for 75 Solidago species. Many are limited to the areas where they evolved. Of those that did spread, most live either east of the great plains, like stiff goldenrod, or in the west. Common goldenrod is the only one that has adapted almost everywhere. It can’t handle the humid southeast and, early in the twentieth century, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley suggested in New Mexico, it only grew in Chama and on "moist ground in the upper Sonoran" that includes the Rio Grande valley.

This summer even the local goldenrod expanded with the unexpected early moisture. The peduncle stems, that hold individual flowers, grew longer, so the wands became airy plumes. Last weekend those canadensis heads, by then turned white, still maintained their form. But one, growing along a curve where its pappus of white fluff caught the morning light proudly proclaimed to any passing driver, "See I am a composite, see my glorious crown."

Notes:
Nesom, G. L. "Taxonomic Infrastructure of Solidago and Oligoneuron (Asteraceae: Astereae) and Observations on Their Phylogenetic Position," Phytologia 75:1-44:1993.

Semple, John C. and Rachel E. Cook Entries on Solidago, S. canadensis, and S. rigida at efloras Flora of North America website.

US Department of Agriculture plant profile for Solidago, available on-line.

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

Photograph: Stiff goldenrod seed head, 25 October 2009, winterfat in back.

Pampas Grass

2009-10-25T05:57:00.003-06:00

What’s still blooming somewhere: Tea roses, red hot poker, winecup, scarlet flax, drab chamisa, chocolate flower, chrysanthemum, Mexican hat, áñil del muerto, tahokia daisy, blanket flower, hairy golden and Mönch asters; yellow leaves and fallen apples litter the ground, grapes shriveling into raisins.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

What’s turned/turning red: Lapins cherry, Bradford pear, pasture rose, spirea, raspberry, sand cherry, Virginia creeper, leadwort.

What’s turned/turning yellow: Cottonwood, globe and weeping willows, Siberian elm, tamarix, beauty bush, sour cherries, peach, rugosa rose, Apache plume, lilacs, hosta, Rumanian sage, catmint, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower.

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

Weather: Rain Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by mornings so cold frost lay on lawn grasses and water froze in the village arroyo; 10:18 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There are times when I drive by someone’s yard and see something so beautiful, I wonder "how’d they do that."

Near the village someone has two magnificent clumps of pampas grass at the end of her driveway that have thrown up white plumes that wave 6' high against a backdrop of yellowed trees.

It may sound quite ordinary, except Cortaderia selloana is a zone 8 plant that can survive in zone 7 Albuquerque in favorable situations. There are some shorter cultivars like Pumila which tolerate zone 6 Santa Fe. But, Española is zone 5. The average low temperature for zone 8 is twenty degrees and, even in our mildest winters, there are mornings in the high teens.

Many western gardeners have learned the USDA system of zones is more reliable in the east than on the plains and in the Rockies. The idea of using a single variable, mean low temperature, to predict that ability of plants to survive was introduced in 1927 by Alfred Rehder, who was interested in describing the vegetation belts he saw across the country and the Appalachians.

According to Peter Del Tredici, Donald Wyman redefined Rehder’s concept to use the average minimum temperature in 1938 when he was at the Arnold Arboretum. He and other specialists continued to issue competing modifications until the USDA published the standard developed by Henry Skinner in 1960 at the National Arboretum. The agriculture department has since issued several revisions, and other groups, like Sunset magazine, continue to publish alternative guides for this part of the country.

But no matter how sensitive the tool, nothing will explain how those thriving South American plants have survived at least one winter.

The owner has done everything she could to create a favorable environment. The land around her house is surrounded by high, stone walls, that also line both sides of the sealed drive. In the winter the dark walls and paving absorb daylight, then radiate heat as they cool in the night. The surrounding microclimate is warmer than the prairie.

The owner has also been helped by her location. She lives about three-quarters of a mile from the river and about five hundred feet from a wide arroyo. A concrete-lined irrigation ditch passes near the outer wall carrying water in summer. Trees across the road help deflect the drying
winds of February.

Her natural and manmade location helps, but still can’t explain what makes her rhizomes so successful. My friend from Uruguay tells me what he calls horses’ tails grows on the sandy beaches of the eastern shore where the coldest it gets in winter is a few degrees below freezing. Tour groups advise it can be seen in its native habitat in the Costanera Sur nature reserve in Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata.

It also grows to the southwest at the Ernesto Tornquist Provincial Park with the 3,700' Cerro de la Ventana about 75 miles inland from the Atlantic. There, Natalia Cozzani and Sergio Zalba have found birds nesting in the tussocks of dried grass that accumulate beneath the fountains of sharp-edged foliage.

Pampas grass prefers moist winters and dry summers, but is not restricted to the coast. The perennial is also found in Brazil, Paraguay and Chile. Texas A&M has published a photograph of white heads growing like dense scrub in western Mendoza province in what looks like a tree-lined mountain meadow backed by snow-streaked peaks.

The wild species, which can reach 20', is probably not the one available in trade: nursery catalogs advertize 10' heights. Many are probably sterile cultivars that don’t shed the pollen, flowers and seeds my friend says fill the Uruguayan air. My neighbor probably has a hardier cultivar, but it’s still unique in this area for its height, width and vitality, a wonder to behold.

Notes:
Cozzani, Natalia and Sergio M. Zalba. "Estructura de la Vegetación y Selección de Hábitats Reproductivos en Aves del Pastizal Pampeano," Ecologáía Austral 19:35-44:2009.

Del Tredici, Peter. "The New USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map," Arnoldia 50:16-20:1990.
Rehder, Alfred. Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs, 1927.

Texas A&M University Herbarium. Vascular Plant Image Library photograph of Cortaderia selloana taken by Hugh Wilson.

Photograph: Pampas grass in the wind, 17 October 2009.

Blackberry Lily

2009-10-18T05:42:00.003-06:00

What’s still blooming somewhere: Tea roses, California poppy, red hot poker, winecup, chamisa, chocolate flower, chrysanthemum, Mexican hat, áñil del muerto, broom senecio,
tahokia daisies, Maximilian sunflowers, purple and hairy golden asters, untouched blanket flower buds, low growing Mönch asters.

Bedding plants: Moss rose.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

What’s turned/turning red: Pasture rose, spirea, raspberry, sand cherry, skunk bush, leadwort, pink evening primrose, Virginia creeper.

What’s turned/turning yellow: Cottonwood, globe and weeping willows, black locust, Siberian pea, Siberian elm, tamarix, beauty bush, cherries, peach, rugosa rose, lilacs, lilies, hosta, ladybells.

Animal sightings: Large black harvester and small dark ants

Weather: Tuesday’s morning’s rain followed by great squawking of birds towards the river when I was leaving for work; 10:38 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When Americans and the Chinese look at the same thing, say a blackberry lily, they don’t see the same thing.

When Thomas Jefferson planted what he knew as Ixia chinensis in 1807, he was probably interested in the loose clusters of six, spotted, orange petals that open late morning. Soon other flowers from other parts of the world surpassed their beauty, and the iris-shaped leaves persisted on their own in ditches, along roads, and in fields east of the Rockies.

Today, gardeners are told to grow the shorter, less garish Freckle Face cultivar for its fall and winter interest. Around September 26, the pear-shaped pods on my plants split open to reveal rows of shiny black seeds. The reflexed outer wraps have since dried a papery white.

When the Chinese look at shegan they see medicine.

Steven Foster and Yue Chongxi interpret Shi Zhen Li as having recommended it for throat cancer in 1578. When George Stuart translated Li’s work in 1911, he simply said it had "some special popularity in diseases of the throat" and reported it was used for breast cancer.

Chinese and scientists from other countries that still have some respect for traditional plant medicine have been combing reports of traditional practices looking for potentially useful plants. In the 1970's, doctors at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences were testing the folk methods for treating bronchitis.

By the 1990's, chemists were isolating more than a dozen compounds from the rhizomes of Belamcanda chinensis, and identifying some as flavonoids. In 2000, Li Xin Zhou and Mao Lin had been able to create a synthetic form of one, and demonstrate its effectiveness against inflamation. Lin and others later showed the compound was a powerful antioxidant, and it has since attracted a great deal of interest.

Most recently, Asian scientists have been doing the necessary work to make possible the mass production of the blackberry lily compounds. They have been creating tests for the cost-efficient evaluation of extracts, verifying that cultivated plants don’t differ in efficacy from the ones used in laboratory tests, and trying to develop synthetic forms.

Meantime, European scientists associated with a German herbal medicine company, Bionorica, have identified two of the flavonoids, irigenin and tectorigenin, as phytoestrogens that could be used to counter problems caused by sex hormones, especially prostrate cancer. They took out their first patent on a blackberry lily extract in 2002.

Most Americans never look at the roots that so interest the Chinese. Gardeners can buy plants grown from seed supplied by Jelitto, and are told to let the short-lived perennials perpetuate themselves by going to seed. They wouldn’t know the dried roots are chrome yellow inside and have an acid taste when fresh.

The Chinese aren’t particularly interested in the inedible seeds. In the nineties, some Japanese chemists identified four enediones in the seeds, but none have stimulated any further research.

American’s don’t just not see the blackberry lily’s roots. They’ve been told it’s a member of the iris family and therefore should be avoided as potentially toxic. Chinese don’t just ignore the seeds. They’ve been warned that only the roots are useful and not to substitute aerial parts in their formulas. We both see what we’ve been told to see.

Notes:
Bionorica AG, Wolfgang Wuttke, Hubertus Jarry, Michael A. Popp, Volker Christoffel, and Barbara Spengler. "Use of Extracts and Preparations from Iris Plants and Tectorigenin as Medicaments," patent 2002/092111, 21 November 2002.

Chang, Tzu-Ching, Chih-Liang Wang, and Hsiu-Lan Wang. "Pathogenetic and Clinical Study of Bronchiolitis," Chung-Hua I-Hsueh Tsa-Chih 12:731-73:1976.

Foster, Steven and Yue Chongxi. Herbal Emissaries: Bringing Chinese Herbs to the West: A Guide to Gardening, Herbal Wisdom, and Well-being, 1992.

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

Morrissey, Colm, Jasmin Bektic, Barbara Spengler, David Galvin, Volker Christoffel, Helmut Klocker, John M. Fitzpatrick, R. William and G. Watson. "Phytoestrogens Derived from Belamcanda chinensis Have an Antiproliferative Effect on Prostate Cancer Cells in Vitro," The Journal of Urology 172:2426-2433:2004.

Seki, Katsura, Kazuo Haga and Ryohei Kaneko "Belamcandones A-D, dioxotetrahydrodibenzofurans from Belamcanda chinensis," Phytochemistry 38:703-709:1995.

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

Wang, Qing Li, Mao Lin and Geng Tao Liu. "Antioxidative Activity of Natural Isorhapontigenin," The Japanese Journal of Pharmacology 87:61-66:2001.

Zhou, Lin Xin and Mao Lin. "Studies on the Preparation of Bioactive Oligomerstilbene by Oxidative Coupling Reaction (1)-Preparation of Shegansu B using Silver Oxide as Oxidant," Chinese Chemical Letters 11:515-516:2000.

Photograph: Blackberry lily seeds, 11 October 2009.

Broom Senecio

2009-10-11T06:15:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, chamisa, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, tahokia daisies, Maximilian and native sunflowers, purple, and hairy golden asters; cottonwoods beginning to yellow.

What’s blooming in my yard: California poppy, red hot poker, snapdragon, winecup, chocolate flower, chrysanthemum, Mexican hat; leaves turning yellow on globe willow, black locust, Siberian pea, lilacs, lilies, hosta, ladybells; turning red on pasture rose, spirea; blown off roses of Sharon.

Bedding plants: Moss rose.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, wasp, grasshopper, large black harvester and small dark ants; large black fowl in odd places along the main road when I was leaving for work.

Weather: Rain Wednesday, frost on my car window Friday morning, fog on the river; 11:06 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The first hard frost, and what red or blue flowers remain lay hidden amongst cushions of seeds. It’s time for nature’s medley of yellows.

When I drive out of Santa Fe, bands of aspens loom from the distant Sangre de Cristo. When I drop down into Pojoaque, cottonwoods pick out the watercourse. Here, mossy yellow chamisa rise above the mustard snakeweeds and golden hairy asters. Clearest of all are the broom senecios.

Last weekend they peered from under chamisa shrubs in the arroyo and swayed by themselves in the sand. A few skim great mounds along the road, while the ones that have moved about my garage have clusters of six to eight skinny petaled daisies atop sparsely leaved stalks. A seed, attached to a white, dandelion-life tuft, has come up to the south by the fence that stopped its flight and a single, bright green stalk has risen from its taproot.

Broom senecios were seen by John Frémont when he was exploring the Sweet Water in Wyoming during the first part of August in 1842. One likes to imagine, when one is told someone was the first easterner to see a plant, that his report implies something about the primeval vegetation of the area.

With this groundsel, I’m not sure what past Frémont represented. Theodore Barkley suggests the plant is encountered infrequently in western South Dakota and Nebraska, and only found occasionally westward in the Great Plains, although its known in all the plains states.

The Sweet Water is the link between the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains and the river Platte that travelers followed from Missouri. A group of Astor Fur Company men had discovered the route from the west in 1812. Jedediah Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick rediscovered what became the Oregon Trail from the east in 1823.

Soon, fur traders were using the route to bring pelts back to Saint Louis from their annual rendezvous with trappers. In 1830 the more enterprising William Sublette built a wagon road to haul his goods, a path Benjamin Bonneville used two years later to scout the area for the federal government.

By the time Frémont arrived, the trail was well established, but not yet heavily used. The valley of the Sweet Water varies from a few yards to five miles in width. He saw absinthes when he was near the mouth, and asters near the pass. Occasionally the river was bordered by "groves of willow" and nearer the pass, by aspen, beach and willow.

During his third day in the 120-mile-long valley he noted "numerous bright-colored flowers had made the river bottom look gay as a garden." Later he contrasted the occasional side valley of "deep verdure and profusion of beautiful flowers" with the "great evaporation on the sandy soil of this elevated plain, and the saline efflorescences which whiten the ground."

About the same time, he remembered seeing "many traces of beaver on the stream; remnants of dams, near which were lying trees, which they and cut down." Probably the first environmental change that favored the composites over the more valuable grasses was the death of the beavers who may have kept all those salt plains irrigated. In the mountains beyond the pass, Frémont noted both the presence of both beavers and saturated grasses.

Soon the valley would be filled with wagons in summer. The Whitmans had followed the Sweet Water in 1836, as did the wagon train of 1841 led by John Bartleson and John Bidwell and the one led by Elijah White in 1842. Fremont himself had so many men with him they needed to kill two buffalo a day to feed themselves.

Broom senecios do well in slightly disturbed soils. The only scientists I’ve read who’ve described an area dominated by the bright green subshrubs were surveying a part of the National Guard’s Camp Navajo, outside Flagstaff, that had been burned, then used for detonation exercises. The land was desolate and, no doubt, windblown, but the soil surface was not damaged the way it would have been by wagons or flocks of sheep.

In the Chihuahuan desert, others have noticed that when the soil is seriously disturbed, the thin veneer of microorganisms that sustains the grasses is destroyed and shrubs invade. The chamisas and other Chrysothamnus species protect soil nutrients while the ground between the shrubs continues to erode.

In the arroyo, the senecios growing with chamisa are taller, near 30", and have a number of stems with more clusters with more flowers crowded into the heads. The solitary plants, like those in my yard, at most have gotten 24" tall and the starry shapes of the flowers are more distinct as they overlap one another in open lattices.

In addition to its ability to survive sand and drought, Senecio spartioides was chemically prepared to protect itself from wagon train draught animals. All its parts contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids that stop most from eating them; when animals or humans do overindulge they die from liver damage.

Nature protects itself as soon as it’s disturbed. I suspect Frémont didn’t just see climax vegetation of the Great Plains, but the first response to its destruction.

Notes:
Barkley, T. M. "Asteraceae Dunn., the Sunflower Family" in Great Plains Flora Association, Flora of the Great Plains, 1986.

Evans, R. D. and J. R. Ehleringer. "Water and Nitrogen Dynamics in an Arid Woodland," Oecologia 99:233-242:1994.

Frémont, John Charles. The Daring Adventures of Kit Carson and Frémont, 1885.

Young, Erin, Abe Springer and Ty Ferré. "Frost Penetration Depth and Frost Heave at Camp Navajo: Year 1," 29 October 2004.

Photograph: Broom senecio leaning out from under chamisa in the arroyo, 4 October 2009.

White Prairie Clover

2009-10-04T05:08:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, leather leaved globemallow, white prairie clover, Crimson Rambler morning glory, goats’ head, chamisa, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, tahokia daisies, purple, heath, and hairy golden asters, pampas grass; bittersweet berries; sand burs ripening; tamarix leaves turning yellow, Russian thistle and prostrate knotweed turning red; grape and Virginia creeper leaves dead; red pepper plants dead.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Mexican hat, chocolate flower, chrysanthemum; Lapins cherry leaves turning orange.

Looking east: Snapdragon, large-leaved soapwort, Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Sweet pea; zinnias and cosmos dead

Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, David phlox, Mönch aster; leadwort leaves turning burgundy; skunk bush orange red.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; tomatoes dead.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern; rochea leaves turned red.

Animal sightings: Brown speckled woodpecker landed on front porch post poised to attack; rabbit, geckos, large black harvester and small dark ants, cows brought in to graze in village.

Weather: Below freezing temperatures Friday and Saturday mornings; last rain 9/24; 11:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When plants die that have been around for some years, I mourn a little, as I would for someone I knew years ago. When the plants are relatively new, I shrug and remind myself it’s hard to find perennials that can survive this environment.

When the wild prairie clover disappeared last year, I wondered if it was simply short-lived. It had only been growing under the protection of a clump of June grass at the end of my drive since 2006. I knew a gopher could have gone after the deep taproot. The rabbit as easily could have eaten the sparse, light green foliage.

When a five-year-old stand of the white flowers died at the Bridger Plant Materials Center in Montana, people were less philosophical. After all, these were the scions of the Antelope seed they had collected in Stark County in 1947 and released in 2000 to growers for prairie restoration projects. Entomologists discovered the larvae of long-horned beetles had burrowed into the root crowns.

Those who were already using the kidney-shaped seeds in their restoration projects wanted to know why they failed to germinate. The most obvious answer was that the clover is a legume that needs a specific bacteria in the soil to help its roots convert soil nitrogen to feed the plant.

Some also pointed to the seed-stealing habits of rodents, while others noted the need for cold moisture or abrasion to break the seed’s dormancy, and that irrigation increases the existence of particular rust parasites.

Timothy Dickson and William Busby found a more complicated answer: a prairie is not a uniform mix of plants. Dalea candida grows better when there is less competition from warm season grasses. I’ve noticed some time ago that in this area, the only plants that live with the bunch grasses are things like snakeweed and winterfat and then only when seeds drop where the wind has loosened the soil enough and water happens to pass.

Most of the forbs are either in the arroyo, or have sprung up where off-road vehicles have killed the grass. Of course, Russian thistle is the most likely volunteer, but other annuals and perennials do emerge. Last weekend white prairie clover was growing on the north side of the arroyo plain, near the path of the water flow, and in one of the feeders.

The herbaceous perennial can grow anywhere from the prairie provinces of Canada to Chihuahua, Durango, and Sonora below 7000'. In this country, it avoids the far west and New England, but can grow in the glades and savannahs of the southwestern south. Early in the last century, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley found it grew on open slopes throughout New Mexico.

Dan Moerman noticed the distribution of native people utilizing two subspecies is much more limited. Outside the Pawnee and Kiowa, every group lives in or near New Mexico. Going down the Rio Grande are the Santa Clara, the San Ildefonso, and San Felipe. Moving west, he read about the Laguna, Acoma, Navajo, and Hopi. No one reported a use that suggested it was common enough to be built into the material, medicinal or nutritional culture.

If a plant is this difficult to grow, I wonder why so many try. Although some give the usual answer about forage quality, I suspect for many it’s nostalgia for lost prairies. It may indeed attract a number of bees and contain chemicals that make it easier to digest, but plants like Illinois Bundle Flower are better.

The white flowers are simply something you remember in the grass, and hate to see disappear. The small flowers open at the bases of tall, narrow columns, and the rings rise through the blooming season. The modified pea flowers have a single wide banner, but the other petals are reduced to flaps amongst the stamens. When the cone is short and flowers fill the entire head, the usual tutu of lightness turns into a fairy’s wand.

Notes:
Dickson, Timothy L. and William H. Busby. "Forb Species Establishment Increases with Decreased Grass Seeding Density and with Increased Forb Seeding Density in a Northeast Kansas, U.S.A., Experimental Prairie Restoration," Restoration Ecology 17:597-605:2009.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

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

Wynia, Richard. "White Prairie Clover," USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Plant Guide, 2008.

Photograph: White prairie clover with grass on the bank of the arroyo, 27 September 2009.

Leadwort

2009-09-27T03:20:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush almost gone, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet and white prairie clovers, yellow evening primroses, datura, goats’ head, bouncing Bess, stickleaf, chamisa, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, horseweed, wild lettuce, African marigolds, tahokia daisies, purple, heath, strap-leaf and hairy golden asters, pampas grass; canna buds, bittersweet berries; more Virginia creeper turning red.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; leaves on butterfly weed turning yellow, catalpa leaves turning yellow and dropping, sand cherries turning red, seeds on blackberry lily.

Looking east: California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower; leaves on peony turning color.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, sweet pea, Crimson Rambler morning glories, zinnia, cosmos; grapes turning red.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, David phlox, leadwort, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; leaves turning orange on skunkbush and white spurge; peach leaves turning yellow and dropping.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; edible tomatoes.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, bees, wasps, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Short bursts of strong winds late some days; rain Thursday; 11:55 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Some flowers are definitely camera shy. Some weigh so little, they never stay still long enough for a camera to capture them. Others reflect so much light they blind the lens. The blues are trickiest of all, because their wiles defeat the camera itself, not just the photographer.

Of all the blue flowers in my garden, leadwort is the hardest to photograph. Early in the morning, when the Chinese natives are in shade, images look like they were taken underwater. By the time the sun reaches the west facing bed, the petals have begun to protect themselves by reflecting light. I was only able to get a clear picture last Sunday when the sky was still bright, but a little rain was falling. Even then the color was wrong.

Unlike the old silver-based film cameras, nothing is constant with a digital device. Then, if a picture was out of focus, the photographer knew he or she hadn’t set the distance parameter, the focal length, properly. With a computer-controlled camera, two parts of a plant the same distance from the lens, will appear in different degrees of detail. The reddish brackets that hold the pinkish tubes of the five-petaled leadwort flowers are always clear.

The same variation occurs with color. When the light is right, the leaves, the stems, the tubes and brackets are reasonably true, but not the petals. The reds, greens, browns and whites are fine. Only the blues are bad.

The chemicals in the plant absorb light both as part of photosynthesis and as the nature of matter. What we see is the light that’s not absorbed. In the case of leadwort, the flower is absorbing the yellow center of the visible light spectrum and ignoring the reds and blues, which the human eye combines into purple. On the other hand, the leaves are rejecting the green, and using the rest of the light to feed themselves

Jeffrey Harborne identified the flower pigment in Ceratostigma plumbaginoides as europinidin, a reddish blue anthocyanin derivative of the bluish purple delphinidin typically found in members of the plumbago family. Later this fall, when the leaves turn a burgundy red, the plant will have produced a cyandin monoside that will reflect light differently. Earlier, when they broke through the ground the second week of May, the new leaves were a shiny green.

Chemists themselves have troubles defining colors precisely. When William Lawrence’s team was testing the anthocyanin pigments in fall leaves, they found a number had one hue when seen in daylight and another when seen in artificial light. The nature of light is not constant from morning to noon, from clear to cloudy, from June to September.

Whenever I try to explain to myself what has happened with my pictures I get tangled in the differences between the reality of the physicist’s linear spectrum that fades into infrared at one end and to ultraviolet at the other, and the vocabulary of the artist’s color wheel which sees purple as the junction between red and blue. When I compare the photograph with the flower I see, it looks like the blue is bad because the red has been lost, only the blue has become lighter, not darker as a consequence.

I finally defined the two colors, the actual flower and its representation in the language of the computer monitor, which sees everything as a mix of red, green, and blue. The one is roughly 130 parts red to 50 parts green to 255 parts blue. The other is 100 parts red to 130 parts green to 245 parts blue. The first formula lacks the depth of the petals, but 255 is the maximum allowed for any color. The second doesn’t capture the sheen or white overtones of the photograph.

My camera uses the established technology that existed when it has introduced in 2005. The light enters through the lens to bounce against a prism that redirects it down to the CCD chip that converts the light into electronic impulses. Thom Hogan indicates such chips are more attuned to the high-energy infrared and somewhat blind to the low-energy blues. Some of the loss of blue, from 255 to 245, may be a consequence of that limitation; some of the loss of red (from 130 to 100) may come from the manufacturer’s attempt to compensate for the infrared sensitivity.

Computer chips only see on and off, which translate into black and white monochromes. The first stage of coloration comes from two layers of filters that sit above the CCD chip. One alternates red and green filters, the other blue and green so every point on the chip has one green filter and one of another color. At this point, the only loss of color comes from the quality of the filters.

The camera then takes the information from the chip and from the filters and combines them, using proprietary algorithms that try to reconstruct the relative importance of the data captured by the two layers. Since engineers know most people are more sensitive to green, than to red or blue, they tend to favor green when the pattern isn’t clear. And so, the amount of green in my picture is increased from 50 to 130, which distorts the flower color.

The variations increase when the image is transferred to a computer monitor or printer, because each piece of equipment has its own way of translating the RGB schema.

I originally asked questions about my camera’s technology so I would have some idea what features I needed if I replaced it. It never occurred to me to alter my garden so only the flowers that could be photographed would be allowed to grow. Nature is still more complex that it’s scientific representation, and flowers can be remembered without mechanical devices.

Leadwort is one of the last perennials to emerge in spring, rising in new places along the soaker hose where its rhizomatous roots have extended themselves. It’ll be one of the more colorful this fall. It’s now been putting out low flowers every few days since the middle of August. I grow it for the pleasures lived and those remembered, not for being recordable.

Notes: Charge-coupled devices (CCD’s) were developed in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at AT&T Bell Labs. The network of filters was patented by Bruce Bayer for Kodak in 1976. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz established humans perceived colors from only three band widths of light; the existence of separate human receptors for red, green and blue (RGB) was finally established in 1983 by Herbert James Ambrose Dartnall, James K. Bowmaker, and John D. Mollon. What I call a part of color, using the language of artists, actually refers to the intensity of the light measured by the physicist.

Hogan, Thom. "How Digital Cameras Work," bythom website, last revised 9 April 2009, provides the clearest explanation for the layman.

Harborne, J. B. "Comparative Biochemistry of the Flavonoids-IV: Correlations Between Chemistry, Pollen Morphology and Systematics in the Family Plumbaginaceae, " Phytochemistry 6:1415-1428:1967.

Lawrence, William John Cooper, James Robert Price, Gertrude Maud Robinson, and Robert Robinson. "A Survey of Anthocyanins. V," Biochemistry 32:1661-1667:1938.

Photograph: Leadwort, taken around 3:30 on 20 September 2009.

Heath Aster

2009-09-20T02:07:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet clovers, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, bouncing Bess, pale trumpet, stickleaf, clammy weed, spurge, pigweed, Russian thistle, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, horseweed, wild lettuce, purple, heath, strap-leaf and hairy golden asters, goldenrod, tahokia daisy; bittersweet berries, apples falling.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat almost gone, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan almost gone, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: California poppy, hollyhock almost gone, winecup, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum darkening, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, sweet pea, Crimson Rambler and reseeded morning glories, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, flax, sea lavender, David phlox, leadwort, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, geckos, bees, wasps, grasshoppers, large black harvester ants, explosion of small dark ants

Weather: Rain Wednesday and Thursday; mornings were cold enough for the furnace to come on and my neighbor to fire up his chain saw to cut fire wood; 12:15 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Mornings turn cold, heath asters open, and my thoughts turn to Billy Grammer. In 1959 he sang "summer’s almost gone, winter’s coming on."

Grammer’s answer was it’s time to travel on. That’s good advice for hummingbirds raiding the last hollyhocks, but what about the bees and wasps and other insects still flitting about?

My bees probably come from some hive maintained down by the orchards, and will survive the winter by clustering together and beating their wings to produce enough heat to keep themselves warm. The six-legged creatures only venture out when temperatures rise above 50, so will subsist on stored honey.

Other bee species and wasps have no such surplus. The social wasps, and hornets that are part of that insect group, spent the summer feeding larvae with animal proteins from insects they had killed, including ones that would have eaten the leaves or sucked the juices from my wild asters. The adults themselves lived on sugars and got some nutrients from the process of feeding the grubs, some from flowers, and some from foraging in garbage.

Now the larvae are grown and everyone needs to eat. In some species, the young females will impregnate themselves and burrow under leaves or find an attic to hibernate for the winter. Others will simply lay eggs which remain dormant until spring. The rest, the workers, will die.

Unfortunately, they all need food just when most flowering plants are responding to nature’s signals that winter’s coming on by moving to seed production. Wasps don’t have the specialized tongues of bees and need open, shallow autumn flowers where nectar is easily available. They must have had a tough time this past week when the white asters pulled up their twelve ray flowers to shed the rain.

The small, white composites, like many related asters, seem to have two growth cycles related to changes in light. The basal rosettes emerged this year in late April, but the tall plumes of narrow green leaves didn’t appear until late July, nearly six weeks after the long days of mid-summer stimulated their production. It wasn’t until the shorter days of fall that the flower clusters were ready to open.

With so little time to produce seed and visitations by smooth wasps, who aren’t as efficient at pollinating as hairy bees, heath asters have found others way to perpetuate themselves. Every spring I remember how the skinny stalks turn into a hedge that overshadows everything before smothering the lower plants when they collapse. I pull out most of the plants, but strands of their stolonous roots break off.

After the heat of summer drives me inside, the perennials spread underground and push up new shoots back near the water and paths. By then, it’s too late to do anything except plan how to control them the next year.

Man has found little use for Aster ericoides. Some call it steel weed because the woody brown stems dull their tools; others call it good-bye meadow because it’s poor forage. Only the Meskwaki used it to their lash together their sweat lodges and tested its herbal uses.

The seeds, if they get produced, can last several years. Heath asters are one of the first things to return in tall grass prairies when fields are abandoned. They dominate the land for a few years, then succumb to competition from other plants, including the grasses. When they bloom, they stretch from Manitoba to northern Mexico and provide a nectar path for migrating monarch butterflies, as well as a steady diet for the more sedentary silvery checkerspots.

These are precious weeks when life is suspended between summer and winter. Heath asters may attract stinging insects, but they have no inhibitions about blooming until frost. We can’t all travel on. Those of us who stay around, deserve our pleasures too.

Notes:
Clayton, Paul. "Gotta Travel On;" Bob Colton discusses the origins of the song in Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival, 2008.

Hilty, John. "Heath Aster," Illinois Wildflowers website has more details on insects.

Smith, Huron H. "Ethnobotany of the Meskwaki Indians," Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee Bulletin 4:175-326:1928, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Photograph: Heath aster with wasp on cloudy day, 16 September 2009; brown sweet pea pods in back.

Autumn Joy Sedum

2009-09-13T06:14:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet and white prairie clovers, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, pale trumpet, stickleaf, clammy weed, spurge, pigweed, Russian thistle, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, horseweed, wild lettuce, purple, heath, strap-leaf and hairy golden aster, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, pampas grass; tiny apricots and apples coming down; red peppers and ripe watermelon.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Hosta, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Maltese Cross, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, sweet pea, Crimson Rambler and reseeded morning glories, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, butterfly bush, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, flax, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; peaches falling.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Rain in area all week, but all I got was late afternoon clouds; last night not enough water fell to dampen the surface; last real rain 8/30/09; 13:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: My Autumn Joy sedum is now at the stage where the rose red, five-petaled flowers attract bees.

The three plants formed new basal rosettes of pale, scalloped leaves in early March. The single, stout stems emerged in early July. The fattening buds, held in flat clusters like yarrow, showed streaks of white when the protective sepals were forced apart later in the month. Two weeks ago the florets started to open a pale pink, and now the tips are darkening.

The perennial’s not only one of the more colorful fall flowers, but also a sign of nature's ability to survive the worst that the climate or man can contrive.

In 1863, the ambitious son of a silk worker, Friedrich Bayer, and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott opened a factory in Barmen to produce synthetic dyes from coal tars. Eight years after Bayer died, Georg Arends opened a nursery in Ronsdorf on the same Rhine tributary in 1888.

Chemists were then improving upon nature by taking known, discrete elements and mixing them to see what would result. Ten years before Bayer changed from selling dyes to manufacturing them, Charles Frederic Gerhardt combined acetyl chloride with a sodium salt of salicylic acid to produce a synthetic form of the white willow bark then used to treat fever and inflammation. In 1897, a Bayer chemist, Felix Hoffmann, found a way to produce acetylsalicylic acid in a stable form that could be mass produced as aspirin.

Breeders were applying the same methods to nature. In the early 1900's, Arends began introducing new varieties of astilbe that crossed at least four species. In the 1920's, he was experimenting with sempervivums, another succulent in Autumn Joy's Crassula family. And in 1939, the same year Hitler invaded Poland, he introduced a new hybrid heath, Silberschmelze.

In the same years, Bayer was assimilated into I.G. Farbenindustrie, and the towns of Barmen, Ronsdorf and Elberfeld, where Bayer had moved its operations, were merged into Wuppertal, a major rail and heavy industrial complex spread along the banks of the narrow Wupper river valley. Beginning the night of May 29, 1943, the British sent 719 planes to drop 1,900 tons of bombs on the area. 2,450 civilians died, Bayer was out of production for nearly two months, and Arends' nursery was destroyed.

Julia Brittain says Arends, then nearly 80, never fully recovered. Paul Temple landed with the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, and remembered helping the crippled nursery smuggle seedlings to Harold Hillier in England.

After the war, Arends' two sons kept the operation running. In 1950, the old man began working with a dwarf azalea seedling. Then in 1955, three years after he died, Herbsfreude was released as a hybrid between Sedum spectabile, a pink-flowered ornamental from the lowlands of northeastern China and Korea, and Sedum telephium maximum, a highly variable European native.

In the middle sixteenth century, Hieronymus Bock had reported extracts of telephium were used in the Rhine valley to treat internal injuries like ulcers of the lungs. A century later, Nicholas Culpeper said a bruised leaf or the sap from orpine was used in England to treat external wounds. However by the time, Georg Arends was active, the old herbal remedies, like the dye plants, had been displaced by chemists.

Now, medical researchers are isolating the active ingredients from those traditional medicine plants and testing their efficacy. In the early 1990's, researchers in Munich identified two polysaccharides in telephium that were anti-inflammatory. A few years later, Italian scientists observed the ways the polysaccharides and flavonols operated on cells during wound healing. Last year, another Italian group described the biochemical processes involved in abating inflamation.

Bayer may have reemerged from Allied control in 1951 a much smaller company, but it has since reconglomerated, and now even makes the lawn pesticide sold in the local hardware that uses synthetic pyrethrum. Arends' granddaughter, Anja Maubach, still has the nursery in Ronsdorf. Herbsfreude is sold as Autumn Joy, and botanists have decided that spectabile and telephium aren’t really sedums after all, but members of a related genus they call Hylotelephium.

Notes:
Altavilla, Domenica, Francesca Polito, Alessandra Bitto, Letteria Minutoli, Elisabetta Miraldi, Tiziana Fiumara, Marco Biagi, Herbert Marini, Daniela Giachetti, Mario Vaccaro, Francesco Squadrito. "Anti-Inflammatory Effects of the Methanol Extract of Sedum telephium ssp. maximum in Lipopolysaccharide-Stimulated Rat Peritoneal Macrophages," Pharmacology 82:250-256:2008.

Bock, Hieronymus. Kräuterbuch, 1539, cited by Culpepper.

Brittain, Julia. The Plant Lover’s Companion, 2006.

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.

Obituary for Paul Temple, The Telegraph, 24 February 2007.

Raimondi, L., G. Banchelli, D. Dalmazzi, N. Mulinacci, A. Romani, F. F. Vincieri, and R. Pirisino. "Sedum telephium L. Polysaccharide Content Affects MRC5 Cell Adhesion to Laminin and Fibronectin," Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 52:585-591:2000.

Sendl, A, N. Mulinacci, F. F. Vincieri, and R. Wagner. "Anti-inflammatory and Immunologically Active Polysaccharides of Sedum telephium," Phytochemistry 34:1357-62:1993.

Photograph: Autumn Joy sedum, 7 September 2009.

Clammy Weed

2009-09-06T04:38:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet and white prairie clovers, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, pale trumpet, stickleaf, clammy weed, spurge, purslane, pigweed, Russian thistle, amaranth, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, purple, strap-leaf and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, black grama grass; buds of heath asters; seeds on bittersweet and burr grass; some corn stalks turning brown; grass and alfalfa hay cut; apples falling.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Maltese Cross, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaved soapwort, sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, sweet pea, Crimson Rambler and reseeded morning glories, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, butterfly bush, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, flax, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; ripe tomatoes.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, hummingbird, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Rain last rain Sunday; 13:05 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When clammy weed began blooming the end of July it resembled phlox, a round white head topped a tall, straight stem that rose from a bed of three-part, clover-like leaves.

Now it’s been out for more than a month it looks more like mustard. The individual florets terminate maroon stems that reach up and out from narrow leaves. Each flower begins as a collection of four white petals surrounding a purple pistil like ancient megaliths held tight into the head. A fountain of purple stamens towers above.

The central stem continues to grow, and after the flowers are fertilized, the petals fall away leaving the stamens and ovary which become isolated from the head. Soon, they’re replaced by a green pod held out by the pedicel branch dropping under the weight until the plants looks like one of those many armed Hindu gods.

This member of the caper family ranges from lower Canada to the upper states of México, but it isn’t ubiquitous. John Hilty says that in Illinois the taprooted annual occurs on "sand or gravel bars along rivers, gravelly areas and clay banks along railroads, and barren waste areas." In Michigan, Edward Voss reported it grew in the southern counties with glacial till.

To the southwest of Española, the Nature Conservancy reports clammy weed grows with stickleaf species on intermittently flooded, sometimes stony alluvial flats and sandbars in central and southern Arizona where other herbaceous plants are scarce. In southern New Mexico, it’s found with local stickleaf species, datura and agave where shrubs have replaced grasses on the Jornado plain.

The nearby wide arroyo where I see the flowers runs west to the Rio Grande. The south wall is maybe seven feet high and relatively soft clay or sandy loam. A wide plain has developed at its base, edged by chamisa where the water runs. The wildflowers blooming there now include golden hairy asters and hopi tea.

The north bank is higher, with openings carved by wind and water. Bands of exposed gravel spill out, so the near floor is pebbly in places. Russian thistle and stickleaf sprouted in its shadow when the weather warmed. Clammy weed’s only found in this protected area, except for one plant that emerged in the middle of the road cut.

Despite the wide national distribution, the only native groups Dan Moerman reports using clammy weed live in Arizona and New Mexico. The Isleta south of Albuquerque rolled dried leaves in corn husks for ceremonial cigarettes while the cactus fraternity of the Zuñi rubbed chewed a’pilalu roots and flowers on wounds after members were whipped by willow and cactus switches.

It’s limited use by tribes may be a function of the sporadic nature of a summer annual that depends on soil, rain and temperature conditions to germinate, or it may result from the natural protection of the plant. The leaves and stems are sticky and stink.

Qian Shi’s team at the University of North Carolina has been testing chemicals they’ve extracted from Polanisia dodecandra and found at least one is effective against a number of types of cancer cells, and another is somewhat effective. If it weren’t for all these chemicals, the plant that’s growing into a robotic toy soldier might better be known as red whiskers.

Notes:
Association for Biodiversity Information/The Nature Conservancy. "International Classification of Ecological Communities: Terrestrial Vegetation of the Western United States, Chihuahuan Desert Subset," May 23, 2000 draft available on-line.

Hilty, John. "Clammyweed," Illinois Wildflowers website.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Volney H. Jones, The Ethnobotany of the Isleta Indians, 1931.

Shi, Q., K.Chen, L. Li, J. J. Chang, C. Autry, M. Kozuka, T. Konoshima, J. R. Estes, C. M. Lin, and E. Hamel. "Antitumor Agents, 154. Cytotoxic and Antimitotic Flavonols from Polanisia dodecandra," Journal of Natural Products 58:475-82:1995.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuñi Indians, 1915.

Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 2, 1985.

Photograph: Clammy weed in arroyo road cut, 30 August 2009.

Ragweed

2009-08-30T04:39:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, sweet pea, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, pale trumpet, stickleaf, clammy weed, spurge, purslane, pigweed, Russian thistle, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap-leaf and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, black grama grass; buds of heath and purple asters; new áñil del muerto plants.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Maltese Cross, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaved soapwort, scarlet flax, sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, Crimson Rambler and reseeded morning glories, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; some peaches survived the spring frosts.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, hummingbird, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Continued hot afternoon winds and late clouds rather than usual monsoons; last rain 8/24/2009; 13:41 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Somehow, from bits of urban legends, facts half remembered from grade school, and trivia passed on at summer camp or, later, by friends at work, we cobble together a collection of facts about the natural world we absolutely believe to be true.

Everyone knows cockroaches are older than dinosaurs and ginko trees are the oldest living fossils. I had my own idea that plants like ragweed with male and female green flowers so inconspicuous they could only be pollinated by the wind were nearly as old as the ginko.

We cede these survivors of the cataclysm that destroyed the dinosaurs great powers of adaptation.

And sometimes we’re at least partly right. Cary Easterday found a nearly complete fossil of a giant cockroach from the 300 million-year-old Carboniferous layers of an eastern Ohio coal mine in 1999 that predates the dinosaurs. However, it’s closer to the insects found today in the tropics than to our domestic insect which comes from the Cretaceous that followed the extinction of the giant reptiles. It’s the genus that’s ancient, not the species.

Ragweed, like cockroaches inhabiting city apartments, will not be killed. Increase the carbon dioxide in the air and it still germinates. Throw salt on the road in winter and ecotypes germinate before the salt’s disappeared from the soil. Mow it down and it comes back in two weeks with flowering stalks below the level of a blade.

Spray it with herbicides, it develops strains resistant to Round-up and ALS inhibitors. Give it a hard spring that won’t encourage growth, the seeds resume dormancy and can wait 20 years to germinate. Let the surrounding vegetation get too luxurious, it produces short, female-only plants that go to seed.

Well, plasticity’s the only part about ragweed that fits the naturalist’s equivalent of an old wive’s tale. Ambrosia artemisiifolia, in fact, is a member of the composites, one of the more recent plant families, dating to sometime in the Cretaceous, the era before our modern continents formed when bees were just emerging Ginko fossils go back to the Permian, that geologic time between the Carboniferous of the giant cockroach and the Triassic of the dinosaurs.

Ragweed was one of the first plants I could distinguish as a child by its determined geometricalness. The divided, grey-green leaves spread parallel to the ground and at ninety degrees to each other. Later in the season the leaves changed shape and location, but by then I recognized the tapering flower spikes that looked like the square weave on a lanyard with openings between each layer where green caps repeated the pattern of the lower leaves.

Because I could identify the plant from a distance, I never bothered to look at it closely. This year’s unusual mix of rain, heat, and cold may have encouraged the flowers to expand more than usual to interrupt the expected color pattern. Last Sunday was the first time I ever saw a reason to pick a spike.

Under the green heads of five sepals, that cover the flower clusters before they’re ready to bloom and give the upper spikes their green appearance, is a round yellow bud, surrounded by a single ring of similar buds. There looked to be six or seven outer buds near the base of the spike, but maybe four toward the top. Along the spike, only a few of the male flowers had three anthers pointing down to release the hay fever causing pollen.

I was somewhat gratified to discover scientists can be as fooled by their early assumptions as lay people like me. Although they know the pollen can blow for miles, botanists have always assumed the grains dropped directly down to the female flowers placed where the leaves join the stem. Then, Jannice Friedman and Spencer Barrett watched some ragweed flowers and found most of the female flowers aborted if they detected pollen from their own plant and plants grown in isolation produced far fewer hard seeds than those au naturel.

But even then they realized the common ragweed would adapt. Deprive them of the pollen they need, and they’ll overcome their self-incompatibility to make do with what appears. No one yet has proven the green weed won’t survive Armageddon.

Notes:
360-286m - Carboniferous - hot - oldest cockroach - evergreens
286-248m - Permian - glaciers in southern hemisphere - more insects - deciduous trees - ginko
248-213m - Triassic - hot and dry - Gondwana breaks away - dinosaurs - ferns
213-144m - Jurassic - seas advance - dinosaurs - earliest birds and flowers
144-65m - Cretaceous - swamps - dinosaurs extinct - bees - modern cockroach - composites
65m-2m - Tertiary - drier - modern continents form - sea animals - grasses
2m- - Quarternary - glaciers come and go - modern animals and plants

Bazzaz, Fakhri A. "Ecophysiology of Ambrosia artemisiifolia: A Successional Dominant," Ecology 55:112-119:1974.

_____. Plants in Changing Environments, 1996.

Friedman, Jannice and Spencer C. H. Barrett. "High Outcrossing in the Annual Colonizing Species Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Asteraceae)," Annals of Botany 101:1303-1309:2008.

Lee, Chad, Karen Renner and Jim Kells. "ALS- Resistant Common Ragweed in Michigan," Michigan State University Field Crop Advisory Team Alert for 23 March 2000.

Lundholm, J. T. and L. W. Aarssen. "Neighbour Effects on Gender Variation in Ambrosia artemisiifolia," Canadian Journal of Botany 72:794–800:1994.

Ohio State University. "Largest Fossil Cockroach Found; Site Preserves Incredible Detail," news release, 7 November 2001.

Pollard, Justin Michael. "Identification and Characterization of Gylphosate-Resistant Common Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.), University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.

Antonio DiTommaso. "Germination Behavior of Common Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) Populations across a Range of Salinities," Weed Science 52:1002-1009:2004

Photograph: Ragweed growing along the road by my house, 23 August 2009; most are buds, but it looks like the anthers are extended on one flower to the left of the stem above the long leaf.

Caryopteris 'Longwood Blue'

2009-08-23T05:46:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, snakeweed, native sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy; trees loaded with apples; some Virginia creeper turning red.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaved soapwort, garlic chive, cut-leaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflower; buds on sedum.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, hummingbird, bees, monarch type butterfly, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Cool mornings, hot afternoons; last rain 8/14; 13:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Santa Fe Style, with a capital S, prefers flat roofs, stuccoed walls, and blue painted window frames and door jambs to ward off the evil eye.

The theory is that since belief in the ability of someone to induce illness or sudden death in a young child by staring was widespread in the Mediterranean and blue was used by Arabs as protection from evil, the local migrants from Spain would not only have brought those customs with them, but perpetuated them unchanged for 300 years.

In fact, Cleofas Jaramillo remembered around Arroyo Hondo they sometimes protected babies with a bead of jet or coral, while Nasario García recalls a coral necklace. John Campiglio believes people in Mexico still use necklaces or bracelets made from the coral tree.

Most reports of el mal ojo in New Mexico focus on cures that involve eggs, water and religious incantation. Protection takes the form of invoking God when a child is admired or touching the child’s head, perhaps with a wetted finger. Alicia Re Cruz found the same combination of traditions used in Denton, Texas, in 2005 to save a young girl who had recently moved there from the same Zacatecas region that sent so many settlers north to our area before and after the reconquest.

Santa Fe Style has always been about being auténtico not objetivo. Once faded blue trim was de rigueur, then blue or purple flowering plants were necessary compliments, especially if they evoked Zane Grey’s purple sage. And so Russian sage is now blooming everywhere, relieved by an occasional caryopteris shrub.

I admit I have both growing on the west side of the house. As much as I remember, I planted them because the area flat enough there to hold water was so narrow, I thought shrubs might give an illusion of depth. I had already decided everything on that side would come from the blue end of the spectrum. Once the parameters were set, there really was little choice.

Caryopteris has the more complex flower. From a distance, the surface of the greyish shrub is covered with upright clusters of blue-grey flowers. Up close, the balls of color are composed of up to 45 round blue buds that open into four small blue-and-white petals and one taller fringed one. Four darker anthers rise above like so many crisscrossing antennae.

Botanists have more or less agreed Caryopteris is a member of the mint family, not the verbena as they once had thought. They’re still arguing how many species exist in the genus and if they in fact represent one genus with shared DNA or several.

Scientists hope to discover the same kinds of continuities that led some to expect traditions in Santa Fe to remain static remnants of the past. Instead, both nature and folklore are dynamic. Aurelio Espinosa heard they used an egg white in 1910 to detect the presence of the evil eye, while one person told García said it was the yoke in Cañon in the early twentieth century and another said they watched how the egg separated.

In the early 1930's, Arthur Simmonds discovered a new hybrid caryopteris growing in his garden in West Clandon, Surrey, that geneticists have now determined was a natural cross between a mongholica from western China and an incana from eastern Asia. The resulting clandonenisis was fertile, and continues to produce variant seedlings. Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania,.chose one in 1981 to nurture that became the parent of the shrub I bought in 1997.

If people in Santa Fe, who grow Longwood Blue, expect it to remain the neat rounded form shown in the pictures of the Du Pont’s allée, they will need to do more work than I’m willing to do. Farther north it dies back like an herbaceous perennial, but not here.

Each year, when I see the narrow, slightly toothed leaves sheath the empty grey framework of branches, I think about pruning it back. Then the leaves fill the center and new growth reaches up, now four and half feet. This year it’s spread seven feet with some suckers covering areas where other plants have died.

Whenever I walk near where its bee-covered branches intrude into the path, I have to remind myself, plants, like species and cultural traditions, do not have a predetermined final form.

Notes:
Campiglio, John P. "Natural Medicine Tradition," 2005 revision available on-line.

Cruz, Alicia Re. "Taquerías, Laundromats and Protestant Churches: Landmarks of Hispanic Barrios in Denton, Texas," Urban Anthropology 34:281-303:2005.

Espinosa, Aurelio M. and J. Manuel Espinosa. The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest: Traditional Spanish Folk, 1990.

García, Nasario. Brujerías: Stories of Witchcraft and the Super-natural in the American Southwest and Beyond, 2007.

Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912.

Jaramillo, Cleofas M. Shadows of the Past, 1941.

Miller, Diana. "Caryopteris," December 2007, Royal Horticultural Society website.

Photograph: Longwood Blue caryopteris with bee, 22 August 2009.

Silver Lace Vine

2009-08-16T04:14:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, Queen Anne’s lace, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, few cultivated and native sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, goatsbeard, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, barnyard grass.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, large-leaved soapwort, garlic chive, cut-leaf coneflower; buds on sedum and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, hummingbird, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Heat continues even though early mornings cooler; high winds several evenings before heavy rain Thursday night; 14:10 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Agatha Christie’s Nemesis begins with an highly contrived house and garden tour as a way to get Jane Marple to the location of an unsolved murder. When the spinster detective noted some of the people on the tour who professed great interest in gardens had displayed appalling ignorance, I couldn’t identify the clues she’d dropped. However, as soon as Miss Marple mentioned the Polygonum baldschuanicum, I knew here the body was buried.

Her Polygonum is what we call silver lace vine, a woody climber that can grow ten to thirty feet a year. I had one in Michigan that abandoned its trellis for the garage eaves, then sent its twining branches into the crevices between the wall and roof, before dying in the winter. In Nemesis the narrow leaves cover the remains of a collapsed greenhouse.

The popularity of the vine is very much a product of what is now called the Great Game between Britain and Russia in central Asia in the late nineteenth century. In 1868, Russia annexed the Emirate of Bukhara, southeast of Lake Aral, then marched east. In 1871, it used a Moslem uprising as the pretext for taking Kulja from China, and a few years later sent Albert von Regel there as district physician.

Albert was the son of the head of the Russian Imperial Botanical Garden in St. Petersburg. He used his time to explore the vegetation of the area, describing the Turfan oasis in 1880. A year later, Kulja was returned to China, and Regel began exploring Turkestan. He sent Polygonum seeds from Bukhara back to his father in 1882. Eduard August, in turn, sent the trophies to the competing national gardens of Europe. Bukhara fleeceflower was released in France in 1894 and promoted by Victor Limone in 1896, the same year it finally bloomed at Kew Gardens.

Meantime, missionaries were playing their own hand in Asia. In 1899, Georges Aubert sent the shiny, black seeds of another Polygonum back to France from Tibet, where it was released the following year. A few years later, Louis Henry regretted the baldschuanicum was already so popular, gardeners might not notice the newer aubertii.

Botanists have now determined the two are the same plant and have reclassified them as Fallopia baldschuanica. The reported differences in flower color and size were probably the consequence of Darwinian isolation in separated high, dry environments. No doubt, gardeners and nurserymen confused them long ago, and aubertii was probably accepted in the trade as a convenience.

If it didn’t cover walls and fences so completely, I’m not sure the buckwheat family member would be grown. The greenish-white flowers resemble tiny flat pods spaced out on a necklace, that only take form from a distance. Rosalie Doolittle complains in Albuquerque, where winters are warmer than here, gardeners constantly have to trim it back and pull out suckers.

Someone down the road planted it along the property line on a stout farm fence. It started spreading along the neighbor’s section while the house was for sale. Another person, who has several growing along a stuccoed road wall, cut them back last fall. Their white halos are now topping the wall. A third lets it clamor over a wire fence because, even when the leaves drop, the dense grey-brown stems provide some privacy from the road.

Christie’s been dead for years and our government has assumed the Great Game. We don’t grow the silver lace vine in tribute to either, but because it happens to come from some environment like ours and so thrives on the outposts of our properties where morning light transfigures and forgives its crimes.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. Nemesis, 1971.

Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, revised 1967.

Henry, Louis."Polygonum aubertii," Revue Horticole 79:82-83:16 February 1907.

Päster, F. A. "Polygonum baldschuanicum Regel," Möllers Deutsche Gärtner-Zeitung 12:432:1897.

Photograph: Silver lace vine growing on farm fence down the road, 9 August 2009.

Woolly Paper Flower

2009-08-09T06:36:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, Queen Anne’s lace, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, cultivated and native sunflower, Hopi tea, gumweed, goatsbeard, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, barnyard grass.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s yarrow almost gone.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, large-leaved soapwort, garlic chive, cut-leaf coneflower; buds on sedum and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos; hips forming on rugosa roses.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, mushrooms.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, large red snake, geckos, hummingbird, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Typical monsoon weather, cool mornings, warm days, bits of late afternoon rain; last useful rain 8/05/09; 14:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This past week the red snake I think lives in my neighbor’s yard crept onto my front porch railing. People tell me it’s harmless and most likely a western coachwhip, sometimes called a red racer, or a bullsnake.

The only dangerous snakes in New Mexico are the seven varieties of rattlers and the coral snake. Zuñi healers used to mix the taproots of woolly paper flowers with the roots of other plants to form a dressing they applied to rattlesnake bites after they had protected themselves by chewing another plant root and sucked out the poison.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson also found Zuñi men collected ha’tsoliko blossoms for their wives to grind. The man who directed the dancers impersonating the gods mixed the meal with yellow ochre and urine to produce body and mask paints. Although the Keres speakers of Acoma and Laguna and the White Mountain Apache of Arizona also used the yellow composite as a dye, it’s unclear if the ocher was an insufficient yellow for the Zuñi, or if they were adding magical properties.

To the west, the Hopi at Shipaulovi on the Second Mesa in Arizona sought to control the snakes by bringing them into their ceremonial chambers in rituals that showed great knowledge of the ways of the venomous animals. When Elsie Clews Parson was allowed to observe a snake-antelope ceremony in 1892, they casually let the rattlesnakes fall into her lap. She was too distracted to identify the pollen they sprinkled on the reptiles’ heads.

Harold Colton found a different species of paper flower there, Psilostrophe sparsiflora, and that people used it like the Zuñi to strengthen medicine. They also used it in their snake dance ceremonials.

When Stevenson visited San Ildefonso in 1912 she heard two villages propitiated the rattlesnakes by killing sacrificial victims with datura and then letting the animals feast on the bodies. She had heard rumors of such rituals in the past in other pueblos, but such knowledge was kept so secret within the small group of participants that she learned little more.

When William Robbins and his team visited the same area a few years later, no one mentioned the woolly paper flower, even though today a few domes of Psilostrophe tagetina are growing down hill from the road that crosses the village arroyo. The earliest, notched ray flowers have dried tan, but new three and four petaled flowers are opening, held high by their flattened receptacles.

Whenever I find such discrepancies in the reports of wild plants, I wonder how much to attribute to reticence by the Tewa speakers and how much to natural conditions at the time. The butter-yellow perennial grows in Colorado and Nebraska and south through Chihuahua and Coahuila. The current center of diversification in western Texas.

Several research teams have reported it appears with black grama grass on the Jornado plain north of Las Cruces. However, William Dick-Peddie found few of the forbs, that grow on desert grasslands in the southern part of the state, survived in our area where sheep grazed so long.

One can’t know if William Robbins’ team didn’t mention the paper flower because it had died out in the area or if the association of the woolly paper flower with rattlesnakes and rituals hadn’t spread or survived here with the snakes, or it the local people simply professed ignorance. I don’t even know if the plants I see are natives or were introduced when the road was cut through the ridge to the highway that comes up from Arroyo Seco were some plants are blooming on the eastern shoulder.

Notes:
Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Gibbens, Robert P. and Reldon F. Beck. "Changes in Grass Basal Area and Forb Densities over a 64-Year Period on Grassland Types of the Jornada Experimental Range," Journal of Range Management 41:186-192:1988.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932; Albert B..Reagan, "Plants Used by the White Mountain Apache Indians of Arizona," Wisconsin Archeologist 8:143-61:1929 and Harold S. Colton, Hopi History and Ethnobotany, 1974.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion, 1939, reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuñi Indians, 1915.

_____. "Strange Rites of the Tewa Indians," Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous Collections 63:73-80:1913.

Photograph: Woolly paper flower growing near the village arroyo, 2 August 2009, with both yellow and papery dried ray petals.

Fern-leaf Yarrow

2009-08-02T05:29:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, Queen Anne’s lace, pigweed, cultivated and native sunflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, plains paper flower tahokia daisy, blue and side oats grama grasses; buds on goldenrod; apples redder.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s yarrow.

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

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; buds on leadplant.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, gecko, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Storms that can break a heat wave moved through and left water; 14:53 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Whenever you get interested in herbal medicine, the first plant you discover is yarrow. Achillea millefolium leads or terminates any list.

It’s also one of the easiest to find, at least in the Midwest where it blooms in abandoned fields and along the roads in mid-summer. It comes with the nicest stories about Achilles and his troops carrying it with them to staunch bleeding when they were wounded attacking the walls of Troy. Claire Haughton says it spread north with Roman soldiers and east with their Gothic conquerors. Colonists brought it to this country as a band-aid, but it had preceded them across Beringia during the Pleistocene.

Unfortunately, the airy, flat-topped wildflower won’t grow here, and the ornamental varieties sold by nurseries are no substitute. They aren’t white and have little medicinal value.

The flowers of my Achillea filipendulina are more densely packed in clusters composed of clusters of florets topping clusters of stems, branching from more clusters that together form what looks like a round, flat head. The ray flowers are few, appearing at the base of each receptacle and disappearing quickly; the outer disc florets are shorter than the inner ones.

The numerous round disc flowers appear to be empty tubes with only a few, at any time, holding up vital forking organs to relieve the monotony. Everything would be the same, dark gold if individual florets didn’t turn tan as soon as they’d bloom, leaving every honeycombed corymb spotted brown, until nothing is left but moss colored heads.

They’re best seen from a distance, say near the garage or back fence, where large blobs of undifferentiated color are welcome. The Caucasian natives aren’t particularly adapted to gardens. While the green stems are strong enough to hold the heavy heads, they tend to lean, then sag from the weight.

Sweetmagnoliame complained to Gardenweb readers that hers had become such a nuisance she was ready to send them to a neighbor. She had tried plant velcro, then peony supports, but nothing could both stop them from falling in Utah. One of her readers said he’d tried tomato cages, until he just removed the plants.

I have an aversion to getting near mine, either to cut off the darkening heads or counteract the lunging habit because the stems turn rough and irritate my skin. Alan Armitage says when he was testing members of the genus for their potential as open-field cut flowers, his nose ran, his eyes watered, and he sneezed.

You have to wonder, why bother?

Botanists find the genus exciting because many members, especially the common yarrow, have evolved into so many ecotypes they challenge the very concept of species. Breeders have exploited the composites’ ability to interbreed by introducing hybrids like Moonshine derived from clypeolata and taygeata and Coronation Gold descended from filipendulina and clypeolata, although neither combination could thrive in my north facing bed.

A number of new varieties appeared in 1990's, including my Parker’s Variety, when plantsmen were looking for perennials they could produce cheaply from seed. Jelitto tells growers they can have sellable plants 16 weeks after they plant the flattened achenes, and they can be planted anytime. The fern-leaf yarrows look their best soon after the dissected leaves have risen from the rhizomatous crowns, before the stems emerge.

Researchers supporting the cut flower trade have been experimenting with generating plants from small pieces in special mediums to produce disease free plants quickly and cheaply. Filipendulina are particularly interesting because they not only survive for several weeks after they’re cut, but the flowers can even withstand periods without water. Israelis increased their production from 150,000 stems a year to about 1,300,000 with clean stock produced by micropropagation.

Scientific frontiers are exciting to hear about, but they do belong on the frontier of my yard, not in my garden. I’m not going to remove my plants: they justify their armor by blooming reliably, but they won’t be replaced if they ever die. They’ve been there since the year 2000 and show no signs of decline.

Notes:
Armitage, Alan M. "Yarrows: Aromatic Perennials for Beauty and Variety," in Fine Gardening, Perennials, 1993.

Evenor, Dalia and Moshe Reuveni. "Micropropagation of Achillea filipendulina cv. ‘Parker’," Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture 79:91-93:2004.

Haughton, Claire Shaver. Green Immigrants, 1978.

Jelitto Staudensamen GmbH. "Parker’s Variety," on company website.

Ramsey, Justin. "Rapid Adaptive Divergence in New World Achillea, an Autopolyploid Complex of Ecological Races," Evolution 62:639-653:2008.

Sweetmagnoliame. "Yarrow Gone Amuck," Gardenweb website, 17 June 2007, with response by Digit, 17 June 2007.

Photograph: Parker’s Variety fern-leaf yarrow, rising from Mexican hat leaves, 26 July 2009.

Moss Rose

2009-07-26T04:31:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and bush morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, cultivated, farmer’s and native sunflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, Queen Anne’s lace, tahokia daisy, blue and side oats grama grasses.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s Gold yarrow.

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

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower; buds on Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

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

Weather: Storms in the area left rain on Tuesday night, and mediated afternoon temperatures and evaporation levels; last moderate rain 7/22/09; 15:21 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Cactus flowers, which were more plentiful this year than usual, resemble Busby Berkeley film musicals. The central attraction is a single pistol, towering above the ensemble like Carmen Miranda in her biggest hat. Surrounding her is a corps of thin stamens, and beyond them a few ladies, the petals, carrying large fans.

Moss roses are so closely related to cacti that they’re thought to be their immediate ancestors. They have the same flower, only everything is a bit more rococo. The single ovary has at least five stigmas which flare and curl. The petals multiply in groups of five. The anthers are sensitive to touch, so when a premier danseur insect moves among them, they bend in its direction. The prima is usually located off center.

Prickly pear flowers in this area are a lemony yellow, much paler than the moss roses blooming in my garden. The magenta of the chollas is a deeper, richer hue than the roses or pinks. All open mid-morning and close before sunset, eschew clouds and water drops.

A friend of William Hooker, probably John Gillies, told him that on the western bank of the Rio Desaguadero, which borders Mendoza province in the rain shadow on the Argentine Andes, there were so many Portulaca grandiflora plants in the late 1820's they "spread a rich purple hue, here and there marked with spots of orange color."

Some twenty years later, in 1851, Joseph Breck offered rose, scarlet, yellow, and white varieties in Boston. He said some white annuals appeared with pink stripes. How the simple color of the natural population could produce the brilliant shades of the cultivated plants, without benefit of any selective breeding, has puzzled botanists ever since.

Before 1921, Seniitiko Ikeno crossed plants he had selected over several generations for pure color. He believed yellow was primary and that the addition of some factor created orange. Further additions spawned red offspring, and even more of some unknown produced the magenta. He also noticed double flowers were dominant over the singles.

Biochemists have now determined both the cactus and portulaca families contain betalain pigments which are created by DOPA (3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine). When betalamic acid interacts with amino acids it becomes the yellow betaxanthin of the local prickly pear; when it mixes with cyclo-DOPA derivatives it becomes the purple betacyanin of the cholla. Orange results from the presence of both; white has little or no betalain.

Ikeno realized that Portulaca grandiflora did not fit the simple genetic matrix described by Mendel. He believed three factors needed to exist to produce the varieties he observed, an hypothesis Giampiero Franco Trezzini and Jean-Pierre Zÿrd confirmed when they found the biochemical patterns of betalain synthesis were consistent with the existence of three controlling genes.

You have to accept Miranda’s colors to grow moss roses. Most seed companies only offer mixed colors, and most growers put several tiny seeds in each pot. They don’t thin them, both to save labor costs and to make the plants look fuller than they are when they’re sold. No matter what color you see when you buy them in the spring, they will be something else in the summer.

When I bought Sundial F₁ seedlings this spring, they were all apricot. I planted them in an exposed bed where I hoped they would shelter the zinnia seeds. Now both are blooming in gaudy pinks and yellows with the South American natives kneeling in a corps around the taller Mexican pas de quatres, ensembles within an ensemble.

Notes:
John Gillies was a Scotch physician who lived in Mendoza between 1820 and 1828. Hooker, then at Glasgow University, described many of his discoveries according to John Dunne-Brady’s on-line listing of "Eponyms."

Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden, 1851, reprinted by OPUS Publications, 1988.

Hooker, William Jackson. Curtis's Botanical Magazine 56:2885:1829, quoted by Zÿrd and Christinet.

Ikeno, Seniitiko. "Studies on the Genetics of Flower-Colours in Portalaca grandiflora," College of Agriculture, Imperial University of Tokyo Journal 8:93-133:1921.

Trezzini, Giampiero Franco and Jean-Pierre Zÿrd. "Portulaca grandiflora: a Model System for the Study of the Biochemistry and Genetics of Betalain Synthesis," Acta Horta 280:581-585:1990.

Zÿrd, Jean-Pierre and Laurent Christinet. "Betalains," Annual Plant Reviews 14:185-213:2004.

Photograph: Moss roses, 19 July 2009, center of apricot flower has several thin stigmas reaching up like posts holding a ring stone between four and five o’clock from the darker stamens.

Bush Morning Glory

2009-07-19T04:41:00.006-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bush morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, alfilerillo, cultivated and native sunflower, bachelor button, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, Queen Anne’s lace, muhly ring, blue and side oats grama grasses; buds on tahokia daisy.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker, hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: 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 and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, blue veronica, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, dragonfly, hummingbird moth, ladybug, bees, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Monday was the hottest day so far this summer; it was still 80 at ten in the evening with no wind and still 70 when I got up the next morning; last rain 7/05/09; 15:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As a child I absorbed Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper that contrasted the busyness of the one preparing food for the winter with the frivolousness of the other.

When I later heard about the rigid social structure of ants, where sterile females toil for the benefit of the queen, I wondered why the individualistic grasshopper was so disdained. Later still I discovered Aesop is believed to have been a slave in the century before Athens outlawed slavery and began groping towards democracy. Then, society depended on servitude to eat, and men only wished they could let their indolent masters starve.

Now that I have problems with both insects, I wonder if Aesop, or anyone who’s retold his tale, ever had a garden. Certainly grasshoppers are destructive: they will eat everything above ground, so only plants that reproduce early in the season survive for the next year. However, the ant steals seeds so nothing germinates this year.

Unlike me, the bush morning glory blooming in the road cut near the prairie arroyo clearly prefers the ant. The petunia-sized purple flowers stand erect on reddish stems that arch out from mounds resembling young desert willows. A grasshopper can eat a flower, stigma and all, in an hour.

In defense, Ipomoea leptophylla developed glands at the base of its sepals which begin releasing nectar for ants even before the buds mature. Kathleen Keeler says the insects provide protection by nipping the feet of any grasshoppers that land within their range. They’re so successful that plants Keeler watched near the social insects in Nebraska averaged 211 seeds each, while those without ants only produced 45.

It’s easy for man-of-the-earth to prefer ants. Unlike its cousins, the Heavenly Blues and Crimson Ramblers, it’s perennial in this environment and doesn’t depend on producing a crop of hairy, brown seeds each year to survive. Indeed, it may produce no flowers for the first five years of its life, and survives drought by aborting its buds.

The Great Plains native relies on its deep taproot to withstand dry spells, when there may be no water in the top five to seven feet of soil. While some can get to be a foot across, four feet long and weigh 40 pounds, many are half as wide and half as heavy. Some put out lateral branches that can grow 10 to 15 feet, and produce separate crowns. The two plants near the arroyo are close enough to be joined below ground.

The large roots apparently aren’t threatened by insects, but would be dug by humans except, as Edward Sturtevant said, they’re by "no means palatable or nutritious." His 1919 comments were passed from one author to another until Harold Harrington tested them and found only the older roots were bitter. He suggested two-year-old plants could be quite edible.

The problem with following Harrington’s advice is finding young plants. Keeler observed two bush morning glory populations over a decade, and found about 2.6% of the plants died each year. Those that didn’t survive were usually small, and probably younger, the ones Harrington would recommend. She guessed a generation was probably twenty years, and that many bush morning glories lived much longer. Most in any colony are past adolescence.

More important to understanding Sturtevant is discovering the context that was lost in the repetitions. His source was describing the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa in the late 1860's, after grasshoppers had devastated Colorado in 1864 and again between 1867 and 1868.

During the first plague, Dakota women in Minnesota had boiled half-digested grains they’d scavenged from horse manure and the army had attacked a Cheyenne village on Sand Creek, destroying much of the tribal social structure. When the government issued the report Sturtevant read, natives on the Great Plains were eating anything; looking only for young plants would have been as much a luxury as being a grasshopper in the days of Aesop.

Notes:
Harrington, Harold David. Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains, 1967.

Keeler, Kathleen H. "The Extrafloral Nectaries of Ipomoea leptophylla (Convolvulaceae)," American Journal of Botany 67:216-222:1980.

_____. "Survivorship and Recruitment in a Long-Lived Prairie Perennial, Ipomoea leptophylla (Convolvulaceae)," American Midland Naturalist 126:44-60:1991.

Roberts, Jeanne. "Minnesota Sesquicentennial Highlights Native American Plight," 20 May 2008, The Panelist website.

United States, Department of Agriculture. Report 407, 1870, cited by Edward Lewis Sturtevant in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1972.

Waldbauer, Gilbert. What Good Are Bugs?, 2003, discusses work of Keeler, including comments not in her articles.

Photograph: Bush morning glory in road cut near prairie arroyo, 18 July, 2009; dark spot just above and to the left of the green cup is an ant.

Tamarix

2009-07-12T01:39:00.005-06:00

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

2009-07-05T05:11:00.008-06:00

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

2009-06-28T06:44:00.005-06:00

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

2009-06-21T04:05:00.005-06:00

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

2009-06-14T06:21:00.008-06:00

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

2009-06-07T05:37:00.008-06:00

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

2009-05-31T06:11:00.006-06:00

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, Louise 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.

Locoweed

2009-05-24T07:10:00.005-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, Russian olive, Austrian copper, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, snowball peaked, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, yucca, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, hoary cress, tumble mustard, stickseed, alfalfa, purple loco, scarlet beeblossom, oxalis, bindweed, blue gilia, perky Sue, fleabane, goatsbeard, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, cheat, single and three awn grasses; buds on stickleaf; buffalo gourd, purslane, tahokia daisy and ragweed up.

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

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

Looking south: Beauty bush, weigela, rugosa and rugosa hybrids, spirea, raspberry; Sensation cosmos
germinating.

Looking west: Flax; buds on catmint and sea lavender; last of the herbaceous perennials emerged, shasta daisy and perennial four o’clock; buddleia coming up from the ground.

Bedding plants: Moss rose.

Inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, humming bird, bumblebee on Apache plume, bees and flies around beauty bush, orange butterfly on locust, vicious mosquitoes, small moths, large black harvester and small red ants; cow mooing somewhere nearby Wednesday morning

Weather: Rain off and on since Thursday has penetrated a few inches into my drive, but left barely a trace in the native yard. Plants that formed their buds last year, like daffodils and spirea, had a great spring, if they missed the days with extreme temperatures; those like needle grass that rely on current conditions are having an average season. 15:33 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Ranchers have no problems recognizing loco weed: it’s the purplish flowered legume, with pairs of leaves spaced along its stems like feathers and odd leaflets at the tips, that kills animals by attacking their neurological systems, enlarging their hearts and congesting organs like those used for digestion.

Discovering the source of the poison was an early conundrum for the agriculture department. In 1909, Charles Marsh identified the connection to locoweeds and noted the similarity between locoism and problems caused by Swainsona in Australia. Researchers first suspected barium was the toxic agent that caused horses to treat small stones like boulders and cows to stagger. Then they investigated selenium, but found it only produced some of symptoms and didn’t appear in all areas where livestock were sickened.

Finally, in 1979, Steven Colegate’s team identified the active chemical in the Australian plant as swainsonine, and scientists like Russell Molyneaux and Lynn James confirmed its existence in the two southwestern locoweed genuses, Astragalus and Oxytropis. Now Karen Braun’s group has found a fungus living within the plants is the actual producer of the dangerous toxin.

I have no way of knowing if the Oxytropis lambertii currently blooming in my drive is dangerous. Biologists culture their samples to detect the fungus. However, Michael Ralphs’ team found only three lambertii populations of one subspecies growing in southern Utah, Arizona and southwestern New Mexico contained swainsonine. They found none of the chemical in any of the plants from the rest of Utah, eastern Colorado, and northeastern New Mexico.

Even though lambertii is the most common locoweed in New Mexico, it probably needs more moisture than exists in this area, at least 16" a year. The taprooted perennials didn’t appear until I graveled my drive, and may either have come with the truck or been lying in the soil waiting for the right conditions.

Right now, one is in the drive outside my front porch that’s survived repair trucks, one hides in the grass at the edge of the gravel to the west, and two are at the eastern edge. There have never been more than four clumps, though ones have come and gone, and they’ve never strayed from soil with water trapped by gravel. This year, two have colonized, perhaps from underground runners.

The Astragalus growing outside my neighbor’s bark-covered fence may be as harmless and as accidental. The colony didn’t appear until he built the fence and planted some fruit trees. Again, the seed may have come with the wood or been waiting for ideal conditions. The pinkish, introverted pea flowers bloomed the past two weeks downslope from where he waters the trees.

My purple flowers with white reflector blotches on their upper petals differ from his because the individual florets are spaced along bare, straight stems while his smaller racemes cluster at the tips. My Oxytropis rise from basal rosettes of five widely separated pairs of grey-looking leaflets on stalks that may stand three inches off the ground and often persists through the winter. The leaf stalks with five to eight pairs on his Astragalus splay from stem joints that also hold the flowers. There are more leaf stems than flowers, and they reach beyond the color to catch the light. My leaf segments are flattened narrow lances with pointed tips, while his are narrower, folded down the center and blunted at the ends.

Ranchers really don’t care about such variability in nature. Marsh told them all they needed to know. The seed banks that produced my flowers and those of my neighbors make locoweed nearly impossible to eradicate. It will be a while before the discovery people should control an invisible fungus on the open range has any affect on livestock losses.

Notes:
Braun, Karen, Jennifer Romero, Craig Liddell, and Rebecca Creamer. "Production of Swainsonine by Fungal Endophytes of Locoweed," Mycological Research 107:980-988:2003.

Colegate, Steven M., P. R. Dorling, and C. R. Huxtable. "A Spectroscopic Investigation of Swainsonine an Alpha Mannosidase Inhibitor Isolated from Swainsona-canescens," Australian Journal of Chemistry 32:2557-2264:1979.

Marsh, Charles Dwight. The Locoweed Disease of the Plains, 1909.

Molyneaux, Russell J. and Lynn F. James. "Loco Intoxication: Indolizidine Alkaloids of Spotted Locoweeds (Astragalus lentiginosus)," Science 216:190-191:1982.

Ralphs, Michael H., Stanley L. Welsh, and Dale R. Gardner. "Distribution of Locoweed Toxin Swainsonine in Populations of Oxytropis lambertii," Journal of Chemical Ecology 28:701-707:2002.

Photograph: Oxytropis lambertii at the east end of my drive, 19 May 2009; the pink flower held at the lower left is the last of the season from my neighbor’s Astragalus.

Scarlet Globemallow

2009-05-17T06:32:00.006-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Austrian copper and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, skunkbush, yucca, peony, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, nits-and-lice, hoary cress, tumble mustard, stickseed, wooly and common loco, scarlet beeblossom, oxalis, blue gilia, alfilerillo, perky Sue, goatsbeard, native and common dandelion; needle, rice, June and three awn grass; some cheat grass turning brown.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Black locust, Lady Banks rose, German iris, golden-spur columbine, first chocolate flower; buds on Moonshine yarrow; grape leafing; cherries, sand cherries, and Siberian pea pods forming.

Looking east: Snowball, Persian yellow rose, winecup, mossy phlox, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, last year’s snapdragons, rock rose, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on hollyhock and sea pink.

Looking south: Beauty bush, rugosa rose, spirea peaked; zinnias germinating.

Looking west: Vinca, flax; leadplant up.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum.

Inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Long red snake, rabbit, humming bird, other birds heard but not seen, gecko, bumble bee on locust, ladybug on goatsbeard, miller type moth, large black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Spring winds, summer heat; yesterday’s winds and clouds left little water; last useful rain 5/03/09; 15:11 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Delicate is not the first thing I associate with the mallow family. Maybe smores by the camp fire or hollyhocks behind a fence, but not translucent etherealness.

Scarlet globemallow is a useless name for the flowers blooming in my yard: they’re the same color as the copper globemallows that will appear later this summer. I distinguish them by their habits. The current plants stay short with silvery, divided leaves and dense racemes, while the later ones get tall with widely spaced flowers on woody stems and leathery, serrated leaves.

The one remains a perpetual youth, the other becomes the wizened crone who spent too long in the sun. Sphaeralcea coccinea blooms in May, with occasional flowers in August and September; angustifolia comes into bloom in late July and stays around until late September. The one reopens each morning, the other seems forever available.

Neither are scarlet or copper, but tangerine. The five petals of the late summer cups have the uniformity of paint, while the early flowers are luminescent with white bases beneath the characteristic, protruding stamen columns. A few on the prairie are darker, while one that appeared in my yard in the middle 1990's was white. It survived until a bad storm in 2000 sent sheets of water down the drive that broke away the soil surrounding soil the basal leaves.

The currently blooming perennials have adapted to the short-grass prairies west of the Mississippi, ranging from Chihuahua to the grasslands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while the other is native to the desert scrub of the southwest from Colorado through central México.

Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley reported the first, which they still called Malvastrum coccineum in 1915, grew in the "open hills and plains, in the Upper Sonoran zone" throughout the state, while the other, which they identified as Sphaeralcea lobata, was found on the "open hills and in river valleys, in the Lower and Upper Sonoran zones" and was a nuisance in the irrigated fields of the lower Rio Grande.

In my yard the hard brown seeds of the more exquisite one have germinated in the needle grass where there’s a bit more water. Along the road to the north, they stay back from the shoulder. One group has spread through its rhizomatous roots along the tracks left by off road vehicles. In the prairie, away from the arroyo and ranch road, a few have emerged from deep taproots next to bunches of grass where wind currents dropped the seeds.

The elusive globemallow may be the atypical graceling among the mallows, but it still has the family chemistry. Most Malvaceae contain mucilage that forms a protective film over inflamed tissue. The Lakota chewed roots of the prairie plant to create a lotion to protect their hands from fire and scalding during ceremonies, while the Santa Clara used powdered roots of the arid species to treat snake bites and "sores in which considerable pus appears."

The Tewa speakers also used the mucilage from powdered root skins to make face paint and associated it with the medicines used for broken arms and legs. William Dunmire and Gail Tierney report Picuris used the roots of the early summer plant to make castes for broken bones, while Santo Domingo used an unidentified species as the bonding agent in calcimine house paints and Taos mixed the mucilage with mud to harden their floors.

Local people may have treated the two plants interchangeably and botanists may have taken a while seeing through variations that didn’t connote species, but there does remain a difference between the piqués of an ephemeral flower that comes back year and year, despite the hazards of southwestern life, and its plodding cousin.

Notes:
Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Dilwyn J Rogers, Lakota Names and Traditional Uses of Native Plants by Sicangu (Brule) People in the Rosebud Area, South Dakota, 1980; Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919, and Shelly Katheren Kraft, Recent Changes in the Ethnobotany of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, 1990.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

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

Photograph: Scarlet globemallow, 9 May 2009.