Nature Abhors a Garden

Sacred Willow

2012-01-29T07:11:00.005-07:00

Weather: Warm afternoons continue to dry the mud; when temperatures drop at night, the moisture hovers above and keeps morning temperatures in the middle to high 20's; last precipitation 2/17/12; 10:08 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Black mustard coming into bloom along shoulders.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on hybrid roses and young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia seedlings, snakeweed, anthemis, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf seedlings, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; branches on weeping willow more intensely yellow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: The use of willow for sacred objects made to ensure a bountiful food supply goes back thousands of years, to the time when corn wasn’t yet an important part of the diet.

By then, the large mammals hunted with Clovis points around 9500 bc had come and gone with the peripheral environment of the last glaciers. The bison hunted with Folsom points around 8000 bc had moved on when the climate continued drying. The people who remained in the southwest adapted by following annual crops of seeds and berries and eating rabbits.

Then, about 2000 bc, the rains returned. Big horned sheep were in the area stretching from Grand Canyon west through the Mojave to what is now China Lake Naval Weapons Center at the base of the Sierra Nevada. A new technology, Gypsum points, developed and foragers perfected coiled basketry.

With the animals came hunting rituals whose artifacts were found at Newberry Cave southeast of Barstow on the Mojave river in the 1950's. They included quartz crystals with pigments and adhesives still attached, feathers wrapped in sinew, sheep dung wrapped in sinew and some petroglyphs.

Most important were small figures made by forming strands of willow into animal shapes then wrapping them with the same piece of willow. They found 11 in tact and fragments of another 1,000 that dated to 1500 bc.

Such figurines have been found in at least 15 sites in the lower Colorado basin and have occasionally been made with skunk bush or cottonwood. The earliest were found at Stanton’s Cave in the Grand Canyon from 2000 bc where they were associated with deer. They persisted in the Canyon Lands at the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers where they evolved into social totems.

The petroglyph tradition persisted for another two thousand years in the nearby Coso Mountains. There drawings etched in volcanic rock show big horn sheep and animal-man figures. David Whitley argues the ones made a thousand years ago were done by Shoshoni shamans who traveled miles to seek contact with spirits of big horn who controlled rain. The details of the drawings came from their trances.

Alan Garfinkle suggests the ones made three thousand years ago, those contemporary with the willow figures, often show leaping or running sheep without hunters or depict long lines of animals emerging from crevices in the rocks. He believes they were done in communal spring rituals by people who believed animal spirits reemerged annually from the underworld. The glyphs were attempts to ensure a large population of edible animals.

Garfinkle notes many were more practically located near ambush sites, suggesting a more direct link to hunting magic. There are something like 35,000 glyphs scattered over 90 square miles.

Hunting techniques from 3000 years ago are difficult to understand when only stone points survive and petroglyphs show only the most symbolic interactions between man and animal. In more recent times, men in Wyoming first drove sheep into traps. There’s evidence they also used juniper bark nets to snare animals who could then be killed.

If such techniques were used earlier, wrapping an animal figure in the willow from which it would be formed would be more than a representation of a fixed moment. It’s creation would be a symbolic dramatization of the hunt itself.

Unlike the Coso petroglyphs which exist in open areas, the split twig figurines tend to be found in caves, many inaccessible today. Their location in a pluvial period may have been different, but there’s little indication Newberry was entered for any reason other than rituals. There’s little evidence of stratigraphy and no signs of occupation.

The use of willow may have been pragmatic: it was available, it was used for nets, it was pliable enough to form the figures. If the association of sheep with rain predates the cultural complex described by Whitley, the use of willow to capture the spirit of the sheep may have been meant more in a society more dependent on plants than animals for food.

Notes: All dates are general approximations.

Coulam, Nancy J. and Alan R. Schroedl. “Late Archaic Totemism in the Greater American Southwest,” American Antiquity 69:41-62:2004.

Crockett, Stephanie. “The Prehistoric Peoples of Jackson Hole,” in John Daugherty, A Place Called Jackson Hole, 1999.

Davis, C. Alan, RE Taylor, Gerald A. Smith. “New Radiocarbon Determinations from Newberry Cave,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 3:144-147:1981.

Garfinkel, Alan P. “Paradigm Shifts, Rock Art Theory, and the Coso Sheep Cult of Eastern California,” North American Archaeologist 27:203-244:2006.

Whitley, David S. A Guide to Rock Art Sites: Southern California and Southern Nevada, 1996.

Wulbrecht, Sally. “The Mountain Shoshones: Sheep Eaters,” Wind River Historical Center website.

Photographs:
1. Sandbar willow on ditch banks near Española, 13 January 2012.

2. Sandbar willow on banks of Santa Cruz river just before it merges with the Rio Grande, 29 December 2011.

3. Globe willow, 30 January 2012, just acquiring its winter color.

4. Weeping willow growing down the road, 27 January 2012, with winter yellow branches.

Willow Prayer Sticks

2012-01-22T06:43:00.006-07:00

Weather: Some rain Tuesday, more muddy afternoons; 10:08 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Black mustard coming into bloom along shoulders.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on hybrid roses and young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia seedlings, snakeweed, anthemis, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

Men have been pruning their apples this week.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf seedlings, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus. A twig of sandbar willow I stuck in water has put out some roots and a leaf is beginning to open.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: Rain this week washed away what snow remained, but judging from my muddy drive, the water hasn’t gone far.

What a difference a year makes. The monsoons of 2010 left little water. We got some snow the usual time, just before the solstice, but it soon disappeared, to be replaced by zero temperatures last January with no cover to insulate plants.

Some flurries fell the first week of February, followed by below zero temperatures and a gas outage that left us with no heat for a week. Then nothing until May when more snow fell that killed what apple blossoms had managed to survive. The cherries and apricots hadn’t much tried to bloom.

By June we knew we were in serious drought. In past years, the pueblos would have been sending messengers to the rain spirits at Tsikomó mountain four days after the summer solstice. But last year, the Pacheco Fire that began June 18 had put restrictions on forest use. Then the Las Conchas fire broke out June 26 and crossed the headwaters of Santa Clara Creek (P’opii Khanu) on its way past what the Forest Service called Mount Chicoma on June 29.

In a normal year at San Juan, Alfonso Ortiz says the agricultural cycle begins on January 20, a month after the solstice, when the chief of the Winter moiety initiates To Lessen the Cold. This ends when, on the fourth day, he formally asks the chief of the Summer people to “seek life for all.”

On February 20, the Summer chief initiates Bringing the Buds to Life. March 20 marks Bringing the Leaves to Life and April 20 begins Bringing the Blossoms to Life. This work is so important, it must be postponed for four days if someone dies while it’s in progress. As Ortiz notes, since people do die, the work often is not completed until the beginning of June.

If no rain has come by the end of the retreat for Bringing the Blossoms to Life, “all of the Made People go on a ‘rain retreat’ to the mountain and hill shrines west of the village.” He doesn’t detail what occurs, but only says the purpose is “to pray, meditate, and make offerings to the spirits of the shrines and earth navels.” While there, they also “gather plant medicines for use in other rituals.”

After the Las Conchas fire burned through the headwaters of the creek, the Santa Clara governor, Walter Dasheno, called a press conference to express his dismay. But, when he had to explain why the fire was so serious, he would only say it destroyed “cultural sites, forest resources, plants and animals that the people of Santa Clara depend upon for their livelihood and culture” and that “he and other pueblo members were continuing to pray.”

William Boone Douglass grew impatient with the silence of local people regarding Tsikomó, and entered the sacred space in 1911. As he climbed the 11,400' mountain he moved beyond the timber line. The sacred spring was about 50' below the crust, which was bare, except for a group of four piñon.

When Ortiz climbed the mountain with two others from San Juan in 1964, they noticed the number of trees killed by lightening and the greater level of precipitation. He took that and the constant presence of rain clouds as signs the spirits were unusually active there. The lower part of the mountain is the source for both Santa Clara Creek and Rio Oso.

At the top, Douglass found a stone mound in the center of the crest. To the south was a stone enclosure (Kwan-po) with seven exits on the east side. These are the openings for the rain roads (awu-mu-wa-ya) used by the Taos, San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Jemez, Cochiti and Navajo.

In the center was a saucer like depression. To its west was a polished blackware vase which had held water and corn meal offerings. Behind the vase were rows of prayer sticks planted in the earth.

Prayer stick is a confusing term, because while the sacred objects to which it refers are similar in form - a stick or pair of sticks, with feathers and plant matter attached by cotton cording - they are used in most of the pueblos for overlapping and sometimes differing purposes.

Ruth Bunzel found among the Zuñi, their most important associations were with the two solstices, and that winter solstice activity was related to the kachinas. At Isleta, Elsie Clews Parsons says prayer sticks were used during the summer solstice only, and that the Tewa speaking pueblos only used them in times of drought. She notes there they were made by all the chiefs and taken to the top of Tsikomó.

Douglass identified 14 different types of prayer sticks in the space shared by three Tewa speaking pueblos, a Tiwa speaking, a Towa speaking, and Keres speaking one, along with an Athabascan group. Most were made from willow, but other materials were used. Parsons says willow was used for rain or water spirits and oak or pine for the war cult.

The most important reason willow is used is that it only grows near water. Frank Cushing went so far as to suggest the Zuñi believed willow brought forth water. The Hopi call their prayer sticks paho, meaning water wood.

In a binary world sharply divided between two moieties where harmony and community are valued, the prayer sticks may also have acted as symbolic bridges between two discrete worlds. Sometimes, two sticks are bound together, representing male and female or, Douglass was told, older and younger brothers.

Among the Zuñi, the fact willow has separate male and female flowers seems important. Bunzel heard a poem used for offering prayer sticks at the winter solstice that included the lines:

    From all the wooded places
    Breaking off the young straight shoots
    Of the male willow, female willow

Another used at a monthly offering of prayer sticks was

    Male willow,
    Female willow,
    Four times cutting the straight young shoots

And, during the chief’s summer retreat to bring rain, she heard

    Male willow, female willow.
    Four times breaking off the straight young shoots.

The other important characteristic of willow is color.

Most prayer sticks found at Tsikomó were made from wood with “smooth reddish bark” and painted green or yellow. The attached plants were either ones with yellow flowers (goldenrod and snakeweed) or green sedges. Ortiz says the colors associated with the Summer people are black, yellow and green, while the one associated with the Winter is red.

The willow is almost always described as red, but Parsons says in one pueblo “one moiety uses red willow, the other yellow willow.” Often, the wood is painted with green or black paint, the one color representing life, the other the underworld.

What isn’t mentioned, but must be observed, is the colors of willow embody elements of both summer and winter in a single branch. In one season, it’s clothed in green leaves. In January, its bare stems are not dormant, but every day become a more vivid red.

Notes:
Baca, Joe. “Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land – 6/30,” Santa Clara press release, 30 June 2011; words with potentially coded meanings are bolded.

Bunzel, Ruth L. Introduction to Zuñi Ceremonialism, 1932.

_____. Zuñi Ritual Poetry, 1932.

Cushing, Frank Hamilton. Zuni Breadstuff, 1920.

Douglass, William Boone. “Notes on the Shrines of the Tewa and Other Pueblo Indians of New Mexico,” International Congress of Americanists Proceedings 19:344-378:1915.

Los Alamos Monitor. “Santa Clara Pueblo Declares State of Emergency,” 30 June 2011; words with potentially coded meanings are bolded.

Ortiz, Alfonso. The Tewa World, 1969.

Parsons, Elise Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion, vol 1, 1939.

Photographs:1. Red willow near a public path that someone cut, 1/15/12.

2. Las Conchas fire from my back porch about 12 miles away, 7/4/11. I believe this is one of the canyons south of Tsikomó.

3. Goldenrod growing on a ditch bank, the water now frozen, 1/20/12. The local Solidago species doesn't bloom at the time of summer solstice, but everywhere I’ve seen it here it’s been growing near water.

4. Snakeweed in my drive, 1/21/12. Douglass identified the plant he found used as Gutierrezia eathania. I haven’t found any other reference to that name. The species that’s common here, Gutierrezia sarothrae, doesn't bloom at the time of summer solstice, but it retains some green leaves all winter.

Modern Willow Baskets

2012-01-15T07:39:00.004-07:00

Weather: Afternoon thawing continues, but morning temperatures have dropped again; last snow 12/22/11; 9:59 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on roses and young chamisa; leaves on sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia seedlings, snakeweed, strap leaf aster; cheat grass; crust active.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, small-leaved soapwort.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf seedlings, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus peaked.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: Genuine tradition isn’t frozen into a single set of rules. There are general patterns which anthropologists use to define cultural periods, but within those groupings there’s room for individual variation and innovation.

At Chevlon along the Little Colorado in the 1300's, basket makers covered some of their wares with thick coats of paint. In the early twentieth century, Mary Lois Kissell says the Papago and Pima were still decorating their baskets with red and blue mineral paints.

However, the craftsmen at Chevlon also dyed some materials to weave in patterns. When aniline dyes became available in the late nineteenth century, Hopi women were quick to experiment with them. Many returned to vegetable dyes, partly because collectors preferred them and partly because isolation made it difficult to purchase materials.

When Helga Teiwes was interviewing basket makers in the 1990's, she talked to Vera Pooyouma, then estimated to be 104 years old. She first learned chemical dyes, changed to vegetable ones, and had returned to chemicals because they were easier at her age. The slightly younger Eva Hoyungowa, born in 1912, learned to use vegetable dyes from her father’s sister. Dora Tawahongva, born in 1930, was using both commercial and vegetable dyes at the time, while many others used only chemicals. All lived in Oraibi, the most traditional village on the Third Mesa.

Among the plants Teiwes saw women use for red dye were Navajo Tea and Hopi Tea. The preference seemed to depend on which was more abundant, with the first used more often by coiled basket makers on the Second Mesa and the second by wicker workers in Oraibi. Otis Mason identified additional dyes made from prairie sunflower seeds for dark blue, introduced safflower for yellow, and kaolin clay for white. Myrtle Zuck Hough told him Hopi also used their cooking beans to produce a black dye.

Dye introduces a second skill into basket making and a separate material harvesting cycle. When making items for the tourist trade, where speed is more valued by the artisan than effect, color can be introduced by using different natural materials: against the natural white of dried yucca leaves, modern Papago, the Tohono O’odham, use fading but still green yucca, brownish red banana yucca roots, and black devil’s claw pods.

Similarly, local craftsmen use variations in willow to introduce color into their work. Steven Trujillo, who settled in San Juan, learned to interweave “light and darker colored reeds, the later being older and slightly discolored when he harvests them. When first done, the baskets are white and light tan, but with age, the darker reeds turn almost ebony, giving a frank contrast to the pure white reeds.”

Carol Naranjo, who learned from Joe Val Gutierrez of Santa Clara, keeps the bark on the willow she uses, but introduces designs with small strips of pealed, white branches. She makes sure all her pieces are as close to the same color as possible. Carlos Herrera of Cochiti uses willows of different ages, sometimes using the older, nearly purple ones in horizontal bands, sometimes randomly in the vertical posts.

Greater variations in design are produced in the ways they finish off their baskets. Instead of making a simple rim, contemporary willow workers, who use bands of four for their warp, fold them in great arches to tuck them back several uprights away. The overlapping bands create the illusion of an open weave.

Naranjo indicates there also are small differences in the way people gather their materials. She cuts her willow sometime between October and May when sap levels are low. The best color is found now, in January.

She lets the branches sit for a few days so more sap can drain, then uses the willow quickly, while it’s still flexible. She can finish a small basket in a day. A larger one can take two to three days and is stored under a towel in the bathtub between work sessions.

She says others weave their baskets immediately. However, she says when the wood dries, as it will, it shrinks and the weave can get a bit loose.

In the late nineteenth century, Mary Lois Kissell says the Papago cut the willow for their coiled baskets in the spring, when new growth was emerging, then removed the bark immediately. In the past they had used boiling water to loosen it first. When they made a basket, they then soaked their willow, a few splints at a time.

One thing that drives innovation within tradition is a desire to master something seen but unfamiliar. Allie Seletstewa taught herself how to bend the warp to start the sides of a deep wicker basket by “experimenting with wet sand, water, and steam.”

When Trujillo was first learning how to make baskets, he said he was “down by the river gettin’ willows. And then, a crazy thing go on. Suddenly it’s like I asleep and dreamin’. I was awake, I know that, but somehow I was asleep at the same time. And I heard this voice - real clear - says to me, “Keep goin’, son. Keep on goin’’.”

“So I go home and get right into makin’ them baskets. Pretty soon I got it real good. Them baskets turnin’ out alright now, and been makin’ lots of baskets every since.”

Notes: The current Latin name for Hopi tea is Thelesperma megapotamicum, Navajo tea is Thelesperma subnudum, prairie sunflower is Helianthus petiolaris, and safflower is Carthamus tinctorius. Banana yucca root is Yucca baccata. Devil’s claw is Proboscidea parviflora. Other plants identified in post below.

Fewkes, Jesse Walter. Two Summers' Work in Pueblo Ruins, 1904, on Chevlon.

Fleming, Tim. “The Basketmaker,” The New Mexican, 19 July 1984, on Trujillo.

Kissell, Mary Lois. Basketry of the Papago and Pima, 1916.

Mason, Otis Tufton. Indian Basketry, volume 2, 1905, on Chevlon and the Hopi.

Naranjo, Carol. Comments made 4 January 2012 at her Santa Clara home.

Teiwes, Helga. Hopi Basket Weaving, 1996.

Photographs:
Red willow wicker basket by Carol Naranjo; willow was collected near Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Pecos.

Yucca and bear grass coiled basket by Rachel Pablu, Tohono O’odham.

Traditional Willow Baskets

2012-01-08T05:19:00.005-07:00

Weather: Days alternate between thawing afternoons and freezing nights; the snow that melts turns to ice which turns slick under water; last snow 12/22/11; 9:52 hours of daylight today.

Snow still covers west and north facing beds, and eastern beds in the shadow of the fence. Those facing south or east are exposed to the drying sun and wind, as are open areas in the bunch grass. Ice is in the drip lines at night.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; rose stems; leaves on cheese mallow, sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed; cheat grass.

Big jump in prices for seeds in one catalog. Some prices much higher for bare root trees in another. No one left selling perennial plants at affordable prices by mail order.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, small-leaved soapwort.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: Weaving techniques exist separately from their form or plant material, and thus have adapted when changing requirements demanded new utensils. In parts of the west where fish were important, one set of shapes developed. Netting and cordage appeared elsewhere when people became dependent on rabbits.

The forms we associate with baskets evolved with a reliance on plants for food. The dietary transition occurred when glaciers had receded and the remaining lakes were drying. Large mammals had died or were migrating. The lacustrine environment supported trees like sandbar willow and sedges like tule.

The earliest burden baskets were made by weaving tule stems twisted into strands between fibers extracted from Indian hemp stalks. At Danger Cave in Utah in the 7000's bc, twined baskets were found with pickleweed chaff. The technology and form also appeared at Falcon Hill, Spirit Cave, and Hidden Cave in the same millenium in Nevada.

Within a thousand years, coiled baskets appeared that used willow as a weft, but eliminated the vertical posts that would have introduced spaces and rippled walls. The rows were held together by lashing them with strands of yucca.

A coiled basket has been found in Cowboy Cave in Utah from sometime in the early 6000's bc. Another made from sandbar willow was found in Hogup Cave, also in Utah, that dates to the late 5000's bc. Anthropologists think the technique developed a century or so earlier in Coahuila and moved north.

The use of yucca suggests a steadily drying environment. David Rhode and David Madsen found that while limber pine nuts existed in the strata from the 5000's bc in Danger Cave, the more arid piñon replaced them in the next higher layer, as they replaced them in the environment. They note that neither tree grew in the immediate vicinity of the cave, so the nuts found there had to have been gathered and transported.

With time people found ways to strengthen their baskets and compensate for variations in willow. They used two branches laid side by side or two with a split piece above. If a twig was too big, they dressed it down. If wood was too small, they padded with grass. They daubed the insides with mud to hold cooking water heated by hot stones. They caulked them inside and out with piñon gum to carry water.

When pottery was perfected after AD 500, it assumed many functions served by baskets. Then conditions dried even more, and places like Chaco Canyon were abandoned around 1200 for river plains.

Basket makers continued to work in the 500 room Chevlon on the Little Colorado in northeastern Arizona in the 1300's, but they substituted drought tolerant rubber rabbitbrush for willow. Walter Fewkes found the fragment of one wicker basket with small construction details identical to those used at Oraibi on the Hopi Third Mesa in the late nineteenth century.

Wicker work had been around for some time - Chevlon graves were lined with wicker matting. This apparently was simply an application of a familiar technique to a familiar, but different form.

The Spanish introduced new storage devices, like iron cooking pots, which altered usage patterns for both baskets and pottery, but they also introduced new foods with new handling requirements.

James Stevenson found an 8" high, globular wickerwork basket at Zuñi in the 1880's used to gather peaches. It was made from rubber rabbitbrush with a yucca rim. There were visible gaps between the rows and the walls were deeply corrugated by the stiffness of the composite. It was dismissed as crude, but fruit only needs a strong container, not a sealed or smooth walled one.

Many of the remaining basket functions disappeared when mass produced containers filtered west in the nineteenth century. Helga Teiwes says coiled basketry began to disappear among the Hopi around 1750, and willow was no longer used for the foundation after 1820. They once used skunkbush for their wickerwork, but now use dune broom for the warp and rabbitbrush for the weft.

By the 1880's, Stevenson’s wife Matilda noticed the Zuñi bought their baskets, preferably from the Apache, then from the Hopi. By 1916, Smithsonian researchers among the local Tewa speakers mentioned no local tradition, only used the past tense for the Hopi and Zuñi.

Basket making didn’t die out completely. Mary Lois Kissell heard the Papago continued to carry water baskets in the 1890's when they took their horses on long journeys. Steven Trujillo, who was born about 1899 and settled in San Juan, had an uncle who made baskets. Carol Naranjo, now in her 70's, remembers her grandmother had willow baskets hanging on the walls of her home in Old Laguna and always stored her freshly baked bread in a red willow basket.

Driven from the kitchen and store room, basket making, both coiled and wicker, survived for ceremonial uses. Basket dances existed in many pueblos. The Hopi used small plaques as symbolic emblems of kinship and community. Zuñi women avidly collected the finer pieces.

The trains that brought cheaper, more efficient containers also brought souvenir-seeking tourists. By 1915, the Papago were making coiled baskets for the curio trade. They no longer used willow for the coils; it was too valuable to waste on ephemera. Instead, they used bear grass. The Pima adopted cat tails. The Hopi were already using galleta grass.

They all still used sun bleached, dried yucca leaves. However, at White Dog Cave in Arizona, where early corn and primitive pottery were found from sometime between 480 and 175 bc, the finest baskets had eight coils to an inch with twelve yucca stitches per inch. Most were five coils to an inch and nine to eleven stitches. The coiled plaque I bought this week, made by Rachel Pablu, uses three coils to an inch with five stitches.

Tourists who drove between Santa Fé and Taos expected collectible pottery, not baskets, and so pottery making was revived for them. When Steven Trujillo wanted to learn basket making in the early 1950's in San Juan he could find no teachers. His uncle was dead; his aunts knew nothing.

Trujillo passed on his wicker ware skills to Joe Val Gutierrez of Santa Clara, who taught Naranjo, who has since taught others. While she’s sold her share, she’s also given her baskets to people in the pueblo. General weaving techniques may not have changed for thousands of years, but hers now serve a new function, providing continuity with those past generations.

Notes: The current Latin name for pickleweed is Allenrolfea occidentalis. Tule is Schoenoplectus acutus and Indian hemp is Apocynum cannabinum. Limber pine is Pinus flexilis while piñon is Pinus monophylla. Rubber rabbitbrush is a subspecies of Ericameria nauseosa, skunkbush is Rhus trilobata, and dunebroom Parryella filifolia. Bear grass is Nolina microcarpa , the Pima cat tails are Thypha latifolia, and the Hopi galleta is Pleuraphis jamesii. The yucca leaf is usually from Yucca elata. Sandbar willow is Salix exigua, but the Zuñi used Salix irrotata, the Pima Salix nigra, and the Hopi Salix laseolepis.

Fleming, Tim. “The Basketmaker,” The New Mexican, 19 July 1984, on Trujillo.

Fewkes, Jesse Walter. Two Summers' Work in Pueblo Ruins, 1904, on Chevlon.

Guernsey, Samuel James and Alfred Vincent Kidder. Basket-maker Caves of Northeastern Arizona, Report on the Explorations, 1916-17, 1921, on White Dog cave.

Kissell, Mary Lois. Basketry of the Papago and Pima, 1916.

Mahoney, Jane. “Winding willow,” The Albuquerque Journal, 18 April 2004, on Naranjo.

Mason, Otis Tufton. Indian Basketry, volume 2, 1905, describes baskets collected by Fewkes and James Stevenson.

Rhode, David and David B. Madsen. “Pine Nut Use in the Early Holocene and Beyond: The Danger Cave Archaeobotanical Record,” Journal of Archaeological Science 25:1199-1210:1998.

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

Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

Teiwes, Helga. Hopi Basket Weaving, 1996, on Mexican history of coiled baskets.

Photographs:
1. Sandbar willow with some remaining catkins growing along the Rio Grande in Española, 29 December 2011.

2. Coiled basket made by Rachel Pablu, Tohono O’odham; the detail showing the stitching technique and grass is from a joint on the back, not the front.

3. Red willow wicker basket made by Carol Naranjo.

4. Sandbar willow with some persisting leaves, 29 December 2011.

Sandbar Willow

2012-01-01T06:44:00.004-07:00

Weather: Snow has slowly been disappearing on warm afternoons, but persists in northern and western shadows; last snow 12/22/11; 9:47 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; rose stems; leaves on hollyhock, cheese mallow, vinca, sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, strap-leaf aster; cheat grass.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, small-leaved soapwort.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: There should be a guide book called New Mexico at 70 Miles an Hour. In the modern world of expressways and fences, there simply are things one can never see up close.

For years I’ve driven by a patch of brilliant red stems that stretch south from the Griego Bridge in Española interweaving different hued swaths that looked, from a distance, like they’re growing on a sandbar separated from the left bank by a narrow rivulet. By May they’re covered in green, quite indistinguishable from whatever else grows down there.

A couple weeks ago, when I was driving toward Taos, I saw something similar growing between the road and the river. It was early Sunday morning, so I could pull onto a shoulder broadened for customers to a winery that would have been busy at that hour in summer. Traffic was light enough to cross the road safely. The skiers were already on the slopes. The horn maddened drivers weren’t out yet.

As soon as I touched the thin, round branches I knew they were willow. It may have been decades since I’d touched a willow, but there’s something about the pliability and surface the fingers remember.

That’s when I wanted the guidebook that would answer the question - what is the short willow that grows along the Rio Grande with brilliant red stems in winter. Instead, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley let me know twenty Salix species grow in New Mexico. Two are described as “common shrubby,” one more as “common,” one more as “shrubby,” and two as black. None are red.

The Tewa speakers of Hano knew better. They told Barbara Friere-Marreco another shrub was “like the ordinary willow, jay, but the bark is green, not red.”

Three of Wooton and Standley’s willows occur in the lower Sonoran Piñon-Jupiter belt, but only one, sandbar willow, is found in this part of the state. However, their identification key was no help in winter for a deciduous tree:

- Leaves several times as long as broad, linear to elongate-lanceolate or oblong-lanceolate; capsules glabrous (or weakly villous).
- Scales pale yellow, deciduous
- Stamens 2, hairy below; leaves more or less canescent, linear, remotely denticulate, or sometimes entire; capsules more or less hairy.
- Capsules 5 to 7mm. long, glabrate; leaves 5 to10 cm long.
- Leaves canescent, entire, or sometimes denticulate; capsules smaller, 5mm long, on a short pedicel or sessile.
- Capsules sessile.

Their comment that “Indians and Mexicans use the stripped branches in basketry” was more helpful only because it suggested something about tensile traits I already suspected.

When I went on line to confirm the local plant was Salix exigua, I found others who were more interested in distinguishing different types of willows than with identifying the one that was too common to notice. I appreciated their detailed photographs because they showed me things I’ll never see in person. But, they didn’t make me any more confident I know what’s happening on the river.

The short trees must once have been more accessible. Local Tewa speakers told John Harrington they recognized the flowers existed in catkins. They had separate terms for the willow grains (buds) and the ensuing loose down of a bird (the detached fluff). They even had a separate term for the male flowers.

Similarly, Spanish speakers knew the plant, called it jarita. They told Leonora Curtin they chewed the leaves when their gums became infected. Perhaps ruefully, Rubén Cobos recalled jara de la hoja redonda was “used for whipping mischievous children.”

Neither Harrington nor his botanist, Wilfred Robbins, bothered to find out what species they were discussing. They simply associated the Tewa words with the two shrubs Wooton and Standley called “common shrubby,” one of which had been described as growing in the transition zone near Pecos. Curtin seemed to think jarita and jara de la hoja redonda were different varieties, while Cobos was sure his was sandbar willow.

Assuming the local tree is Salix exigua, I wonder why something described as common should be so difficult to find in an accessible location.

Part of the reason may be the species can be heavily browsed by domestic stock which once would have been kept near the homesteads in the village which edges the river. At least three shaggy head of cattle are in a clover field near the river in the village right now.

Once eaten, willow can resprout from its roots. Single plants spread into dense copses of erect, thin, young branches, each with a fine netting of twigs. The shrubs I see in the river may all be one plant. However, its ability to regenerate after heavy grazing, especially in the fall is limited, especially if the ground is trampled at the time.

If it once grew heavily along both sides of the river south of town, it may be have been exterminated on the populated side, leaving it on remote islets and distant shores. For once gone, it doesn’t often reappear from wind blown or water carried seeds. The seeds have no dormancy. They must settle on wet land within a week and usually germinate within 24 hours. Then they have to survive the first season near a river swollen by monsoons.

Basket makers don’t care about the scientific name - they call it red willow or Rio Grande willow or river willow. They’re more interested in a subgroup of the trees, those with uniformly-sized branches. Many of those growing near Española have young branches that are still too short or too thin for baskets. The growth at the top of the taller trees tends to be curly, rather than straight.

Inaccessibility has been a problem for Carol Naranjo, a basketmaker who recently moved to Santa Clara. She gathers her reeds in winter when the trees are dormant. The desirable ones tend to be on private land protected by dogs or on federal land protected by prohibitions against cutting.

The late Steven Trujillo had fewer problems because he could find reeds “all the same size” along the banks of the river within San Juan pueblo where he lived. His problem was vandalism: a group of boys deliberately burned the willows in the area where he collected his raw material.

Actually, if you want to get to something badly enough you can. This week I discovered people had cut the fence on far side of the river so I could get down to it. On the other side I watched a man who had found a place to park his car so he could walk his dog. The next morning, I followed his example and discovered the view is better standing on the bridge.

Notes:
Anderson, Michelle. “Salix exigua,” 2002, United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System.

Cobos, Rubén. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.

Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Fleming, Tim. “The Basketmaker,” The New Mexican, 19 July 1984, on Trujillo.

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

Southwest Art. “A Basket Maker Pursues a Dying Art Form ,” 1 July 2002, on Naranjo.

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

Photographs:1. Red sandbar willow, cat tails and cottonwoods from opposite bank, 28 December 2011.

2. Red sandbar willow from the bridge, 28 December 2011.

3. Sandbar willow on the point with other grasses and trees of fall from the bridge, 28 October 2011.

4. Red sandbar willow with bits of snow from the bridge, 28 December 2011.

5. Red sandbar willow from the bridge, 28 December 2011.

6. Red sandbar willow behind cattails from below the bridge, 29 December 2011.

Gray Shrubs

2011-12-25T07:30:00.009-07:00

Weather: Snow early Monday and again Thursday; warm afternoons defrost top of ground into slippery layer over frozen base that refreezes and heaves at night; 9:43 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, rose stems, hollyhock, winecup, cheese mallow, vinca, sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, strap-leaf aster, cheat grass.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on coyote willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on red hot poker, coral bells, small-leafed soapwort, pink evening primrose.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, yellow alyssum, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae, branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium, Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds, rabbit tracks.

Weekly update: Blame it on Zane Grey.

If James Fenimore Cooper defined the near west where Indians moved through primeval forests, Grey created our image of the far west where men ride horses through fields of sage.

When people see the gray shrubs growing along my drive, they compliment me on my sagebrush. When I demur, they give me that look the cognoscenti reserve for the feeble minded.

The logic is inexorable:
Sagebrush dominates many parts of the far west.
Sagebrush is gray.
These shrubs are gray.
This is the west.
Ergo, these shrubs are sagebrush.

There is no room for winterfat in such a world.

Last week I took a reality check. I drove up route 68 towards Taos through volcanic boulders and uplifted rocks. When you reach the top, a broad plateau opens, covered with sagebrush as far as you can see.

On the way back, I looked for the boundary between winterfat and sagebrush. It’s somewhere around Rinconada.

Above that point, sagebrush grows on volcanic rises on the western side of the river, and in crevices to the east. Between there and the Dixon turnoff, you see a few patches of winterfat. Below that point, it’s mainly chamisa and salt bush. Between Velarde and Española cholla grows with grasses on the eastern open land.

You don’t see much winterfat again until you take route 30 toward Los Alamos and pass through unsettled land between Santa Clara and San Ildefonso. The reason is probably quite simple. Unlike sagebrush, winterfat is quite palatable and doesn’t recover when overgrazed by sheep.

The two shrubs aren’t easy to tell apart at 60 miles an hour. If you stop, sagebrush has three-toothed leaves that persist into this season. Winterfat has long narrow leaves that first turned pink and now are tan, if they haven’t fallen completely. In their place are small, partly opened clusters of next year’s leaves. Both get their color from white hairs.

If you make the mistake of walking too close to either, your clothes get covered with debris that’s difficult to pick off. Sagebrush fragments smell; winterfat’s don’t.

If you happen to drive by either when they’re blooming, you can recognize the sagebrush by its yellow aura. Winterfat flowers are nearly invisible. What you see is light reflected through the fluffy white seed tails.

Artemisia tridentata is a composite with perfect flowers. Eurotia lanata is a chenopod with separate male and female florets.

This time of year, what distinguishes them from a distance are the floral remains. The receptacles of sagebrush are dirty brown in narrow plumes, while the male flowers of winterfat are titanium bumps on bare stems. The larger, redder brown heads you see along the road belong to salt bush. The lighter, more golden ones are chamisa.

If the bracts of sagebrush have fallen off, then its bare stems look no different than the tips of winterfat where the seedless male flowers are concentrated.

Sometimes though you can distinguish them by their habit. As winterfat ages, it sends new stems with shaving brush tops which force the existing stems to spread. Sage, at least the tridentata subspecies, has a main stalk and manages to stay erect, even when decrepit.

I suppose it’s soil that determines which you see. In this area, winterfat grows on recent Quaternary alluvial soils near the river, while the few sagebrush plants I’ve seen were near older, Tertiary badlands. On the road between Rinconada and Taos, the shrubs grow in disintegrating lava fields. The first tend to be finer grained than the second.

In the end, you may only know one from the other by remembering where you are, a local version of “If this is Tuesday, it must be Brussels.” However, if you really must visit the world defined by Zane Grey, there’s a small plateau in the climb north where sagebrush fills a narrow ledge and horses are available to rent. Sniff your pant legs when you leave.

Photographs:
1. Gray shrub and grassland on route 84 north of Abiquiú dam. I didn’t get out to look. It has a single stem but no sign of flowers on 3 September 2011.

2. Winterfat volunteers along my drive, 15 June 2011.

3. Sagebrush, tridentata subspecies, on Taos plateau with river gorge in middle distance, and sagebrush beyond, 11 December 2011.

4. Winterfat along the road north of the Dixon exit on route 68, 11 December 2011.

5. Pinkened winterfat leaves with white seed tails, from a shrub in my drive, 6 December 2011.

6. Sagebrush flower receptacle from Taos plateau, 11 December 2011.

7. Left, sagebrush stem tip with remains of flower receptacles from Taos plateau; right, winterfat stem tip with remains of male flowers and new leaf buds from Embudo valley, 11 December 2011.

8. Winterfat sprawling on Santa Clara land, route 30, 11 December 2011.

9. Erect, but dead sagebrush and shrubs with tan receptacles north of Pilar on route 68; light headed chamisa in the center and more sagebrush and juniper on the back ledge, 11 December 2011.

10. New winterfat leaf cluster with last season’s leaves, from my drive, 6 December 2011.

11. Sagebrush leaves, tridentata subspecies, from somewhere along route 68, 11 December 2011.

Sagebrush

2011-12-18T06:48:00.003-07:00

Weather: Monday’s snow landed on the snow still here from a week ago; Tuesday’s rain didn’t wash everything away; temperatures have been too cold since to melt much; 9:43 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, rose stems, hollyhock, winecup, vinca, sea pink, coral beardtongue, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, strap-leaf aster leaves.

Still green plants, like gypsum phacelia, seem to peak through snow first, perhaps because they generate heat from below that adds to effects of the sun above.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla; branches on coyote willow, apples, apricots, spirea and raspberry; leaves on red hot poker, coral bells, small-leaved soapwort, pink evening primrose.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, yellow alyssum, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green: Branches on weeping willow; arborvitae beginning to bronze.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; buds on Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: The day before Thanksgiving, I wandered out toward one of the badland formations for a closer look at junipers I’d seen for years from my back porch. I found them growing in an allée bordering a wide stretch of ground bared by flowing water.

Having gotten that far, I thought why not start up the water path towards the sedimentary cliffs themselves. Bunch grasses were dark and dormant, but Gypsum phacelia was green everywhere.

Then I saw something I’d never seen before in this area, a very low sagebrush. Soon after, the alkaline loving phacelia disappeared, and more sagebrushes sprawled about, exploiting, if not directing, the movement of water.

These plants had the shorter, wider three-lobed leaves and branching habit of the wyomingensis subspecies of Artemisia tridentata found in this state in Rio Arriba and Taos counties.

The other big sagebrush subspecies, tridentata, with longer, narrower three-toothed leaves and a central trunk, is also found in Rio Arriba and Taos counties, but also in San Juan county to the west. It doesn’t grow in Santa Fe or Los Alamos counties, but in Sandoval and McKinley to the west. It isn’t around Albuquerque, but in Valencia and Torrance counties to the south.

While I associate sagebrushes with the Taos plateau, Frederic Clements warns their dominance is recent, the likely consequence of overgrazing the original grasslands in the late nineteenth century.

Like the badlands, where remains of ancient horses and camels have been found, the Artemisia genus appeared sometime in the Miocene when grasses were emerging. Clements believes the two have had an antiphonal relationship since, with grasses appearing in wet periods and sagebrushes dominating when the climate dried.

In historic times, he thinks the range of sagebrush was limited to desert areas where its roots penetrated deeper than those of the more common grasses. Most of the native groups who used the plant, mainly for medicine, live in the dryer northwestern part of the state, the Hopi, Zuñi, Navajo and Apache.

Tewa speakers used the dark woody branches as fuel when nothing better was available, say “on the journey from San Juan to Taos.” They used the leaves, which they could have brought back, to treat indigestion, flatulence, coughs and congestion.

The gray leaves have a bitter taste which discourages many animals from eating them, except during famine times. The nitrogen containing monoterpene oils that make them medicinally useful attack the digesting bacteria in animals’ stomachs. When sheep or cattle were abusing a stand of grass, sagebrush had a competitive advantage.

About the only wild animal who can digest the composite is the pronghorn, whose ancestors emerged in the post-Miocene when “the lower valleys appear to have been primarily clothed in spruce parklands, marshy meadows, or sagebrush (Artemisia) steppe with subalpine conifers and shrubs dominating the coarser sites.” The modern animal evolved when tree and grass savannas were alternating with shrub steppes during the warm periods between glacial advances.

William Dick-Peddie suggests the mechanics of domination are those of erosion. When grasses are eaten to stubs, water flows over the land, rather than into it. Juniper sprouts in depressions where water collects, while sagebrush nestles in the slightly elevated spots between.

I have no idea from whence came the seeds of the shrubs I saw or if they had taking advantage of the past season’s drought. Seed can last at least nine years under the right conditions, but it first has to be in the area. I haven’t ventured past the cliffs yet to see what grows beyond, so I don’t know if there’s some indigenous source or if the tiny brown seeds were tracked in by hikers or ATV tires.

I waited twenty years to visit the junipers and badlands. No matter how intense my curiosity now, I have no choice but to wait until the snow clears enough so I can see where I’m walking.

Notes:Brown, David E. “An Evolutionary History of Pronghorn Habitat and Its Effect on Taxonomic Differentiation,” Pronghorn Workshop, 2006.

Clements, Frederic E. Dynamics of Vegetation, collected papers edited by B. W. Allred and Edith S. Clements, 1949.

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

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

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

Tilley, Derek J., Dan Ogle, Loren St. John, and Brock Benson. “Big Sagebrush,” USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service plant guide.

United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. New Mexico county distribution maps for Artemisia tridentata subspecies.

Photographs: All were taken near the local badlands, 23 November 2011. Gypsum phacelia in lower left hand corner of second picture.

Four-Winged Saltbush

2011-12-11T07:16:00.008-07:00

Weather: Three inches of snow fell Monday with zero morning temperatures Tuesday.

Thursday snow from the south-facing roof melted, then froze again when it landed on the rose leaves below.

Afternoon temperatures didn’t rise above freezing until Friday. Snow stayed on ground where it could sink rather than rise with evaporative melting. The snow also insulated plants from the cold night temperatures. The only places bare yesterday afternoon were south facing ones where it’s always been difficult to get perennials or shrubs to grow.

9:49 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, hollyhock, winecup, vinca, coral beardtongue, clover; new leaf buds visible on Bradford pear.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla; young branches of tamarix, apples and raspberry; leaves on roses, red hot poker, coral bells, pink evening primrose; raspberries and privet dropped leaves.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, pinks, yellow alyssum, winterfat, golden hairy and purple asters; remaining leaves fell on snow from my neighbor’s Russian olive.

What’s yellow-green: Branches on weeping willow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; buds on Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Small birds in the shrubs; geese were flying south along the river Monday; rabbits were out in the snow Tuesday in the far arroyo.

Weekly update: Four-winged saltbushes grow nearly everywhere in the arid west from central México, where they evolved, up into Alberta. In the immediate area, they don’t grow on the prairies where they would compete with bunch grasses, but instead prefer disturbed, moister lands near arroyos and wash outs.

I don’t know if this is a consequence of sheep eating the shrubs into extinction, so only relic stands remain, or if they never were particularly plentiful in this area. The closest native group to recognize them in historic times was the Jemez, who used the grey leaves to treat ant bites and revive the faint. Farther south the Isleta used the dark wood for poisonous arrowheads.

The shrub’s primary New Mexico homeland, juniper savannah, is found along feeders to the Rio Grande, including the Rio Puerco from the west. Otherwise, William Dick-Peddie suggests the shrub grows where deep sand and water coexist, like areas along the Rio Chama north of Española, the shoulders of the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque where the Isleta live, and the Great Basin desert scrub lands of the Rio San Juan in the northwest.

Before ranchers arrived, rabbits were probably the principal feeders on Atriplex canescens. They also use the shrubs for shelter and water. The Zuñi, who held ceremonial rabbit hunts, tied prayer plumes to the twigs during winter solstice ceremonies to ensure the animals would be available in large numbers.

House finches lived in my bushes this summer after they abandoned their attempts to live on the porch rafters. In other parts of the country quail, grouse and gray partridges eat the fruits, while pheasant nest under shrubs that provide shelter from winter.

Ranchers soon learned the chenopod’s protein, fat and carbohydrate levels match those of alfalfa for sheep, especially in winter when the leaves are high in carotene and other vegetation sparse. There’s enough evidence that in this immediate area someone ran sheep, because overgrazed sections haven’t recovered.

Not only are there large sections of winterfat uphill from my house and on the river side of the ranch road, but there’s a section of winterfat as you continue down that dirt road toward the ranch. Beyond the fence, pueblo land is still grass and juniper. Salt bushes grow along the boundary, some with rust-colored heads, others simple humps of loden.

You see single saltbushes along the road near the village and can spot scattered ones back a bit, here and there. However, the species has both male and female plants. There must be enough of each sex within wind reach of each other for a copse to develop. Males seem to be more common than females.

The largest stand is in a wash that lies on the other side of a road from land used by the rancher. Until the neighbor’s dogs chased them out, that’s where rabbits lived. The cottontails moved under the sheds and debris in my uphill neighbor’s fenced yard from whence they venture into the wash when the dogs are confined.

The other place the shrubs grow in large numbers is along the top of the far arroyo bank where any animal that tried to eat them would probably plunge to its death when its weight collapsed the bank under it.

The saltbush, at least for a while, would survive with its roots exposed. Indeed, one this summer that lost its footings in the August flood, put out new leaves along the bare root by the end of October.

I often wonder how anything can survive such marginal environments. The shrub itself lets rain or snow through its dense, crisscrossing branches, then hides it from the sun. The snow makes obvious that seeds take root where there’s enough hidden water to support them.

Life on the ridges remains precarious. Nothing can live forever with compromised roots. Sooner or later more of the bank erodes and skeletons, dead and alive, tumble to the arroyo floor.

But, more than dead branches fall. Seeds drift down, take root and grow quickly. A colony has developed at the south end of the far arroyo’s steep bank which is where the rabbits have been heading since Monday’s snow.

Notes: The roots and soil preferences of four winged saltbush were discussed in the entry for 11 February 2007.

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

Howard, Janet L. “Atriplex canescens,” 2003, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Sarah Louise Cook, The Ethnobotany of Jemez Indians, 1930, and Volney H. Jones, The Ethnobotany of the Isleta Indians, 1931.

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

Photographs: Four-winged saltbushes growing
1. on the prairie, 7 August 2011.
2. in the near wash with both males and females; winterfat in front, 2 October 2011.
3. between winterfat and pueblo land on ranch road with males and females, 7 November 2011.
4. in the near wash with rabbit tracks, 8 December 2011.
5. along the top of the right bank of the far arroyo, 12 June 2011.
6. with an exposed root along low bank of the far arroyo, 30 October 2011.
7. along the right bank of the far arroyo, 6 December 2011.
8. with dead plants washed into the far arroyo, 30 May 2011.
9. at base of right bank in far arroyo, with rabbit tracks, 8 December 2011.
10. with exposed roots and few viable branches trapping water along the top of the right bank, 11 September 2011.

The River

2011-12-04T06:47:00.006-07:00

Weather: Snow lingers in north and west facing beds, and in low places between bunch grasses; drip lines collecting water that freezes at night; 9:55 hours of daylight today.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, roses, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, oriental poppy, coral beard tongue, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, large leaved soapwort, ladybells, hollyhock, winecup, cheese, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, anthemis, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat, pampas and other grasses.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla; young branches of apples and tamarix; leaves on raspberry, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, red hot poker, pinks, small leaved soapwort, Husker’s and purple beard tongue, coral bells, pink evening primrose, alfilerillo.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, winterfat, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Branches on weeping willow; leaves on Apache plume, rugosa rose, sea pink, golden spur columbine, snakeweed.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: It rained the day after Thanksgiving. By noon the ground was wet, the air misty, the sky gray. It seemed the perfect time to walk towards the Rio Grande.

I’ve found ways to get to it in town, but I’ve been here more than 20 years and never actually seen the river near my house.

As soon as I skirted the new bridge and old ford in the far arroyo, the terrain changed into a bulldozed mud flat with cottonwoods marking the perimeter. I’d known there was a sharp drop behind the houses on the other side of the bridge, but I hadn’t realized the nearness of that bank.

A levee had been built on the right side. The arroyo at times was contained in a small channel, but wet open land spread on the other side. I suspect, before they started regulating the river’s flow, this was its flood plain.

I’m not sure why the levee was built or if it’s still maintained. It would have been a more effective barrier for modern homes on the other side of the channel. Perhaps it provided the arroyo with an exit path through water flowing back from the river, and thus prevented problems upstream.

I suppose this once was bosque. The cottonwoods were widely spaced, but the ground was littered with fragments of dead branches. Someone had cleared the area, and only grass had come back. I don’t know if that’s because trees had died, people were hunting fire wood, or they feared fire and vermin.

Russian thistles grew on the levee. There was also one band of three foot plants in the mud plain, but none had invaded the wetter area colonized by grasses. In the distance, I first saw the bare red stems of willows. The cottonwoods always looked denser in the distance than they were when I got to them.

I passed a row of what could have been young chamisa. The sodden brown heads looked familiar, but the stems weren’t particularly woody. It’s possible that dead wood littering the ground was from large shrubs that had been cleared out and all I saw was regrowth. The rings of wood were about the right size.

The river was closer than I thought, just over a mile from my house. The willows I had been heading for were on the other side of the water.

Where I came out the bank was clear. A few Russian olives, grass. On both sides of me, though, vegetation closed in. It wasn’t wild or like it was before the Spanish or the Anglos, but it did sport a faint rainbow toward town. Downstream, clouds still hung over the Jemez.

Photographs: All pictures taken 25 November 2011.

Juniper

2011-11-27T05:05:00.006-07:00

Weather: Except for Thanksgiving, morning temperatures warmer than last week until this morning, which is the coldest so far; rain Friday; 10:06 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Pansy next to a fence, under snapdragons and low to the ground.

Seed catalogs, that used to come between Christmas and New Years, started arriving before Thanksgiving.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, roses, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, coral beard tongue, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, large leaved soapwort, ladybells, winecup, cheese, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, anthemis, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses, gray mushrooms.

With cold, leaf stems on hollyhocks have broken, but the leaves are still green. Friday’s rain took down most of the leaves still on my trees.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on raspberry, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, pinks, small leaved soapwort, Husker’s and purple beard tongue, coral bells, pink evening primrose, alfilerillo.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, winterfat, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Apache plume, rugosa rose, sea pink, snakeweed.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Something that looked like a chipmunk dove for its hole by the near arroyo, then look back out. Was small, with brown fur and not much of a tail.

Weekly update: One-seeded juniper may be the indicative plant for this region, but you won’t find it just anywhere. Few grow in the nearby prairie. Instead, you see the dark green forms climbing distant hills.

I’ve often wondered why.

Hart Merriam, who first identified the piñon-juniper zone, thought temperature was the determining factor in the southwest, that it decreased with elevation while precipitation increased. His brother-in-law, Vernon Bailey, suggested the major factor separating areas within the piñon-juniper province in New Mexico was humidity. A LANL team headed by Kevin Reid theorized it was soil moisture on the Pajarito Plateau.

I finally got a clue a couple weeks ago when I climbed to the top of a small hill that was grassy at the bottom and brown on top. I discovered the reason is the base was simple alluvial soil and the top was covered with layers of thin conglomerate. At the very top, in the middle of the biggest rocks, where water was most likely to run away quickly, juniper was growing.

Rocks.

I’ve spent the past two weeks rather rudely looking under the skirts of dowager junipers to see how many were associated in some way with rocks. I even drove up to Ojo Caliente and back through the Wild Rivers National Recreation Area. Some, most dramatically, were growing with boulders.

Many others appeared to be growing in sandy loam, but when I got close I saw gravel scattered on the ground. Sometimes, the road bank was covered by gravel that had tumbled from soil that looked smooth on the surface.

When I drove down to Albuquerque two weeks ago, I paid more attention to the juniper beside the road that I ought. Around Santa Fé the trees were denser than here or in the north. Again I could see gravel on the surface or in the road cuts.

The roadside trees disappeared after the Bernalillo exit, just as the Sandias replaced juniper covered hills in the distance. Although elevation could be a factor, I thought it more likely the wooded hills were the seed source and when they disappeared so did their offspring. Reid’s group found that when it rained hard on the Pajarito Plateau, water and sediments moved down from the areas with trees into the more barren areas, dropping their booty as they moved.

I suspect the juniper distribution in my immediate neighborhood is related to the underlying geology. Daniel Koenig has mapped the provenance of surface rocks in this area and shown a line separating recent alluvial soils from older, rockier Tertiary sediments. The foothills where I see the most trees lie in the Tertiary area.

Rocks and stones, either on the surface or in the ground, trap water. It probably doesn’t matter what kind. Teralene Foxx and Gail Tierney found junipers have taproots that could reach down 20' through cracks in tuff around Los Alamos. In addition, junipers put out lateral roots, usually within the top 3', that reach two to three times the height of the tree.

Some in the prairie keep their secrets under a thick mulch of their own needles that keeps dry air from evaporating water quickly. No gravel appears in the immediate area. It could be some thin layer exists below the surface, or it’s non-existence may explain their small size. Many of these, as well as many elsewhere, grow on slopes that allow them to exploit runoff.

Notes: For more on conditions for piñon and juniper in the Albuquerque area, including the underlying geology, see Vicki’s comment at the bottom of the next posting. She lives on the other side of the Sandias in an area the New Mexico Geological Society’s highway map indicates is sedimentary from the Pennsylvanian age.

Bailey, Vernon. Life Zones and Crop Zones of New Mexico, 1913.

Foxx, Teralene S. and Gail D. Tierney. “Rooting Patterns in the Pinyon-Juniper Woodland,” Pinyon-Juniper Conference, 1987.

Johnson, Kathleen A. “Juniperus monosperma”, 2002, United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System.

Koning, Daniel K. “Preliminary Geologic Map of the Española 7.5-minute Quadrangle,” 2002.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

New Mexico Geological Society. “New Mexico Geologic Highway Map,” 2005, compiled by Maureen E. Wilks.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. “Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches,” Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.

Photographs:
1. Upstream of the far arroyo where junipers begin to appear in grass, then get denser towards foothills before disappearing again, 20 November 2011.

2. Hill northeast of my house with grass at the base and Tertiary rocks on top where some junipers grow, 8 November 2011.

3. Juniper in Tertiary rocks atop hill in #2, 8 November 2011.

4. Juniper growing atop debris collected at the base of the volcanic northern black mesa near Chamita, 15 November 2011.

5. Juniper growing along side route 554 in Wild Rivers where exposed bank shows gravel in soil, 15 November 2011.

6. Juniper growing at bottom of a wash northeast of my house, 19 November 2011.

7. Exposed lateral roots of a juniper growing between sedimentary and volcanic rocks at the base of the northern black mesa near Chamita, 15 November 2011.

8. Mulched base of a juniper growing along route 554, 15 November 2011.

9. Juniper growing on slope along route 284 south of Ojo Caliente with volcanic and sedimentary rocks, 15 November 2011.

10. Juniper growing in gravel covered soil on a slope southeast of my house, 10 November 2011.

Piñon-Juniper Belt

2011-11-20T04:38:00.007-07:00

Weather: Rained Sunday night; frost in the mornings and sunny afternoons since; changed into my heavier weight winter clothes yesterday; 10:06 hours of daylight today.

Can smell wood smoke some mornings. Seven pickup trucks were filled with firewood for sale in the parking lot of the local grocers Tuesday afternoon.

What’s blooming: Pansies.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, roses, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, coral beard tongue, snapdragons, soapworts, ladybells, Saint Johns wort, hollyhocks struggling, winecup, cheese, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, anthemis, chrysanthemum, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses; next year’s leaf buds on peach.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Japanese honeysuckle, Husker’s and purple beard tongue, coral bells, pink evening primrose, alfilerillo.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, winterfat, young chamisa, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, sea pink, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; fruit on pomegranate split open; aeonium put out new branch.

Animal sightings: Small birds, rabbit out in my neighbor’s yard where it lives.

Weekly update: Many people in this country may no longer live on a flat Earth, but they can still garden in two dimensions.

The earliest settlers only recognized latitude. They knew the sugar that grew in Barbados wouldn’t do in Virginia, that the tobacco that made Virginia wealthy wouldn’t survive in Boston, that Boston was more congenial to farmers than Maine or New Brunswick.

As people moved west, they gradually became aware that longitude mattered. However, it wasn’t important until they reached the 100th meridian where they saw the beginning of what they called the great American desert, the great dry plains that only supported settlement after they introduced artesian wells.

With the acquisition of the southwest from Spain after the Mexican War, US citizens moved into mountainous areas and discovered the importance of altitude. In 1889, Hart Merriam went to Flagstaff to investigate vegetation by elevation in the San Francisco mountains and Grand Canyon. He defined seven life zones: Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, Timberline and Arctic-Alpine.

His terms, especially Sonoran, were specific to Arizona: the Chihuahuan desert south of New Mexico is considered a different ecological sphere. The labels used by the Forest Service have evolved to identify trees or plants characteristic of an altitudinal band: chaparral and grassland, piñon-juniper woodland, ponderosa pine forest, fir-aspen forest, fir-spruce forest, arctic-alpine-timerline, and alpine tundra.

This part of New Mexico lies in the Upper Sonoran or piñon-juniper belt between 5000' and 7000'. While Merriam was thinking specifically of Colorado Piñon and Utah Juniper, here it’s Colorado Pinus edulis and single-seed Juniperus monosperma that are common.

One of the things that’s always puzzled me about the category is the exact relationship between piñon and juniper. Did the hyphen imply they would be found together, or was it more of an and/or slash distribution.

Francis Elmore says that in some places the two coexist in equal numbers, but that generally juniper are found in the lower elevations and piñon in the upper. Along Pajarito Road, which runs between 7000' White Rock and 7500' Los Alamos, a lab team found large junipers tended to be associated with smaller piñons, and larger piñons with smaller junipers.

In this part of the valley, piñon are found in and around the village, especially near irrigation ditches, and juniper exists in the wild. I haven’t seen a piñon tree on the 5650' prairie, and many of the junipers I’ve see along the roads to the 5600' village could have been, judging from their positions, transplanted.

The piñon may originally have been moved for dietary reasons. Now nostalgia may be more important. Once introduced, they spread themselves by following lines of water, eventually finding my yard.

After I transferred some seedlings from under my eaves to the drive five years ago, I’ve been treating the new volunteers next to my garden hoses as prickly nuisances. The rate of growth for the transplanted trees slowed after they were moved to the dryer area. This summer the saplings reached above the protecting winterfat; their tips are just over 5' high.

When you drive around the village, you see place after place where piñon have taken over and people have done their best to accommodate them by trimming the lower or upper branches.

I drove north this week past Ojo Caliente and back south through El Rito to see if the distribution of juniper and piñon in this area is typical or anomalous. The only piñon I saw along the road were near homesteads. Juniper was almost everywhere, with denser stands at elevations near 7500' approaching the next vegetation zone where an occasional small pine was growing.

In this part of the piñon-juniper belt piñon can naturalize in the most domesticated of circumstances, but they don’t behave like true natives.

Notes:
Elmore, Francis H. Shrubs and Trees of the Southwest Uplands, 1976.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. “Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches,” Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.

Photographs:
1. Piñon growing above the covered irrigation ditch that towers above the one-story house indicated by the utility wires, main road, 14 November 2011.

2. Juniper growing on the prairie, 8 November 2011.

3. Piñon growing in the village with lower branches cut up to the roof line so people could enter their house; 18 November 2011.

4. Several cropped piñon growing inside a yard wall; the roof line is just visible from the main road, 14 November 2011.

5. Pine growing with juniper going south on route 554 in the northern part of Wild Rivers National Recreation Area before the crest that leads down to the Carson National Forest and El Rito, 15 November 2011.

6. Piñon I transplanted from my garden to an area protected by winterfat along the drive in 2006, 19 November 2011; it’s still in the puppy stage when it looks like it’d be nice to have around the house.

See entry for 27 August 2006 that provides more information on piñon and describes my attempts to transplant them.

Cottonwood Copse

2011-11-13T05:51:00.007-07:00

Weather: Morning temperatures settled into low 20's, last rain 11/05/11; 10:20 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Pansies, sweet alyssum, other plants in sheltered positions may have one or two flowers left.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, purple and coral beards tongue, sea pinks, coral bells, Saint Johns wort, oxalis, hollyhocks, winecup, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tansy, Hopi teas, anthemis, blanket flowers, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses.

Pepper plant dropped its drying red pod when the stem holding it was killed by the cold.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum and sand cherry, leathery Bradford pear, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Husker’s beard tongue.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, blue flax, stickleaf, winterfat, chocolate flower, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Berries have disappeared from my Russian olive along with the leaves that covered them. Berries are also gone from the pyracantha near the village. With the drought leaving less food for local animals, those passing through seem to have taken more that I can see than usual.

Weekly update: Cottonwoods have become endangered in this area because their habitat has been altered, partly from draining malaria incubating wetlands, party by dams that have stopped tributaries from flooding the banks of the Rio Grande, and partly by generally drying weather the past decades.

A few weeks ago I walked out in the far arroyo and discovered a cottonwood copse in the process of forming. There were mature trees near the point where the arroyo and the county road intersect. Trees about three feet tall were growing back by a high sand and clay bank. Much younger seedlings were growing in raised areas in the arroyo bottom itself.

Cottonwoods don’t easily reproduce themselves. The seeds are only viable for a couple weeks after they mature, which is in the spring, but they germinate within 24 hours if they land on bare, moist soil.

They then need to stay moist at the level of the young roots, but the leaves need full sunlight to feed the roots, a difficult balance in this environment. During the time the roots are reaching down to the water table, seedlings can tolerate very wet conditions. However, young plants don’t always survive heavy water flows.

In the wild, good conditions for developing new trees occur periodically, maybe every five to ten years. The existence of three generations of trees so close to each other means these ideal conditions have been met at least twice in the past decade.

The mature trees are growing where water would have collected or washed from the river ford.

The dirt road through the arroyo has been there for more than 60 years; it shows on the USGS map from the early 1950's. It dropped from relatively high, maybe 15' high, banks. Work must have been done by the county to keep the banks stable and provide a slightly sloped route in and out. I saw the remains of one protecting drain pipe that had emptied water upstream.

The upstream trees lie in the path of water that flows along the arroyo bank from the point where local acequia water enters the arroyo. That area gets lots of water during the summer, but the rate is probably slow and constant so the water supply is fairly reliable. Still it has cut a channel around an island which also supports a tamarix and some chamisa.

Trees could have germinated there any time. The fact they have not is probably indicative of the difficult balance of water and sun young trees require.

One set of young trees are growing between these saplings and the ford, very close to the island bank. I’ve noticed in other parts of the arroyo, those short banks seem to retain water later than the bottom itself.

The other set is in the wide bottom itself on the other side of the island, still closer to the ford. They look about the same age, but were battered by the scouring water that poured through earlier this fall.

I’m guessing these may all have germinated in the spring of 2010 when we had a cold, wet winter followed by a wet spring that lasted long enough for the seedlings to get established. The drought began that summer and lasted until this fall.

Their survival may be helped by changes made to the road this summer. They finally built a bridge over the arroyo. This narrows the water channels and creates a need for a larger area for water to back into while it waits to flow through. Those areas may become pools if the surface is rough enough to prevent the lowest level of water from moving when the flow drops and islands may develop around the area where the young trees are growing.

Notes:
Braatne, Jeffrey H., Stewart B. Rood and Paul E. Heilman. “Life History, Ecology and Conservation of Riparian Cottonwoods in North America” in R. F. Stettler, H. D. Bradshaw, P. E. Heilman, and T. M. Hinckley, Biology of Populus.

Photograph: Cottonwoods taken in the far arroyo, 25 October 2011.

Weeds

2011-11-06T04:46:00.003-07:00

Weather: After weeks of morning temperatures just below 32, they fell to the low 20's Thursday; last rain 11/05/11; 10:36 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses.

Even before Thursday’s cold temperatures, trees were dropping their leaves.

Beyond the walls and fences: Cheat grass bright green under Siberian elm in wash; Siberian elm leaves getting golden bronze tinge; choke cherries turned red-orange.

The arroyos and prairie: Chamisa in sheltered locations, broom senecio and purple asters going to seed; new loco plants up; more gypsum phacelia and stickleaf seedlings up.

With last week’s rain, the soil crust became active in the prairie and arroyo and other places near my house I explored. Bright green moss appeared and more of those grey-white mushrooms pushed through, and didn’t seem to have been affected by Thursday’s cold. I also saw one cream colored, flat-topped mushroom along the ranch road.

Juniper berries on the tree I visit near the far arroyo disappeared. Since it seems a little early for local birds to have striped the tree, I assume something passing through ate them.

Four-leaved saltbush, whose root was exposed when water washed away the surrounding dirt in the arroyo, put out tiny leaves along the exposed area.

In my yard, looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose.

Looking south: Floribunda roses.

Looking west: Flax leaves beginning to turn yellow.

Looking north: Sheltered blanket flowers, chrysanthemums; privet leaves have burgundy leather look.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragons.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches on Maximilian sunflower seed heads; bee on florist mum.

Weekly update: Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian born detective, told Dr. Burton that when he had time “I am going to attend - seriously - to the cultivation of vegetable marrows,” not as a mere gardener, but as someone who improves their taste.

Then, when he’d actually had time to grow them, he told Dr. Sheppard that “a man may work towards a certain object, may labor and toil to attain a certain kind of leisure and occupation and then find that, after all, he yearns for the old busy days and the old occupations that he thought himself so glad to leave?”

My retirement coincided with a change in my garden. I’d never before been in one place long enough to get beyond the discovery phase, the one where you buy all sorts of new seeds and plants while trying to learn what will actually grow.

After some 15 years, my garden has been refined to what works here most years. I could still be lured into buying things just to see how they do, but the economy has caused nurseries to retrench, to offer less and less, to grow what banks will finance. Few new plants have been introduced recently to tempt me. There’s little left to read about.

I began wondering what to do next. I could see how people might concentrate on the one or two plants that thrive and give pleasure, how one could, in fact, become a rabid rosarian.

However, I also knew that, if I truly cared about deadheading and weeding, I’d have found a way to do it before now, that the demands of my job weren’t the real reason my garden was always a bit slovenly - Bohemian or natural I’d say - but overgrown and slovenly none the less.

To escape such tedium, I’d begun creeping out onto the prairie to discover the local wildflowers and weeds, for I’ve never been snobbish about anything that blooms. For a while there was always something new. Then, given the limits of this arid environment, I encountered fewer and fewer new species. I’ve now written about all the ones I can identify.

What to do next?

Now that I actually have quit working, I’ve discovered that after a certain time each day, I can’t stand to be in the house. This doesn’t mean, like Poirot, I want to return to some sort of volunteer version of what I used to do.

It means literally, I can’t stand to be in the house. I want to be out walking beyond my old paths or driving about the area.

Two weeks ago I stopped when I saw something red in a field, and discovered those peppers I photographed. To get a better angle, I’d done something I almost never do, crossed through someone’s barbed-wire fence. After all, I had time. I was only going into town to finish something the new person didn’t need to learn. I could get there whenever.

On my way out I noticed someone across the road watching me unhook my sweater. When I went across to say hello and otherwise defend myself, I discovered Rod, for that was his name, had graduated from Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Farm School sometime around 1950 and lived in a trailer on land owned by the man who also owned the pepper field.

He told me about the family that had leased that field to grow vegetables and that he and the land owner had helped put up that pesky fence after people like me had stopped to look. Only they had helped themselves to the produce.

I’d been watching that field all season, had noticed it seemed to have three sections, squash on the north, corn in the center, and something that didn’t seem to have done much on the south. I’d seen the man, his wife, and children out cleaning the fields.

Then, the middle of July I noticed weeds were taking over the aisles.

I thought they were like so many people here who begin ambitiously with a new vegetable plot, improve the soil, keep things neat, then retreat with the heat of summer and find themselves overwhelmed when weeds germinate after the monsoons. Just when the weather’s most foul, the work doubles and triples.

Like Poirot when he threw a marrow over the fence because, after some months of effort, he’d become enraged with its failure, people simply give up mid-summer.

I noticed the same thing happening in another field where someone had planted some kind of melon for the first time, then let pigweed take over. However, they may simply have abandoned the crop in early September after the listeria breakout make all melons suspect. This week they finally got around to plowing the field to remove the weeds, but left melon remnants.

When I made some comment to Rod about people here not understanding the dangers of weeds as competitors for resources, he denied the people across the road were unwise. They’d gotten several sweeps of their peppers before they cleared the dead vegetation the end of September. This week they removed the last vestiges of the chiles.

Now I think those weeds were left deliberately to prevent people from seeing the bright colored vegetables, for it was that part of the field that was most overgrown. Pigweed may have been a useful camouflage, for we all react negatively to it. It had become a defender, not a predator.

Poirot discovered “we miss the daily toil.” He hadn’t grown marrows before, only thought about it. He found his continuity as a private investigator.

For me, the routine of work has always been a way to support my hobbies. I’m not ready to substitute manicuring a garden for paid labor. I still want to explore, do something new, but without moving again.

Nature is still the greatest source of surprise. Only now, novelty is no longer some new flower, but the ways of the familiar. I want to find a way to comment on the pepper farmer and the melon field when I notice them, not wait until I can focus on some plant.

The immediate challenge won’t be in the noticing, for nature trains you to look, but in finding a way to describe the seeming mundane. I don’t know what format will work best as I change from writing about specific plants to writing about the processes of growing, but something always arises from experiment.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. “How It All Came About” in The Labors of Hercules, 1939, first quote.

_____. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, second quote.

Photograph: Melon field overrun by pigweed, 26 October 2011.

Peppers, Part 2

2011-10-30T06:30:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves dead and dropping, apricot leaves dropping.

Beyond the walls and fences: Clammy weed, stickleaf, chamisa, broom senecio, golden hairy and purple asters; leaves on Virginia creeper killed by cold temperatures; Russian olive dropping leaves and uncovering clusters of berries; leaves on blue gilia and leatherleaf globemallow turning yellow.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; snowball leaves turning red; Japanese barberry leaves turning bright orange; sidalcea leaves turning yellow.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; first ripe raspberries of the season; cold temperatures killed the zinnias.

Looking west: Calamintha; leaves on Rumanian sage, Mönch aster, David phlox, Silver king artemisia and chives turning yellow; leaves on caryopteris turning yellow and dropping.

Looking north: Chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; catalpa leaves turned brown and dropping; Bradford pear leaves turned dark red; cold temperatures killed yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens, moss rose; tomatoes ripening, peppers drying.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rained day and night Wednesday; after days of temperatures falling below freezing, we got our first frost Saturday morning; 10:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Red or green turns out to be more than a trick question sprung on visitors. Habits of taste may have been determined by the pepper plant’s growing cycle.

There are some 25 species of peppers, of which most eaten in this part of the world are some variant of Capsicum annuum derived from a selection or hybrid developed by Fabien Garcia at New Mexico State University. His inspiration was the Anaheim, developed for a California cannery around 1900. His first release, New Mexico Number 9 in 1921, was aimed at providing a uniformly sized, predictably mild pepper for commercial canners that would appeal to Anglos and could be grown around Hatch.

Peppers, of course, had been grown in northern New Mexico long before Garcia was born. In the 1830's, Josiah Gregg said red pepper “enters into nearly every dish at every meal” in Santa Fé while chile verde was considered “one of the great luxuries.”

A hundred years later chile had become one of the few cash crops in the Española valley. People would take their ristras into Abiquiú or Española where Bond and Nohl examined them carefully before accepting them for credit. They shipped the chiles north on the Denver and Rio Grande.

People in Chimayó remember that if their crop was rejected by store keepers, their fathers would go to places like Mora or Truches or Peñasco to swap the chiles for beans or potatoes or goat cheese. Some had connections through a relative in Mora. Elsewhere, Tila Vila remembers strangers would open their doors if they realized the pedlars were from “good” Chimayó families.

Despite the Latin name, chiles are perennial plants that can bloom their first season, but need time to do so at temperatures above 60. When the real heat arrives, they tend to bloom less until late summer. The bell-shaped flowers drop when night temperatures are above 75 degrees, and fruit development is delayed if daytime temperatures reach 90. The first peppers tend to be larger than the later ones.

To speed the growing season, Leonora Curtin says people used to plant seeds in April or May in tins or boxes they kept on their window sills until the weather warmed enough to transplant them. The move should have been made by May 3 for them to develop their glossy green skins by the middle of September.

Even then, the growing season for a pepper is so long it may never reach the red stage in the mountains or in a summer like this when drought and heat send plants into periods of quiescence. A typical green chile is ready to harvest 120 days after planting, but the red needs 165. By necessity, dried green may have become the standard.

Now we can buy good sized bedding plants. Each time I went into a garden center this past April, there was some man unhappy that peppers hadn’t appeared yet.

I finally settled on what was available, Sandia, a cross between the original Garcia pepper and an Anaheim which Roy Harper released in 1956 through New Mexico State. It’s primary virtue is that it matures earlier. During the summer heat, it sets fruit lower on the plants which makes it less vulnerable to the high winds that can come with the monsoons.

When I put the seedlings out the middle of May in a relatively protected area, they wilted every afternoon. The members of the nightshade family have shallow roots and need lots of water. They only stabilized after I stopped watering them each evening with a garden hose and gave them their own soaker that ran at least 15 minutes a day.

In July the light-green plants finally put out a few white flowers, that produced some rather fat, crooked fruits by mid August. About the time the chile roasters were leaving the end of September, the skins turned darker and glossier. The first of October they were turning red and beginning to dry.

There was a very short period when they were at their prime. People, both local and in Hatch, sweep through their fields several times a season picking the green chiles.

My neighbors across the road have four strings of red peppers hanging from their eaves, two long and two short. The latter look redder and fatter, as if the strings represented different croppings, and they were the most recent.

In the 1980's, Roy Nakayama and Frank Matta, also of NMSU, crossed Sandia with “a Northern New Mexico strain” to produce Española, an even earlier maturing red chile.

The famed Chimayó peppers were smaller than others and may have been some special variety brought north by migrants from Zacatecas that self-selected itself into something special in that high environment. In the 1930's, the area along the Chama river produced more strings of chiles per acre than any other part of the valley, but none were considered as flavorful.

The distinctive flavor may have come from the seed’s genetics, from the altitude or soil or water, or it may have come from timing. The chiles may have reached their most flavorful stage at just the right time to fire up the hornos to dry them.

For the past two weeks morning temperatures have hovered around freezing. Pepper plants can’t handle cold temperatures. Mine are probably still alive because I put them next to a southwest facing wall protected by some shrubs that haven’t lost their leaves yet.

My neighbors have picked their corn and peppers, removed the corn stalks and squash vines, and left the tomato and chile plants with unripe fruit to continue to redden. At some point soon, the remaining chiles will need to be picked and dried, because the weather will change. When we get our first heavy frost, the internal cells will rupture, release sap and incubate internal mold.

Notes:
Bosland, Paul W. and Stephanie Walker. “Growing Chiles in New Mexico,” 2004 revision.

_____, Danise Coon and Eric Votava. “The Chile Cultivars of New Mexico State University,” 2008.

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

Epicentre. “Chile Pepper Varieties,” The Epicentre Spices website.

Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.

US Department of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Tila Vila.

Photograph: Sandia chile beginning to dry, 23 October 2011.

Peppers, Part 1

2011-10-23T05:28:00.005-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, dahlias, silver lace vine, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves brown or yellow, apple leaves golden orange; woman down the road has been putting nightly covers over the plants that are still blooming in front of her house wall; man down the road planted alfalfa this week.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallows, clammy weed, goat’s head, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, gumweed nearly gone, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, mushrooms; cottonwood leaves turning yellow, some Apache plume leaves yellow, tamarix and choke cherry leaves turning orange; more Juniper berries a grey blue; gypsum phacelia seedlings grown larger.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; Autumn Joy sedum leaves have coral tinge, Maximilian sunflower leaves turning yellow and falling.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; zinnias turned brown, rose of Sharon leaves turning yellow, raspberry leaves bronzed.

Looking west: Calamintha, Silver King artemisia; sea lavender leaves mottled, red at the tips, then yellow and green toward the stem; purple coneflower leaves turning yellow or dirty brown.

Looking north: Nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; black locust, apricot and sweet cherry leaves turning yellow, Siberian pea dropping its leaves.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens; moss rose blooming despite many dead leaves.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: More birds flitting about the arroyo yesterday late morning; don’t know if it was the time of day or the time of year; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: First morning temperatures below 32; last rain 10/07/11; 11:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As soon as you arrive in New Mexico and need to find a place to eat while you await the moving van, you’re confronted with the great question, red or green.

There’s no right answer. You say green. You like the taste of the peppers or don’t. The next time, you say red. You like, you don’t. You notice how others respond to your choice, and the time after you follow their lead.

Unless you’re from Texas, where they eat jalapeños like the rest of us eat celery sticks, it doesn’t hurt to do what others do in public, and eat what you like when you’re alone.

In theory, the distinction between red and green is simply a preference for a particular food preservation technique. If you pick a chile pepper when it’s green, it has a milder taste because the chemicals that give it the hotter flavor don’t develop until it ripens and the skin turns red.

In Chimayó in the past, people preferred to eat them when they were green, but used the red for medicine. Don Usner was told chile caribe was especially effective against colds and sore throats, while Leonora Curtin was told to use chile colorado for rheumatism.

Unfortunately, unripe Capsicum annuum spoil when they’re picked, while red ones will dry and last a very long time. It’s very difficult to dry the unripe fruits because their skins toughen to prevent premature evaporation in this arid climate. The trapped water supports bacteria, that leads to rot.

People in México, probably those who lived in Teotihuacán northeast of modern Mexico City around the time of Christ, discovered they could preserve unripe peppers in their milder state by smoking them.

When Phillip II sent Francisco Hernández to report on plants from the New World in the 1570's, people on Hispañola, where Christopher Columbus had first eaten chiles 80 years before, were drying and smoking one species so it lasted it a year. Texochilli was a soft pepper, with a light spiciness and was “usually eaten with corn or with tortillas.”

Smoking peppers enough to remove all the water takes time. According to Wikipedia, chipotles are jalapeños that have ripened red and dried on the plant. At the end of the season in Chihuahua, the ones that ripened late are picked for smoking that can take several days. Chuck Evans experimented with smoking peppers over hickory wood with a modern rack smoker and found red pods took three days to dry at 110 degrees.

People realized that, instead of completely drying peppers with heat, they could simply heat chiles long enough to make the skins easier to remove.

In Chimayó, Benigna Chávez remembers they would roast red chile “in the horno, on coals of the wood.” I’ve talked to a young woman in her 30's in Santa Fe who says when she was a child her father would roast green peppers in the stove’s oven in pans. Now every August, a section of the local grocer’s parking lot is fenced off for the propane fueled burners that roast chiles dumped from 50 pound burlap bags into spinning wire cages.

Half cooked peppers still spoil if they’re not eaten within a week. In the past, Chávez said they “peeled it and tied it and hung it outside to dry on the clothesline” before putting the dried chiles “away in a flour sack that was not very thick so it would get air and hang it in the dispensa for the winter.”

When people are given their clear plastic bags of roasted chiles in the parking lot today, they still have to remove the skins and seeds, and cut them. Since electricity was introduced after World War II, many have frozen diced pieces instead of drying slices.

Such progress, of course, changes the taste of and for peppers. It also alters that primal New Mexico question, (almost) fresh or dried?

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

DeWitt, Dave and Chuck Evans. “Chipotle Flavors: How to Smoke Chiles,” Fiery Foods website.

Hernández, Francisco. The Mexican Treasury,” edited by Simon Varey, 2000.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Benigna Chávez.

Wikipedia entry on “Chipotle.”

Photograph: Peppers from different generations this summer left to ripen down the road, 20 October 2011.

Mushrooms

2011-10-16T08:14:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds.

Beyond the walls and fences: Indian paintbrush near chamisa, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, narrow-leaved collomia, clammy weed, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, amaranth, pigweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur; cottonwoods yellowing.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley and California poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Calamintha, sea lavender, Silver King artemisia; lead plant leaves turning red.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Early morning temperatures in mid-30's have put everything on notice; last rain 10/07/11; 11:23 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Perhaps because I first saw mushrooms in fairy rings in the woods at summer camp in southern Michigan, I’m always surprised to see them in this part of New Mexico.

I don’t know now if someone told me or I surmised those fairy rings were toadstools living on the outer edges of dead trees.

When I first saw mushrooms appear here after the rain, I thought of them like the neighboring mosses - dormant spores that sprang to life when they got sufficiently wet. I assumed the spores themselves just blew here, probably from the Jemez.

Douglas Smith says the fungi come out in profusion in the Los Alamos area in early fall for six to eight weeks after the monsoons have begun.

They don’t appear here every year and their appearance changes. I don’t know if that’s a function of species or life cycle. Their fruiting time varies from season to season, but their affinity for moisture is obvious.

I saw one in the gravel drive in 1999, and another flat-topped, whitish one in the garden bed on the north side of the house in mid-June of 2000. In 2001, I saw one by the back fence the end of July.

In 2003, I found two large, flat ones that resembled pancakes in the well in May and another type on the west end of the house in late November. I next saw some in 2007, one with a tall domed, light tan cap in early July and another in early August.

At the end of May of 2009 I saw two next to a hose by the back fence that again had pointed white caps that were slightly flared at their bases. In June I noticed one on the prairie, slightly taller than mine, with a thin, ridged stem. All that remained of the cap was a plate of black fringe.

Later in the summer, in August, the ones were back under the peach tree on the west side of the house. By the time I photographed them, they were tan with caps more spherical than pointed. One had a dark mark in the center of the top.

Last year nothing appeared in my yard until early August when three were growing in the back drip line. However, I saw a colony on the prairie in March that I nearly missed because they still looked a bit like raised pebbles. One had a triangular, whitish grey cap and some darker markings on the stem.

Later in the summer, in early August, I saw one that had had a flat round tan cap that then was splitting to reveal an interior filled with darker, reddish brown matter. It resembled scale on a rusting beam.

This year there was nothing until we finally got some rain in September. They might be the same type I saw last spring. They came up in disturbed land on the prairie where I tend to walk and had the same slightly puffy, slightly rounded white caps. I couldn’t find them the following week: the ATV’s had been through.

Two weeks later I noticed one had survived, but was laying down with a dent in its cap. Last Sunday, after a rainy week, it had revived a bit, and a couple others were growing nearby with some baby Russian thistles.

There are far too few to think of them as a colony. So far, they seem the result of a group of spores caught by the wind and dropped in the same area. They developed some threads underground, the mycelium, that then produce the familiar stem and cap necessary for reproduction. In my yard, none have survived for more than two seasons.

In more favorable conditions the mycelium live a perennial existence underground. Scientists believe fairy rings are caused when fungus grows out from the center like ring muhly grass. As they grow, they exhaust the nutrients so only the outer rings can produce the familiar tan fungi once a year. About 60 species have been identified that grow in this pattern.

Farther north in Michigan, at Crystal Falls near the Wisconsin border, the mycelium of an Armillaria gallica has been found that grew to 37 acres. In Oregon, an Armillaria solidipes has been identified that covers 2,200 acres and may be more than 2400 years old.

Notes:
Ferguson, B.A, T. A. Dreisbach, C. G. Parks, G. M. Filip and C. L. Schmitt. “Coarse-scale Population Structure of Pathogenic Armillaria Species in a Mixed-conifer Forest in the Blue Mountains of Northeast Oregon,” Canadian Journal of Forest Research 33:612-62:2003.

Smith, Douglas. “Species of Northern New Mexico (50),” posted 19 August 2008 on the Mushroom Observer website.

Wikipedia entries on Mushrooms and Fairy Rings.

Photograph: Mushroom growing in an ATV path on the prairie, 9 October 2011; it emerged before September 9, after the monsoons, and revived last week after days of clouds led to a night of rain.

Narrow-Leaved Commolia

2011-10-09T08:59:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, pampas grass; grape leaves turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Indian paintbrush near chamisa, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, clammy weed, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, goat’s head, bush pea, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, pigweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur, black grama grass; salt bush beginning to turn yellow.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley and California poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy fading.

Looking south: Floribunda roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, Silver King artemisia; skunk bush leaves turning yellow orange.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato; peppers turned red.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain much of Friday night, snow in east and west mountains yesterday morning; 11:33 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The far arroyo goes back a couple miles from the ranch road. I don’t usually walk much farther than the section dominated by the high, hard right bank where the four-winged salt bushes creep up the base. If I do continue southeast, the base changes to the sorts of weeds I find along the road shoulder, pigweed, Russian thistle, sweet white clover, yellow hairy asters.

After that the bank drops, vegetation disappears and the rocks cross in what would be rapids if the arroyo were flowing. I can still see striations from water movements a month ago that haven’t yet dried and blown away.

From there the other bank sweeps out with a higher, hard edge, and the right bank slowly rises a few feet. In the area where the soft bank is only a foot high I’ve discovered a small section where late summer wildflowers bloom. Their seeds will occasionally settle in the ruderal section and a few will cross to land near the Russian olive at the ranch road, but if I want to see them I usually need to walk upstream a few weeks after the rain.

Narrow-leaved commolias were blooming there two weeks ago. A few plants were left last Sunday. I suspect I won’t find any when I wander out later today.

When you first come upon the flowering plant, you nearly pass it by as one more aborted purple aster. It has the same general habit, an isolated, reddish stem covered with dark, needle-shaped leaves, flowers at the ends. However, you soon notice they aren’t daisies.

When you stoop for a closer look you realize it’s a member of the phlox family. The five narrow petals fuse into long tubes that settle into dark green nests of individual retaining vials that persist after the corollas fall away, so eventually only the green shows. On some, the heads are full globes; on others they’re spread out like snapdragons or ladybells.

On a few plants, the leaves are long and luxurious. On others, they barely exist or have fallen away. On most in the arroyo, there are only a few reflexed lances alternating along slightly hairy stems.

In other parts of the Great Plains and in California, Dieter Wilken says the flowers are “white to pink,” but in Arizona he says they are “bluish violet to nearly white.” The local ones have light lavender petals and darker veins. Dark eyes dominate the centers, both from pigments in the petals and from the filaments. The anthers and tips of the stigmas are lighter colored.

In many places between the eastern edge of the plains and the Pacific coast ranges, the annual blooms sometime between April and August. With this year’s delayed rains, they didn’t get their chance here until September.

Adaptability seems one of the hallmarks of a plant Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley said was growing in “meadows in the mountains” of Tunitcha, Chama, Santa Fe and Las Vegas early in the last century. Al Schneider says it’s now common in the mountains of the Four Corners region.

When Wilken looked closely at two Collomia linearis populations from Larimer County in north central Colorado, he found more variation in external morphological traits from plants growing in a disturbed area than from those in an alpine meadow. Since the annuals can pollinate themselves, this means, so long as no environmental condition selects one genetic combination year after year, plants in any given location produce wide possibilities to survive whatever nature offers any particular year. Their ability to adapt is sustained.

Perhaps the oblong brown seeds provide some of the most useful adaptative mechanisms. When they’ve ripened, the capsules open to expel them. Sometimes, like this past week, that occurs when the ground is wet. The seed coat becomes sticky when it’s wet and the seed stays long enough to lodge where it landed, rather than being picked up again by the drying winds and dropped in some less congenial location.

In the arroyo, seeds from the primary population apparently have been sent downstream by either the wind or the rain. Only those that landed in areas where other vegetation helped trap moisture, the ruderal base of the high bank, the plants between chamisa and the Russian olive, have been able to germinate.

Next year, those isolated plants may expand their populations, or maybe other environmental factors will destroy their seed before the summer rains arrive. Presumably, they have the genetic variety needed to survive somewhere.

Notes:
Schneider, Al. “Collomia linearis,” Southwest Colorado Wildflowers website.

Wilken, Dieter H. “Local Differentiation for Phenotypic Plasticity in the Annual Collomia linearis (Polemoniaceae),” Systematic Botany 2:99-108:1977.

_____. “Collomia Nutt., Collomia” in Great Plains Flora Association, Flora of the Great Plains, 1986.

_____. Entries on Collomia and C. linearis Nutt., Jepson Flora Project website.

_____ and J. Mark Porter. “Vascular Plants of Arizona: Polemoniaceae,” Canotia 1:1-37:2005.

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

Photograph: Narrow-leaved collomia upstream on the arroyo bank in a slight breeze, 2 October 2011.

Impatiens

2011-10-02T07:28:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, alfalfa, pampas grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, Indian paintbrush near chamisa, leatherleaf globemallows, blue trumpets, blue gilia, clammy weed, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bush pea, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur, sand bur, black grama and muhly ring grasses.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley and California poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed; spirea leaves turning orange-brown.

Looking west: Calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, Silver King artemisia; white spurge leaves turned red.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; lower leaves of sand cherry turning red.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Bees on west side of house, hornets on east, some kind of striped black buzzing insect on flowers in arroyo, miller moths nuisance in house at night, harvester and small black ants in drive.

Weather: Needed to water because last rain fell more than two weeks ago, 9/17/11; 11:43 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The final race of the year has begun, the one between newly germinated seedlings and the coming freeze. Pigweed’s blooming in the drive where it’s 3" high. Everywhere áñil del muerto’s tracing water paths in 6" high yellow drifts.

Last Sunday some clammy weed I hadn’t noticed the week before at the base of the arroyo wall had vestigial flowers on plants only a few inches high. The blue gilia was still putting out dark flowers and a few balls of sand verbena were bright white.

While they’re expediting their reproductive cycles, morning temperatures are falling into the low 40's. Chlorophyll is draining from the cottonwoods, the weeping and globe willows. Soon, the underlying yellow will be all that’s seen, before those leaves drop and bare branches are left for winter.

Nature isn’t restful nor does it run with the regularity of a clock. Men who depend on it to survive are constantly living with the consequences of drought or freeze or destructive insects. No apples, too much squash, what to eat this winter.

The first gardens were luxuries invented by those who could afford to escape such caprices, literal oases in the desert where palms were always green.

A craving for predictable beauty arises among those who spend days in drab cubes where work provides no satisfaction and the results please no one. Many don’t want a garden to reproduce the variations of nature, the frosted apples, the late blooming marigolds: they want it to stand as defiant proof that here at least they can control their environment.

For such people, nature created impatiens - tropical flowers that bloom day and night in the nursery and after they’re planted anywhere there’s shade, coolish temperatures and enough water. The five petaled flowers are simple. No complex patterns of stamens disturb the flat planes of brilliant color that can, in a good year, completely cover the fat, succulent stems and sticky dark green leaves.

Of course, nature didn’t create modern impatiens. The only plant it seems to have provided that’s constantly in bloom is the dandelion, and even that has a cycle. One day’s golden flowers are the next day’s bare stalks.

Only a human weary of feckless nature could have produced such a reliable bedding plant. Claude Hope was born in Sweetwater, Texas, a city best known for its annual rattlesnake round-up. It gets more water than we do, enough to grow prickly pear, but it’s still dry and windy and brown much of the year.

In an act that could only signify a desire to escape west Texas, he went to college in Lubbock where he earned a degree in ornamental horticulture. Alas, that got him a job with the USDA developing fungus-resistant cotton in Arizona. Cotton boles catch in the barbed wire on the road from Sweetwater to Lubbock where it’s the only crop that’s grown. The plants are shorter than in the deep south, the rows more widely spaced. People I knew in nearby Abilene, who’d been raised in northern Mississippi, shuddered when they saw them.

During World War II, the army sent him to Costa Rica to oversee quinine production after the Japanese captured the Philippines. They didn’t know enough about the plant to select a good site and their attempt failed. Synthetic drugs were developed instead.

After the war Hope joined other men in the country who were organizing Pan-American Seed to supply U. S. wholesalers. Temperature and day length are so even there, Hope believed he could get four crops of seeds a year with cheaper labor. He was given the opportunity to develop better petunias, those bright colored, smelly, sticky stemmed money makers of the 50's.

Others were the ones experimenting with the tropical Impatiens walleriana, which evolved in eastern Africa in the late pleistocene when temperatures were still cool and conditions wet. The rose colored Balsaminaceae, which could get 3' tall, had been taken to London in 1896, where it was treated as a house plant.

While he spent day after day staring at light deadening, red petunias to create one given the muscular name Comanche, men at Ball Seed in Santa Paula, California and West Chicago were competing to produce the best light-shy pastel impatiens with ethereal names. Rob Reiman’s Pixie White was introduced in 1958. Two years later rival Sluis et Groot brought an F₁ hybrid to market called Imp.

In 1961 Reiman and Bill Marchant gave their purified in-breed lines to Hope, who, by then, had his own farm in the highlands where he had disciplined workers mass producing F₁ hybrids. He worked to make the tender perennials more compact, with more branches to carry the terminal racemes. His first plants, Elfin, were offered in 1968 in eight colors.

He later told Allen Lacy he had no time for corporate busybodies who based their decisions of sales history because the past “can't tell you what people might buy in the future, if it happened to be available.” If asked what they wanted in 1970, many gardeners would have said a better petunia. Twenty years later, they were saying better impatiens.

But someone who grew up ducking tornados knows you never get exactly what you want from what’s on offer. As Hope said, to please those growers and homeowners who seek a comforting escape from the stresses of modern life, he’s “got to take risks, to use his imagination to dream up something new, and then work his tail off trying to make it a reality.''

Notes:
Howe, T. K. “Evaluation of Impatiens Cultivars for the Landscape in West-Central Florida,” Florida State Horticultural Society Proceedings 111:195-202:1998, on Reiman and Marchant.

Janssens, Steven B., Eric B. Knox, Suzy Huysmans, Erik F. Smets and Vincent S. F. T. Merckx. "Rapid Radiation of Impatiens (Balsaminaceae) during Pliocene and Pleistocene: Result of a Global Climate Change,” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 52:806-824:2009.

Lacy, Allen. “Claude Hope, the Seed King of Costa Rica” in Farther Afield: A Gardener's Excursions, 1998.

Photograph: Impatiens growing in deep shade near a leaky hose with vinca and golden spur columbine, 1 October 2011.

Wild Bush Pea

2011-09-25T07:23:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia peaked, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, alfalfa, pampas grass; red apples in one orchard, others still look barren.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, Indian paintbrush, leatherleaf globemallows, blue trumpets, blue gilia, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, newly sprouted goat’s head, white sweet clover, bush pea, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, 3" high pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, carpets of 6" high áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur, sand bur, black grama and muhly ring grasses, crust, green moss; gypsum phacelia up; leaves turning red on Virginia creeper and velvetweed.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum darkened, winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, Silver King artemisia; peach leaves turn yellow and drop immediately.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Morning and afternoon temperatures lower; last rain 9/17/11; 12:02 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: It’s a pea. That’s what I said to myself when a flash of bright color stopped me from checking the juniper berries on the other side of the arroyo.

I knelt down to see better. No doubt, it was a pea. The bright rose purple flower was larger and more open than most, but it had the characteristic five petals: the wide top banner, a pair of wings that hung down like puppy ears, and the barely visible pair that makes the snout nosed keel.

There was only one flower to a stem, and the stems appeared in pairs. One bloomed before the other. In many cases, I saw a flower and the dark hammock of a bud. In other cases, one flower was open and the other was fading or tan.

It was the seed pods that most loudly shouted, “Yo! Pea here.” Flat green cases attached by reddish stems crossed by darker veins. When the light shone through, two to four round lumps were visible.

With Procrustean certainty, I know it’s a pea, but a week later I can’t tell you what kind. Botanists have reused terms and invented new ones so often, later taxonomists note the confusion and bypass it by offering their own, new definitions.

The problem began with Friedrich Pursh, who described both his work and the collection of Lewis and Clark. He called a large purple flowered pea with large pods from the Missouri river Lathyrus decaphyllus. However, no specimen survived in either the expedition’s or his herbariums, leaving a broad description that could be attached to anything, including the flower I saw last Sunday.

Thomas Nuttall thought the label really applied to Vicia stipulacea, while Nathaniel Britton used the term for a different large flowered plant from the Rocky Mountains. Frederick King Butters and Harold Saint John decided Pursh’s Missouri river plant was really Lathyrus venosa intonsus. They called the unknown species, which doesn’t reach as far east, Lathyrus eucosmus, and indicated it was partly Nuttall’s Lathyrus polymorphus, but not his decaphyllus. Their examples included some collected in Santa Fe in 1874 and 1897.

Needless to say little one reads can be trusted. No one can be more correct than his or her references. The actual distinctions are traits too minuscule to appear in normal photographs.

Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley used decaphyllus for a “rather handsome” plant with “larger flowers than most of the species” that grew in the “plains and open fields” where it “often becomes a weed in cultivated fields” and didn’t mention the other names.

Daniel Moerman standardized on polymorphus for the species eaten by the Cochiti, Acoma and Laguna and used eucosmus for the plant utilized medicinally by the Navajo. Leonora Curtin identified patito del pais as “Lathyrus decaphyllus (eucosmus" which Spanish speakers in northern New Mexico used to treat toothaches, mumps, tonsilitis, and headaches.

The only thing that says “maybe I’m not a pea, I’m only teasing” are the long, narrow leaves. They form rather shapeless grey-green masses clinging to the sides of the north facing slope of the ranch road that rather resemble some pictures Tom Chester published of Lathyrus brachycalyx zionis from the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon. That species, which Susannah Johnson and Kelly Allard says is often confused with eucosmos, has sessile pods and only appears in New Mexico around the San Juan tributary to the Colorado river.

More important, the leaves on the plants I saw don’t terminate in tendrils, a trait that separates both Lathyrus and Vicia from other legumes. However, Johnson and Allred suggest that while ecosmus has “well-developed and prehensile” vines at the end of the upper stems with leaves, the lower ones are “short and bristle-like.” No one has commented on the effects of environment on leaf variation, only quibbled on the difference between elliptic-lanceolate and oblong-elliptic.

I suppose it’s safe to call them bush peas, though they don’t all look like bushes, and simply enjoy them for what they are: bright colored pea flowers.

As for the juniper berries that led me up the road where they were blooming only a few have started to turn purple. Most are still grey-green.

Notes:
Butters, Frederick King and Harold Saint John. ‘Studies in Certain North American Lathyrus,” Rhodora 19:160-163:1917.

Chester, Tom. “Plant Species of the Bright Angel Trail: Bush Peavine, Lathyrus brachycalyx ssp. zionis,” available on-line. He wasn’t sure about his identification, since eucosmus has been treated by some as another subspecies of brachycalyx, and consulted Wendy Hodgson, an expert on Grand Canyon flora.

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

Johnson, Susannah and Kelly W. Allred. “A Taxonomic Review of the Tendril-bearing Legumes (Leguminosae) in New Mexico: I. Lathyrus,” The New Mexico Botanist number 25:1-7:1 January 2003.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Wooton, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Pea flower in full bloom and one fading; a pair of pods on another stem, with a dark bud on another; ranch road leaving far arroyo, 18 September 2011.

Rose Queen Salvia

2011-09-18T07:53:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflower heads bending, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, pampas grass; red tomatoes visible.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, sandburs, muhly ring grass, crust, moss, mushrooms; buds on broom senecio.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, David phlox; buds on Silver King artemisia.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain several days, followed by morning temperatures in the 40's and fog on the river; last rain 9/17/11; 12:23 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: What with drought and fire and heat, it’s easy to forget that much of this year was dominated by unusual cold. When you’re still cutting dead wood from Dr. Huey roses, it’s even harder to remember that cold is essential for many plants.

Still, when autumn brings cooler temperatures and shorter days, some spring and early summer blooming plants, especially members of the rose family, resume flowering. It’s the time plants like chrysanthemums and cosmos, whose incipient buds need long exposure to daylight, begin to bloom.

Perennial salvias need both cold and long days to flourish. My Rose Queen didn’t do well until last year’s cold winter, and did better last summer than this. I bought four seedlings in 2006, but only one appeared the next year to put up a few stalks with two-lipped tubes jutting from their bases. The same scant squares appeared in 2008, not the flowered-filled stems one sees in catalogs.

Then, the winter of 2010 was cold and the moisture lasted until early May. A seedling appeared. The stalks were never full, but they continued to lengthen to accommodate new stamen-spitting florets into September. Instead of a great flourish, they were bits of color all season.

This past winter was cold and dry. The volunteer joined the parent, but they went out of bloom by the middle of August. Last week, with rain and cool temperatures, a new raceme appeared under a hollyhock leaf on the seedling. It now bristles with flowers, while several conical buds have appeared at the tips of other stems. I can’t find the older plant.

I’ve had the same disappointing experience with the more common blue flowered varieties. East Friesland and May Night didn’t survive a full season. The three Blue Queens I planted in 2007 are all still there, but only one ever bloomed, then just in June.

This summer, for the first time, they threw up a number of thin rods. Unlike the fat Rose Queens, each was dense with flowers. By July, only bare stalks remained with single flowers waving at the tops. While mine finally prospered, the ones in the village, that had produced the past two summers, were invisible, either shorter than usual, darker colored than normal, or intimidated by the weather.

Whether lavender pink or deep purple blue, for rose is a wistful misnomer, they’re all derived in some way from Salvia nemorosa, a clump forming European species more popular in Germany than elsewhere. In the 1930's, Louise Beebe Wilder noted it was rarely offered in this country. Thompson and Morgan offered no seeds in 1955, the year Ernst Pagles introduced Ostfriesland. He’d begun working with the species in 1949 at the suggestion of his mentor, Karl Foerster, who brought out Mainacht in 1956.

Both Foerster and Pagles relied of rigorous selection techniques to develop cultivars that could survive with little maintenance in the cold climate of East Germany. If their plants involved multiple species they were usually the result of unsupervised matings.

Blue Queen has no history: it’s simply described by Tony Avent as “an old seed strain.” The pink is equally obscure: Jelitto Seeds lists Rosakönigin without taking credit for it. Both were being offered by Thompson and Morgan in 1986 when I first got their catalog, but the pink flowered variety wasn’t sold by nurseries like Lamb or Milaeger’s Gardens until 1991, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Some taxonomists believe nemorosa is the same as Salvia sylvestris, a species found from middle Europe down through the Balkans and east into Kazakstan. Others believe sylvestris is a natural child of nemorosa and Salvia pratensis, which grows in much of temperate Europe. When Jay Walker’s team tested the DNA from a number of species in the mint family, it found pratensis and nemorosa so similar they must have had a common ancestor.

Whatever the differences in parentage, they’re expressed in the ways different varieties respond to the environment. When the Chicago Botanic Garden tested salvias in the middle 1990's, they found May Night much better than East Friesland or Blue Queen, and all were superior to Rose Queen which winter killed, had few flowers, and decreased in vigor over the years. While their experience with the pink variety paralleled mine, their luck with the others in a muggy, prairie lowland was the reverse of mine in a dry, high mountain valley.

Grete Waaseth found the interplay of vernalization and photoperiod for Blue Queen didn’t follow simple, predictable patterns. When Blaukönigin were not exposed to cold winter temperatures, then imitating high sun light with photosynthetic photon fluxes increased their ability to flower at the expense of developing normal levels of crinkled grey-green leaves. However, if the perennials were exposed to 41 degree temperatures for six weeks, then the added energy impulses made no difference when they were later exposed to light for twenty hours a day.

Blue Queens could survive the absence of cold if the sun was more intense, but if they had cold, greater amounts of light didn’t matter.

In contrast, a group led by Todd Lasseigne found that East Friesland, May Night, and a pratensis could all stand days with 104 degrees without injury, but that Ostfriesland and the pratensis didn’t flower, either because they hadn’t been winterized or hadn’t been exposed to the appropriate day lengths. If cold alone wasn’t enough, then neither was heat.

Garden suppliers, unlike botanical gardens, don’t truly care if a plant survives the first winter; they want it to be blooming when they sell it in the spring. Species that don’t bloom until days are long present a problem. When May Night finally did become popular, Avent says, “unscrupulous nurserymen found a plant that would propagate faster” that didn’t perform as well.

A team led by Gary Keever considered the possibility that a long day flower was simply a short night one, and tried to force plants to bloom by interrupting the darkness of their nights. The group shortened the time to first bloom for Blue Queen by seven to twelve days, but only if it treated them in February in Alabama. At other times of the winter, the trick didn’t work.

Why anyone would go to the trouble of growing perennial salvias in the deep south is another question. Both Allan Armitage, in the Georgia piedmont, and the Missouri Botanical Garden, in Saint Louis, say the plant needs cooler nights than they have. The spikes get tall, then floppy, making only the shortest varieties aesthetic.

So why does anyone bother? The pictures, of course, are always tempting, and blooming clumps always look so nice in places like Santa Fé where elevations are higher elevations and moisture greater. But after finally having some winters cold enough for mine to bloom in our long summers, I’m not sure they’ll be worth replacing when they die, which they most assuredly will, sooner or later. They’ve held on, but never acclimated.

Notes:
Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Avent, Tony. “Perennial Salvia: Ornamental Sages for the Garden,” Plant Delights Nursery website.

Chicago Botanic Garden. “A Performance Appraisal of Hardy Sages,” Plant Evaluation Notes Issue 14, 2000.

Keever, Gary J., J. Raymond Kessler, Jr. and James C. Stephenson. “Night-Interrupted Lighting Accelerates Flowering of Herbaceous Perennials Under Nursery Conditions in the Southern United States,” Journal of Environmental Horticulture 24:23-28:2006.

Lasseigne, F. Todd, Stuart L. Warren, Frank A. Blazich, and Thomas G. Ranney. “Day/Night Temperature Affects Growth and Photosynthesis of Cultivated Salvia Taxa,” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science 132:492-500:2007.

Missouri Botanical Garden. “Salvia x sylvestris 'Rose Queen',” available on-line.

Waaseth, G., S.O. Grimstad and R. Moe. “Influence of Photosynthetic Photon Flux on Floral Evocation in Salvia x superba Stapf ´Blaukönigin´,” Acta Horticulturae 711:235-24:2005.

_____, _____, _____ and R. Heins. “Effect of Photosynthetic Photon Flux and Temperature on Floral Evocation and Development in the Vernalization Sensitive Ornamental Perennial Salvia x superba `Blaukönigin’,” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science 131:437-444:2006.

Walker, Jay B., Kenneth J. Sytsma, Jens Treutlein, and Michael Wink. “Salvia (Lamiaceae) Is Not Monophyletic: Implications for the Systematics, Radiation, and Ecological Specializations of Salvia and Tribe Mentheae,” American Journal of Botany 9: 1115-1125:2004.

Wilder, Louise Beebe. What Happens in My Garden, 1935.

Photograph: Rose Queen salvia seedling blooming under hollyhock leaves, 11 September 2011.

The Monsoon Continues

2011-09-11T10:28:00.005-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper fewer flowers, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, pampas grass; some corn stalks dried; some sweet pea pods turned brown and emptied; people have cleared their vegetable gardens, leaving only still producing tomato plants.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth heads long enough to curve, pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, chamisa, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod peaked, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, sandburs, muhly ring grass, crust, moss, mushrooms; buds on broom senecio; cheat grass coming up; Virginia creeper berries turning purple; pods forming on whorled milkweed.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, Maltese cross, large-leaf soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower peaked, Maximilian sunflowers collapsed over path, tansy; buds on pied snapdragon.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, Mönch asters fading, purple coneflowers nearly gone; buds on Silver King artemisia.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens; first Sweet 100 tomatoes ripe.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Finally getting the long, slow rains we need, but temperatures dropping so low in the night the furnace is coming on; last rain 9/10/11; 12:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The healing’s begun.

We’ve been getting rains now for at least three weeks, much of it coinciding with hurricanes Irene and Lee. However, because they began in late August, and not early July, temperatures have been lower, days shorter and sun angles changing. The recovery has been more like spring, when seedlings and new growth emerge, rather than summer, when existing plants revive.

Along the roadsides, which responded first, the unknown pairs of oval leaves have transmuted into toothed spurge, purslane has arisen, and some ivy-leafed morning glories are blooming. All are plants of late summer.

The only mid-summer pigweed and áñil del muerto seedlings I’d seen before today were in my driveway, mixed with goat’s heads washing down from colonies in my uphill neighbor’s yard. Now, pigweed is sprouting up there as well.

In some barren fields down the road, prickly pear has revived. The pads are shiny enough to reflect light when I drive by in the evening, where before their dull surfaces rendered them invisible. The area between is filled with Russian thistles about four inches high, already capable of blooming and going to seed. In the past those weeds were probably so tall they hid the large cacti bed from the road and discouraged casual intruders.

On the prairie, in small depressions where water collects, or under shading grass clumps, water has remained between showers long enough for new grasses to emerge. There’s also a number of late-summer-germinating prostrate knotweeds. This morning there was new growth on some of the most desolate winterfats, but still only a few new blades have emerged from the established bunches of needle grass.

In the road cut before the arroyo, the broken remains of two bush morning glories someone dug out last spring have poked through the mud that slid into their deep holes. Protecting mud has also washed over the exposed cream tips root in the arroyo, and two tiny buds I saw Monday on the blue gilia were opening this morning.

In the arroyo itself, things have calmed since it last ran. The bottom is still wet in places, but goat’s head and knotweed were the first beneficiaries of the cool damp. However, this morning gypsum phacelia was beginning to germinate under the Russian olive.

The Apache plumes upstream from the tamarix are still blooming, but another in the arroyo bottom has passed and the ones on the prairie bank never bloomed. Chamisa is golden north of town on low land between the Chama and Rio Grande rivers, but only one small shrub had flowers in this arroyo this morning.

White prairie clover normally blooms in summer. Last year its plantain like heads began opening as soon as hurricane Alex brought water July 1. They continued into the first week of August.

This year, green leaves pushed up from root crowns in April, then stopped growing in May. While some were blooming near the road on Santa Clara land on the other side of the river at the normal time in July, I saw no flower buds in the arroyo until the first of August when a couple spikes appeared.

Dalea candida has a long taproot, but that root needs active bacteria to prosper. While W. P. Martin found a number of species in this legume genus lacked rhizobia in Arizona, Oscar and Ethel Allen believe that was an adaption to the arid time they were collected. One would guess the soil organisms need to revive here before the plants can truly prosper.

So far, new growth has emerged from the base of the plant that was blooming, and new stems have pushed up among last year’s bare yellowed stalks on other plants. I don’t know if there’s time for these to reproduce this year, or if they can do no more then prepare the root for another winter.

The more important microorganisms are in the soil crust, that thin layer of cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses that transform nitrogen and carbon from the air into soil nutrients necessary for the succession of grasses. While they spend most of the year as desiccated dark lumps, the blue-green algae resume photosynthesis within minutes of getting wet. Still, it’s taken some time for them to swell enough to be obviously alive and for moss and mushrooms to appear.

In my yard, a thin black layer skimmed the surface of the uphill land on Monday morning where grasses have never revived from grazing decades ago. Later in the day, the water had dried, leaving a lighter colored icing in slight depressions. The patina of cyanobacteria was no longer visible.

Wednesday morning the ground was wet again, apparently from heavy dew. Again, the dark coating appeared before the sun broke through around 9 am. This time I could see little dots of black that could, with time and moisture, grow into clods like those on the prairie. Even a bit of moss appeared in a clump of dead needle grass surrounded by ring muhly grass that had trapped a winterfat seed.

Yesterday morning, in the tail end of another night of soaking rain, the crust had begun to form swallow grey-green islands that mottled the surface, already able to direct flood threatening water away from themselves.

Down the south facing slope there were chaining black threads that, in places, looked more like decaying seaweed in an area where only stumps of bunch grass remain. I assume they’re some form of lichen able to emerge with the cloudy days that have kept the atmosphere cool and moist.

Here and there, in the marbled remains of water, streaks of black appear in the arroyo and the road that leads to it. The fire is still a presence.

On the other side of the river, in places where creeks have a clear path from the Jemez, the banks are covered with black soot. The run-off into Dixon’s Orchard near Cochiti has received the most publicity, but the same dark mud can be seen where the Rio del Oso crosses the Chama highway near Chili north of Española.

Directly across the river, on San Ildefonso land, the arroyos that cross the road rise in badlands that parallel the mountains. Water from the burned canyons can’t reach them. Even so, the ground is covered with grey sand, both in the bottoms and on the steppe, probably from an infiltration of fallen ash.

The Las Conchas fire is not gone. Around 1:45 pm last Saturday I saw a white cloud rising from a canyon to the southwest. Sunday, I saw two different plumes after the rain had stopped about 7 pm. I doubt the original fire flared up, and have no idea what was left for lightening to ignite.

I suppose the fire has been smoldering since July in those canyons, and the rain is finally putting it out in clouds of steam that are still capable of spreading ashes here that turn black when amassed into rivulets by the saving rain.

Notes:
Allen, O. N and Ethel K. Allen. The Leguminosae, 1981; as Petalostemon candida.

Martin, W. P. Observations on the Nodulation of Leguminous Plants of the Southwest, 1948, cited by the Allens.

Photograph: Ranch road, about 9:30 am on 5 October 2009, before the sun could destroy evidence of the previous night’s rain. This road is a continuation of the paved road by my house; there are no sources for the charcoal wash other than the rain or surface ash.

Blue Gilia

2011-09-04T06:36:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, brome and pampas grasses; squash leaves turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, leatherleaf globemallows, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, scarlet creeper, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, chamisa near river, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy aster, sandburs; buds on broom senecio and heath aster; buffalo gourd gourds.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pied snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster; buds on Silver King artemisia.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; long green pod on butterfly weed.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Rain several days, with a lot of standing water along the road late Thursday afternoon; saw smoke in the Jemez yesterday afternoon; last rain 9/3/11; 12:51 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The monsoon rains have finally arrived. The roadsides, prairie and arroyos are reacting, each in their own way.

The shoulders are a refuse of summer annual seeds that wait for the right conditions to germinate. Some, like sunflowers, pigweed and ragweed, seem to have missed their time. Those that emerged early were about a foot high when the rains began. They’re not much taller now, but are blooming. Toward the village, where there’s been more moisture from the ditches and river, plants are their usual selves, tall and in full bloom.

Russian thistles aren’t so easily discouraged. There were few during the summer and they too only got about a foot high before turning spiny. Since the rain, in openings here and there, dense grass is about half an inch high. Much is young cheat grass; the rest will soon push up single spears that reveal their true identity.

Goat’s heads apparently have been taking advantage of the lack of competition from overshadowing weeds. Where bright green pairs of smooth-edged, oval leaves have sprung up, the ones nearest the road are putting out plump red stems with eight tiny leaflets. The existing plants have already expanded their territory. The other seedlings still could be next year’s white sweet clover or this year’s áñil del muerto: the one has already peaked for this season, the other is still scarce.

Earlier bindweed grew luxuriantly in abandoned vegetable gardens and corn fields when the usual pigweed and Russian thistles didn’t appear. By the time the rains came, they’d already exhausted themselves. Those that weren’t cleared by the vigilant had disappeared with the unrelenting heat and dryness, leaving the usual ones blooming along the road.

The related ivy-leaved morning glories are now sprouting in the wash, while an occasional scarlet creeper is finally opening in the village. However, while toothed spurge has been up for a few weeks, it’s no where dense as usual. Purslane and clammy weed simply haven’t appeared.

The dry river beds are very different - nothing is growing. The waters rushed through with such force two weekends ago they washed everything away. The near arroyo, where Russian thistles had colonized the bases of the newly reinforced walls, is now bare. The bottom, leveled by heavy equipment and the wind, has been resculpted.

In the far arroyo, the carpet of leaves and dead plant debris that had collected under the tamarix are gone. The grasses and small chamisas are prostrate, pasted by mud. The only green leaves are on short plants hiding under the protection of the largest chamisas whose roots can resist the compulsive force of passing floods.

The waters reached both sides, with mud still caked several inches up the western bank. On the east, it was strong enough to undercut the base and collapse the wall in places. Some scurf peas are hanging by their white roots.

Downstream on the flood plain, cream tips had earlier become raised islands when the wind dislodged sand around their lower stems. Now, one that had grown near the edge of the active bottom is held prone by a thick, exposed root. The water removed the protecting inch high bank.

In between, the prairie hasn’t changed much. Some grama grass, probably blue grama, is putting up new sprouts, but needle grass is responding slowly. In my yard, where I started watering the native grasses a few weeks ago, the black grama and needle grass are turning green, but in the areas left to nature, things are still brown. Either the messages from the sun angles or the continuing alternations of moisture and evaporation are signaling restraint.

In places where forbs do exist, usually closer to the arroyo bank or the ranch road, some that went dormant are coming back, the strap-leafed asters here, a stickleaf there. The golden hairy asters, which have been blooming everywhere for weeks, are still low clumps crouched within the cages of last year’s dead stems.

The blue gilia has had one of the toughest years. The low growing shrub usually is covered with five-petaled flowers from the end of April until mid-June. Last year, two large plants were living near the base of the deep road cut just north of the arroyo. Smaller plants bloomed in a small waterway leading to an arroyo feeder to the west of the shaded parents.

This year, the smaller plants began blooming in mid-April, but I almost never saw their flowers fully open. When they did unfurl, it seemed to be just before ten in the morning. I never saw flowers on the two larger plants, just lantern-shaped buds and greyish spent blooms.

The Polemoniaceae that most resembles mossy phlox is native to the dry southwest. It’s found from Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma down through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo León.

Taxonomists can’t agree if blue bowls should be called Gilia rigidula or Giliastrum rigidulum ssp. acerosum, but do agree the genus emerged early, probably in Texas or northern Mexico when the climate was drying in the mid-tertiary period and swamps were giving way to grasslands. Leon Stuchlik believes our plants represent “the most primitive species in the genus,” with pollen very similar to its supposed Loeselia ancestor.

The response of the herbaceous perennial to cyclic droughts is to reduce its activity, to stop blooming when moisture disappears in June and maintain its fading, needle tipped leaves until the monsoons. Last year, a few brightened the end of July and bloomed the first week in August. Their leaves stayed green until temperatures fell into the low 20's last November, then fell away leaving twiggy skeletons that faded from red to white by mid December.

The central stem, with its main limbs that branch into a dense ground cover, rises from a reddish taproot that doesn’t penetrate particularly deeply into the soil. The normal equilibrium that’s maintained between the fleshy root and hairy, glandular leaves was challenged by this year’s prolonged drought. The leaves turned brown by August.

When rain finally trickled down the slopes of the road cut, the roots revived and in the past weeks new growth has developed. In the spring this happens about a month before the funnel shaped flowers appear with white-rimmed yellow centers and yellow stamens.

The color of those petals is the rich jewel shade painters seek to paint the virgin Mary’s cloak. It’s a hue more likely found here than in the lowlands. Muriel Wheldale Onslow found the purple anthocyanin pigment needs alkaline sap to turn blue, and the higher the altitude, the more intense the color. She said drought and heat also increase production of the pigment, which may be why the flowers are darkest in June, just before the summer hiatus.

Notes:
Grant, Verne. “Classification of the Genus Gilia (Polemoniaceae),” Phytologia 84:69-86:1998.

Onslow, Muriel Wheldale. The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants, 1916.

Stuchlik, L. “Pollen Morphology and Taxonomy of the Family Polemoniaceae,” Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 4:325-333:1967.

Photograph: New blue gilia leaves on the bank of the ranch road near the arroyo, 28 August 2011.

Broad-leaf Arrowhead

2011-08-28T03:30:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, less Sensation cosmos than usual, alfalfa, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, some snake weed, native sunflowers, chamisa, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy aster, sandburs; buds on broom senecio; with rain, Russian thistle and ivy-leafed morning glories are sprouting, as well as something that could be goat’s head, áñil del muerto or next year’s white sweet clover.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pied snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, hummingbird moth, cabbage butterfly, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Monsoon winds brought rain several evenings this week; last rain 8/25/11; 13:44 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Last Saturday I was surprised by a clump of arrowheads blooming in an Española ditch.

The herbaceous perennial is a semiaquatic plant whose roots live in water, but has leaves on narrow stalks that rise above the surface. With the broad-leafed species, Sagittaria latifolia, the bases of those bright green, triangular leaves are wide in swallow water, but so narrow in deeper water they can’t be distinguished easily from the arum-leafed Sagittaria cuneata. Both have been reported in Rio Arriba County.

The three petaled white flowers appear in whorls of two or three on spongy, erect stalks. The lower ones are female, with their centers filled with green pistols. Those above, with twenty to forty yellow stamens, are male. Each group opens from the bottom up with a space between that begins to resemble a plucked grape cluster of denuded pedicels.

Round, green pods replace the lower flowers. Inside those furrowed fruits, plants can produce up to 20,000 seeds that are eaten by ducks and geese. Indeed, in Michigan the Potawatomi in the southern part of the state and the Ojibwa/Chippewa in the north encouraged the Alismataceae to attract fowl.

The flat green seeds must pass through a winter, a summer, and another winter before they germinate, and then only when temperatures range between 80 and 90 degrees in direct sun. Once they undergo their two-year dormancy, the seedlings do well.

The plants, however, have found other, more reliable ways to reproduce. As the days of summer wane, they transfer carbohydrates and other nutrients to tubers that form towards the ends of their milky, radiating rhizomatous roots so they can survive the winter without photosynthesizing leaves. A mature plant may produce up to forty tubers, each of which can send up clusters of tall stalked leaves for three new plants.

The reason they didn’t quickly overrun their resources in the wetter north was women gathered the white tubers in fall, often using their toes to loosen them. The golf-ball size corms floated to the top and were dropped into floating baskets.

The Potawatomi, along with the neighboring Meskwaki and Menominee in Wisconsin, boiled them, then strung slices for winter food. The Ojibwa dried them. A great many other tribes in the plains and far west also boiled or roasted them. Some even traded them.

The thing that surprised me wasn’t that arrowheads were growing in Española. After all, they’re found almost everywhere in the New World where six to twelve inches of water stands for any period of time.

In New Mexico the arum-leafed species also grows in the Four Corners where the San Juan flows, in the northeast with tributaries of the Canadian, and along the western side of the Rio Grande down to Albuquerque. Latifolia is also found in northwestern San Juan, northeastern Union and eastern Roosevelt counties.

What did surprise me was that there was a running ditch where I was standing near the highway on the west side of the river. The soils are poor and the terrain between the San Juan and Santa Clara tends to be broken badlands that quickly drop to sandy wastes along the river. The only evidence of old farmsteads is a few square houses with steeply pitched, four-sided, steel roofs and dormers, a style I associate with the influence of the French in the early to mid nineteenth century.

When the Spanish returned after the Pueblo Revolt, Antonio de Salazar requested land in 1714 near the confluence of the Chama and Rio Grande he claimed his maternal grandfather had settled earlier near the San Juan settlement. His father, Agustín, was a blind Indian who served Diego de Vargas as a translator when he was leading the reconquest.

On the northern edge of the Santa Clara, near the confluence of the Santa Cruz with the Rio Grande, José López Naranjo claimed land south of that owned by Salazar. It became the ridge and valley settlement of Guachupangue. Naranjo also acted as a go-between with the Indians for Vargas. His father Domingo was active in Taos during the revolt.

At some time the land between was purchased or claimed by descendants of Francisco Montes Vigil, who came north from Zacatecas in 1695 when Juan Páez Hurtado was recruiting settlers for an area north of Albuquerque. He and his wife, María, who was described as an española, relocated to Santa Cruz a few years later.

Angélico Chávez suggests that, while Juan de Oñate had specified all settlers in the north be españoles, his own children had mixed blood. His wife was the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés and Tecuichpotzin, Moctezuma’s oldest daughter and heir. The term came to be used for the children or grandchildren of mixed marriages or liaisons who had become sufficiently acculturated to be restored to their status as Spaniards.

The badlands on the west side of the river, then, were settled by people who openly lived outside society, neither in pueblos nor in the Roman Catholic village of Santa Cruz. The great-great-granddaughter of Vigil’s illegitimate son, Josefita Vigil, married a descendent of Naranjo, Benedito Naranjo. He sold what was then known as La Vega de los Vigiles to the Denver and Rio Grande railroad.

If the name Vigil’s Meadows is any clue, the land was then being used for cattle. It’s unclear when or why the Acequia de los Vigiles was dug.

The ditch begins just below the junction of the Chama and Rio Grande, and flows between the old rail bed and the river until it reaches the city limits. At that point, the older Acequia de Los Salazares turns to empty into the Rio Grande, and the Vigil ditch turns inland to continue what could have been an older path of the Salazar ditch.

From that point the Vigil ditch moves southwest to skirt the bottom of the highland where Frank Bond built his home. Today that land is used by the community college, the hospital, various churches, and public buildings like the library. For most of the distance it’s buried in culverts, but at the point I saw it, the land was dropping steeply and modern engineers apparently had decided it was cheaper to let it fall in the open than try to encase it.

At various times city planners have coveted its right of way, most recently when it was seen as a possible conduit to move water from the Rio Grande to a proposed new water treatment plant that could handle the city’s allotment from the diversion of the San Juan over the Rockies through the Chama to the Rio Grande. That merger of the rivers in 1971 could explain how the plants got here, if they didn’t just fall off some truck headed back north to Colorado.

The open section of the ditch has been carefully maintained. No trash had accumulated and none of the nastier weeds were growing there last week. At the upper end, showy milkweeds were growing on the west bank. They gave way to sunflowers. Then, on the east side, there was some bright green grass. Just before the waters reentered a culvert to cross under the highway horsetails grew on the bank and broadleaf arrowheads flourished in the water.

Rather like the Salazars, Naranjos and Vigils who lived on the west side of the river beyond the constraints of organized society, the arrowheads are exploiting a part of the ditch freed of the concrete and steel walls that confine it before it finally flows west to empty into the Arroyo de Guachupangue.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

_____. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989, on españoles.

Esquibel, José Antonio. Entry on Francisco Montes Vigil posted on Cybergata.com.

Garcia, Lisa K. Entries on descendants of Francisco Montes Vigil posted on Genealogy Place.com. Benedito’s son, Alejandrino, married Delfinia Vigil; their son was Emilio Naranjo.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Frances Densmore, “Uses of Plants by the Chippewa Indians,” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnography Annual Report 44:273-379:1928 (cites latifolia); and articles by Huron H. Smith which appeared in the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee Bulletin - “Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians,” 4:1-174:1923 (cuneata); “Ethnobotany of the Meskwaki Indians,” 4:175-326:1928 (latifolia); “Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians,” 4:327-525:1932 (cuneata); and “Ethnobotany of the Forest Potawatomi Indians,” 7:1-230:1933 (latifolia).

United States. Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. Germplasm Resources Information Network. Distributions for cuneata and latifolia.

_____. Department of the Interior. Geological Survey. 7.5 quadrangle maps for San Juan Pueblo and Española.

Photograph: Male flowers on broadleaf arrowhead growing in the Acequia de los Vigiles, 20 August 2011.

Catalpa

2011-08-21T05:14:00.005-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, Japanese honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, brome grass; orange berries on pyracantha; pods reddening on trees of heaven; local grocer roasting green peppers in parking lot.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, snake weed, native sunflowers, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and strapleaf spine asters, sandburs, sideoats grama.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers; buds on Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, hummingbird moth on large leafed soapwort, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Brief downpours have been good for the garden, but haven’t remained in the unirrigated yard long enough to help; last rain 8/21/11; 13:58 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The catalpas are in trouble. Their leaves have turned white, with only green veins, much like caladiums.

The problems first appeared last July on trees growing in a town medium. On July 24, I noticed the leaves on some were yellowing. A few days later I noticed others appeared more lime green than usual from the car window.

Catalpa bignonioides and Catalpa speciosa are native to the eastern Mississippi valley where they’re warm season plants. The trees don’t leaf until late April. Their leaves begin turning yellow early, usually the first part of October here.

This winter was unusually cold and dry, much colder than they like. On May 1, just after the leaves began emerging, it snowed. The broad, horizontal leaves caught flakes that would have melted quickly into the warm ground. Within days, the leaves turned black and fell.

When new leaves appeared a week or so later, they emerged from buds a bit back from the branch tips. Leaves on branches nearer the ground, that also were protected by shrubs, grew larger and denser than those on higher, more exposed limbs which never formed a canopy to provide normal levels of chlorophyll. Trees like mine and those along the highway, up and away from the comforting winter river, never recovered from the effects of the cold.

I first noticed the caladium effect on leaves on the west side of my tree on June 29. Some in town were yellowing. In the village there now are trees that are completely white, some that are green and sparse, and some that are normal. They may be across the road from each other, they may be near a ditch, they may be tall or young.

I began watering my tree in late June, but nothing stopped the march of white leaves. There now seems to be two toward the end of each branch, sometimes with another slightly discolored one below them. Some on the west, the first to fade, are turning brown.

Kim Coder says chlorosis is a sign that trees growing in soils with a high pH are unable to absorb minerals, especially iron, from dry soil. Since the trees have been growing here for years, this suggests at least part of the problem is there’s not enough water many feet down to dissolve minerals.

However, I suspect more is involved. Unlike this year, the winter before was wet and followed another wet winter which would have replenished soil waters after a decade of dry years that hadn’t affected the trees in town. Mid-July of last year was simply too soon for deep soil to be so dry.

The alternative is that somehow the soils have become more alkaline. Certainly, over time, irrigation from the aquifer would have that effect. When my well was tested in September of 2002, the water had a pH of 8.6, where 7 is neutral. It also contained detectable quantities of dissolved iron.

Most of the area trees, if they’re tended at all, are watered from ditches supplied by the Santa Cruz reservoir. The snow fed lake is probably less alkaline than groundwater, but its primary fish are still rainbow and German brown trout. The Pacific coast species should have water with a pH between 6.5 and 8.5. The European import does best with it between 6.8 and 7.8.

A high pH is usually associated with limestone, but it’s been a great many years since we’ve been under water. The last time was before the Cretaceous Seaway that covered much of the west receded some 70 million years ago While calcium carbonate is eroded from outcrops and transported by rain, we haven’t had enough precipitation this year to add anything to the surface.

Neither missing iron nor additional lime fully explains this year’s etiolated leaves, perhaps because each is only a symbol we use to denote chemical reactions we never question. We’re quite happy to accept the possibility that tests for pH levels are magical divinations of soil qualities, when, in fact, they’re measures of hydrogen ions found in solutions.

In 1884, Svante Arrhenius suggested two molecules of water (H₂O) often recombine to form one hydroxide molecule (OH^-) and one hydronium one (H₃O⁺). The first is missing an electron the second has absorbed. The first thus has a positive charge; the other is negative.

If either ion is absorbed into another molecule before they can recombine into two molecules of water, the chemistry changes. A base condition results when the number of positive ions increases.

The question becomes what chemical could have created a hostile environment for the catalpas last summer and this. I’ve been pondering the ash from the Las Conchas fire ever since I noticed sun beams crossing the Jemez were highlighting fine ash in updrafts that delineated the ridges and canyons. This effect occurs around eight in the evening, just before the sun colors the clouds, when the land is cooling and the air has begun rising.

Burned wood is alkaline. Some recommend using wood ashes to sweeten acidic soils. Early settlers in this country made caustic lye soap by mixing ashes with water. Most people this year have been concerned with the heavier black fragments which have threatened to clog the water treatment equipment in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, or which may have smothered fish on July 31.

My thought is that when the finer invisible dust lands on a leaf, some base molecule reacts with the naturally occurring negative hydronium, and leaves a positive hydroxide. When that occurs enough times, the tree’s surface water turns alkaline. We know leaves absorb that water because Coder says it’s possible to temporarily green a catalpa by spraying the leaves with chelated iron.

We’ve certainly had enough dry ash the past two years. Last year the South Fork fire was started in the Santa Fe National Forest by lightening on June 10 about 25 miles west of Española and maybe 10 miles north, in the Jemez between the Santa Clara and Abique land grants. By the time it finally rained with hurricane Alex on July 3, it had charred 17,086 acres and was only 80% contained.

This year we haven’t just had the Las Conchas fire that raged across the river from June 26. We also had smoke and ash from Arizona fires in early June, followed by the Pacheco fire which started north of Tesuque on June 18.

Both years the monsoons were delayed. There were no rains last June, and the next major rainfall after Alex came with Bonnie on July 23, a twenty day pause between hurricanes. This year, while the burned areas in the Jemez have seen rain, there’s been little here in the valley. No hurricane has yet been serious.

Last July and this, after the fire fighters were less active and ashes had a chance to dry, my nose itched or dripped, my eyes were gummy or burned. I’m not a tree. Unlike the catalpa which lets surface water seep through, my skin and nasal passages act as barriers to prevent irritants from entering my body.

I don’t know if ash is the problem, but like any superstitious being facing an unknown I’m open to any explanation that might help the tree. I followed the standard operating procedures, watered the roots. When that failed, I consulted the oracles, laid down Ironrite and watered it in. When that achieved nothing, I turned to folk science, washed the dust off the leaves in the morning.

And lo, no sooner did I begin spraying the tree, than we started getting brief downpours, either in the afternoon or middle of the night. A belief in sympathetic magic is easily reinforced.

Notes: See entry for 25 November 2007 on why catalpas were introduced into the arid west.

Coder, Kim D. “Southern Catalpa: ‘The Fish Bait Tree’,” University of Georgia, Warnell School of Forest Resources website.

Cowx, Ian G. “Oncorhynchus mykiss (Walbaum, 1792),” FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Cultured Aquatic Species Information Programme website, 15 June 2005.

Raleigh, Robert F.. Laurence D. Zuckerman and Patrick C. Nelson. Habitat Suitability Index Models and Instream Flow Suitability Curves: Brown Trout, 1986 revision.

Wikipedia. Entries on “Acid” and “Hydrogen Ion,” retrieved 14 August 2011.

Photograph: Catalpa with full-sized, discolored leaves growing in Española medium; Jemez in far background; 20 August 2011.

Sideoats Grama

2011-08-14T05:18:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, Heavenly Blue morning glories, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa; pods on honey locust; sweet corn and green chili for sale down the road.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, lemon scurf pea, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, ragweed, snake weed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, heath, golden hairy and strapleaf spine asters, sideoats grama; pods forming on showy milkweed.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and Maximilian sunflowers; new leaves emerging on oriental poppies.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed; hips turning red on rugosas.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens; first fruit developing on Sweet 100 tomato and Sandia pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, gold finches, other small birds, gecko, back dragonfly, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, cricket.

Weather: Air cleared last weekend and temperatures got lower at night, higher during the day; then the clouds and invisible, but irritating ash returned; temperatures returned to normal and rain passed over; last slight rain 8/13/11; 14:17 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Several weeks ago, when we got our first slight rain, I talked to a local woman who thought it had been enough to put out the Las Conchas fire. At my place, the gentle shower lasted 15 minutes. Smoke was still rising in the evenings.

We’ve had more rain since, about the amount we get in a typical August monsoon front with no hurricane behind it. There were days when I could see the Jemez shrouded in rain clouds. The fire may be out, or smoldering, in many places, but it’s still burning to the north.

I must confess, however, I made an assumption as naive as that woman’s. I thought now we’ve had some rain, things will green up.

Then I walked through the arroyo last Sunday. There was no sign of the moisture in the top inches of soil I’d seen the previous Tuesday. The sun had sucked it out. The only things blooming were scattered golden hairy asters and a tamarix. Scurf peas and four-wing saltbushes were the only large masses of green. Everything else was gray or the color of dry sand, even what remained of last year’s grasses.

During the great drought of the 1930's, John Weaver was “impressed with the bareness of the soil” in Nebraska. Gone were the layers of vegetation that began with mosses and lichens. Gone was the “former mulch of fallen leaves, flower parts, stems.” For a while, fungi had feasted on organic matter left by dead roots and crowns in the soil, but finally even they disappeared, leaving not even their smell.

The land didn’t begin recovering until the spring of 1941, when normal levels of humidity, temperature and wind patterns returned. Even then it took months with three times the normal amount of rain for water to percolate through the dry soil to collect at depths needed by roots.

During the dust bowl years, the common prairie grass, little blue stem, died and was replaced by western wheat grass with an understory of blue grama or buffalo grass that was fleeing the even dryer lands to the west. In many places, that wave was followed by sideoats grama. It went from being insignificant to the second most common grass in parts of Nebraska.

Bouteloua curtipendula has perhaps the widest distribution of any warm season grass, growing from Ontario to British Columbia in the north through Nicaragua and Guatemala. It disappears in the isthmus, but appears again to the south in Venezuela, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Within its range, it tends to prefer rocky, limey soils. Early in the last century, the perennial grew in the mountains in this area where Mexican peddlers gathered the stalks in August, then dried them to sell to Tewa speakers who used them for brooms. When the ends broke, women used the remains to brush their hearths and metates. When little was left, they used bound bunches on their hair.

More recently, sideoats grama has been reported growing with one-seed juniper in the Jemez on “steep, colluvial slopes of escarpments, and hill or mountainsides” with a slope greater than 15 degrees and 15" to 19" of precipitation a year. Around Los Alamos, it’s found on canyon sides and mesa tops, including in Jemez and White Rock canyons. Occasionally, it blooms along the shoulder down here.

While it’s widespread, sideoats grama normally is not particularly common. Before 1933, it appeared in many of the prairie plots observed by Weaver, but never reached 1% of the vegetative cover. The seed has a short life span and doesn’t bank. However, it germinates easily, develops quickly and can survive on 12" of precipitation a year. With its competitors gone, it flourished.

By 1937, there were reports that some plants were diseased. By 1939 the unknown problem had spread. However, by then, the USDA had collected seed from vigorous plants and was developing disease-free alternatives. One of the first was Vaughn, found far east of the Manzanos in 1935 and released in 1940.

The seed I planted in 2005 came from a retailer in Wisconsin. The catalog didn’t mention a cultivar, perhaps because the existence of a name would have countered the image of it as a true native plant. I suspect it was one intended for that area, since very few seeds germinated here.

Sideoats grama has adapted itself so well to its environment, that two subspecies exist in this country, curtipendula in the north and caespitosa in the south. In México, a research team collected samples from 577 populations in 13 states. They identified 177 ecotypes that fell into six different groups. Germination success depends in part on the geographic origin of the seed.

Still, one plant survives from 2005, and several come up where seed was scattered among the rugosas the following spring. Most of the year, they resemble June grass. The clump of long, wide green blades stands above the neighboring Bermuda grass. If you’re so inclined, Richard Wynia says you can look for long hairs at the edges of the leaves near their bases to distinguish it.

However, when it blooms, and it’s blooming now, there’s no mistaking it. The stalk rises one to three feet. The seeds hang from one side and their weight bends the culm. In more favorable climates, the spikes are composed of rows of spikelets like those of blue or black grama. The Lakota called it “banner waving in the wind.” Kiowa warriors, who had killed in battle, wore it because it resembled a feathered lance.

The purple bracts surrounding the spikelets protect two flowers, one fertile, one sterile. Hanging from the first are bright red anthers that wait for the wind to blow pollen to the waiting feathery, white stigmas. Each flower can produce one seed. The rudimentary floret is often three awns above the fertile one. In fall, the spikes drop, leaving behind the purple attaching stems.

While side-oats grama has proven itself able to survive drought and pioneer devastated lands, its success with fire is more ambiguous. It does better after early spring fires, than summer ones like ours. The southern subspecies recovers better than the northern one. In the best of cases, it can take two or three years for new seedlings to reach maturity, and that’s when you have enough rain.

Notes:
Chadwick, Amy C. “Bouteloua curtipendula,” 2003, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System; includes studies on fire, seed banking, viability and germination.

Morales Nieto, Carlos Raúl, Adrián Quero Carrillo, Alicia Melgoza Castillo, Martín
Martínez Salvador and Pedro Jurado Guerra. “Forage Diversity of Sideoats Grama [Bouteloua curtipendula (Michx.) Torr.] Populations in Arid and Semiarid Regions of Mexico,” Técnica Pecuaria en México 47:231-244:2009.

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

Schmoller, David. “Side-oats Grama (Bouteloua curtipendula),” 1994, Northern State University’s The Natural Source - An Educator's Guide to South Dakota's Natural Resources website; on Lakota name.

United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Plant Associations of Arizona and New Mexico. Volume 2: Woodlands, 1997 revision; on Jemez.

Vestal, Paul A. and Richard Evans Schultes. The Economic Botany of the Kiowa Indians, 1939, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Weaver, John E. and F. W. Albertson. “Major Changes in Grassland as a Result of Continued Drought,” Botanical Gazette 100:576-591:1939; on bareness of soil, role of fungi. University of Nebraska Digital Commons has made many of Weaver’s papers available on line.

_____ and _____. “Resurvey of Grasses, Forbs, and Underground Plant Parts at the End of the Great Drought,” Ecological Monographs 13:63-117:1943; comments on 1941 as a wet year.

_____ and R. L. Fowler. “Occurrence of a Disease of Side-oats Grama,” Torrey Botanical Club Bulletin 67:503-508:1940.

Wynia, Richard. “Side-oats Grama,” USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service plant guide, 2007.

Photograph: Sideoats grama spikelets, 7 August 2011.

Lemon Scurf Pea

2011-08-07T02:12:00.005-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, Sensation cosmos, squash, alfalfa.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, lemon scurf pea, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, snake weed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Hopi tea, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, sand burs, sideoats grama.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower; buds on hosta, Autumn Joy sedum and Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, other small birds, gecko, large orange dragonfly, small bees on Apache plume, hornets, harvester and small black ants, cricket.

Weather: Hurricane Don sent us some rain from the Gulf; not enough to replenish the reserves of deep rooted trees and shrubs, but enough to reach the roots of grasses; last rain 8/4/11; 14:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This year’s drought has been tough on even the plants one assumes are adapted to a dry climate. Buds formed on prickly pear cacti, then shriveled without opening. No flowering stalks emerged from narrow-leaved yuccas. Many summer blooming grasses are still dormant.

Scurf peas have been sparser in some places, produced fewer white clusters everywhere. In a good year all you usually notice are bright green, branching plants that get about a foot high. The usual trefoil is reduced to three long, narrow segments rather like chicken’s feet which overlay one another to give an illusion of bushiness.

From a distance the flower heads look like Dutch clover balls buried deep in the foliage. Nearer, they resemble small locos on stems jutting from beneath leaf junctions. In some parts of the country, especially west of the Rockies, the flowers are blue, lavender or purple.

Psoralidium lanceolatum is native to the Great Plains from Saskatchewan and Manitoba south to Texas and west. In the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley said it was found west of Santa Fe and in Tesuque edging the east side of the Rio Grande valley, in Coolidge and Zuñi in McKinley County to the west, and the Mogollon mountains and Plains of Saint Augustin in Catron County to the southwest.

There are two populations near my house. One clings to the gravel and sand sides of the large arroyo and in the sandy feeder above that brings water down from a higher bank. They usually begin blooming in mid-May, and have more bumpy, sticky pods than flowers by the first of July. The florets appeared a week or so later this year; the seeds, so far, are few.

The other group grows in a sunken section that looks like a nascent arroyo aborted by harder soil toward the river. Some plants are growing in the clay and sand bank fill where the road was built to cross the wash, while others are growing along the sandy bank beside the gully where the road was cut to level itself.

The herbaceous perennial produces new growth from both the tap root and root buds. This year, plants in the clay loam wash either stayed dormant or only the main stems emerged from the roots. The plants have been shorter and the stand less dense. There have also been far fewer flowers. The plants in the sand fared better.

The nitrogen-fixing legume is one of the few flowers able to grow in pure sand dunes. In the Chico Basin dunes southeast of Colorado Springs, it grows with sand muhly and blowout grass (Redfieldia flexuosa). In the Great Dunes north of the Rio Grande, it’s found with prairie sunflowers and blowout, needle and rice grasses.

The roots form extensive systems of fleshy branches that reflect the availability of water. John Weaver has a drawing that shows a thin taproot that extends down 4.5' before it expands into a fat tube with more lateral roots. Seven feet down the root branches are dense with many ending in nodules.

In the wetter grasslands east of the Rockies, the fleshy section isn’t buried so low. Cheyenne women used wooden digging sticks to gather mohk ta en in early summer for food. By the 1920's, they had changed to iron rods.

Here, the water conserving organ must be deeper. I used a flat stone to dig around one of the smaller plants in the arroyo, and found only a narrow, pliable white taproot that had no taste beyond what one expects biting into a grass stem. As I chewed, it became woody and broke into strips surrounding a white, flat section. In the drier Great Basin to the west of the Rockies, native people used the available fibrous roots to make string and nets.

The Navajo living in the drylands at Ramah near Zuñi in the 1950's didn’t use scurf peas for food, although Paul Vestal suggests the sedentary herders did still dig some roots like wild potatoes (Solanum jamesii) and mariposa bulbs. Instead, they used the roots with other plants to treat venereal diseases.

They were more interested in the above ground parts whose habit they called winding. The knobby leaves are covered with glands. When you rub them, you release an oil that smells of lemon. Only, of course, they didn’t know about lemons until the Spanish arrived. The Diné thought it smelled more of buffalo water, and used ayani biliz ha-lcin as a lotion for Gameway, a ceremonial relic of a nomadic life dependent on hunting in the far north where drought was rarely so common.

Notes:
Bovin, Phyllis Pineda. “Plant Adaptations to Active Dune Systems,” San Luis Valley Environmental and Conservation Education Council Natural Resources Education Quarterly Fall 2005; on Great Dunes.

Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians, vol 2, 1928; treated as Psoralea lanceolata.

Kelso, T, N. Bower, P. Halteman, K. Tenney, and S. Weaver. “Dune Communities of SE Colorado: Patterns of Rarity, Disjunction and Succession,” 2004 Southwestern Rare and Endangered Plants Conference; on Chico Basin.

Nickerson, Gifford S. “Some Data on Plains and Great Basin Indian Uses of Certain Native Plants,” Tebiwa 9:45-51:1966, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952; treated as Psarolea lanceolata.

Weaver, John E. Root Development of Field Crops, 1926.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972; treated as Psoralea micrantha.

Wyman, Leland C. and Stuart K. Harris. Navajo Medical Ethnobotany, 1941; treated as Psarolea lanceolata; they translate the name as “odor of bison urine.”

Photograph: Lemon scurf pea, 31 July 2011.

Large Leaf Soapwort

2011-07-31T03:47:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, few Sensation cosmos, squash, alfalfa.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Russian thistle, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto; buds on snakeweed.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells peaked, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; buds on hosta.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Some rain last night; 14:58 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Clusters of a pink-flowered soapwort have been filling the space between the taller sidalceas and invading hollyhocks since the first of July. At first, the five-petaled trumpets were near the front of the bed, but those are now tinker-toy spheres formed from shuttered bulbous pipes. The current flowers are hidden at the back. With luck, new ones will continue to open until mid October.

When I bought the woody rooted perennials in 2004, the label simply said they were “hybrid giant flowered soapwort” and “saponaria x lempergii.” The 3" pots were next to the more popular rock soapworts, and marketing placement was intended to suggest uses for the plant without actually committing the nursery to any definitive opinion.

The absence of facts, or even romantic narratives, seems the fate of this plant that’s outlived the era that called it into being. The historical context is gone. Fritz Lemperg, for whom it’s named, has become a Cheshire cat surviving as a shadow of himself on a few branches of the internet.

The red stemmed plant is a cross between Saponaria cypria and Saponaria haussknechtii. The first is found only in the Troodos mountains on Cyprus. The endangered perennial was first reported by Pierre Edmond Boissier, whose maternal grandfather was a Swiss physician and naturalist who took him hiking in the Alps as a child. He trained with Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in Geneva, then went searching for plants in Spain. In the 1840's he explored Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt where he accumulated the best collection then existing of plants from that region.

Gudrun Simmler, a Swiss botanist who published a monograph on soapworts in 1910, defined the second pink-flowered perennial as a separate species that grows in Albania, southern Yugoslavia, and northern Greece. Others believe it to be a subspecies of Saponaria sicula found in Sicily.

The nineteenth century development of botany as an academic field that valued the analysis of existing plants over the discovery of new ones favored men like Simmler over those like Boissier and relegated plant hunting to a hobby for the wealthy. Lemperg may have been an heir to this tradition, for he explored Albania in the 1930's and distributed plants and seeds he brought back to national botanical gardens.

There’s no indication whether Dr. Limperg actually tried crossing different plants or some patient, employee or colleague named the plant after him. All we know is he developed a large alpine collection at the sanatorium he opened in 1924 outside the capital of Styria in southeastern Austria, and by 1931, when Magnus Johnson went there to train as a gardener, it had some magnificent clematis.

The interest in plant hunting often followed from the more pragmatic training of doctors before the emergence of pharmaceutical conglomerates. Then, physicians were expected to know the healing characteristics of plants and natural history was part of their education. Many developed private botanical gardens as symbols of both their medical and social positions.

Some of the most intrepid searchers in this part of the world were German emigres who preferred the wilderness to medicine. Frederick Adolphus Wislizenus left his practice with Georg Englemann in Saint Louis to explore northern México where he found coral bells. Englemann, who developed the botanical garden in Saint Louis, would send the specimens he received from travelers to Asa Gray at Harvard, who then identified them using current scientific theories.

Sanatoriums themselves devolved from this utilitarian view of the natural world. In the 1850's, Hermann Brehmer abandoned the study of botany for medicine. After completing his degree in Berlin, he converted his sister-in-law’s spa in the Silesian mountains into a facility to test his theory that tuberculosis could be cured with fresh air, good diet and exercise.

There’s an oft repeated tale that Brehmer himself suffered from TB, and went to the Himalayas to study plants and treat himself. Peter Warren found no evidence for the veracity of the story that didn’t appear until a generation later and believes it part of the romantic aura associated with the alpine sensibility.

By the time Lemperg opened his institution, the idea of the sanatorium had expanded to include any facility in a suburban area that used fresh air and nutrition as part of the treatment. They often became places where people went to recuperate from stress or illnesses, differentiated from the neighboring spas by having a medical staff.

Sanatoriums disappeared after streptomycin was proven effective against the bacteria that causes tuberculosis in 1944. Perhaps equally important to limiting the spread of the infectious disease was the parallel transition to electric heat generated by power sent from remote utility plants that cleared the atmosphere of one factor that had weakened lungs, the dust and fumes of coal burning in every basement.

Nineteenth century medical training in natural science instilled the view that physicians were members of a scientific community dependent on one another’s experience. Much like plant collectors were expected to send their choicest finds to botanical gardens, students were told they should send descriptions of their most unusual cases to society journals.

F. Lemperg was continuing this tradition in the 1920's when he sent notes on knee and ear surgeries, along with descriptions of x-ray and anaesthesia techniques, to publications in Leipzig.

I don’t know if he’s the same Lemperg. German language medical journals from that era that would include the location or affiliation of an author aren’t yet available on the internet. All that survives from the time before malpractice rules limited what doctors learned or said and before drug companies alone provided continuing education for physicians are contemporary bibliographic entries from the publications that sought to keep their readers informed by giving them abstracts of current research.

In the nineteenth century, plant hunting, with its necessary hiking in remote areas, and the removal of the ill to country estates were entwined with the Romantic view of nature as a force for spiritual healing. In the twentieth century, that idea led to the rise of fresh air camps for the urban poor and exclusive summer camps for the upper classes.

Camps like the one I attended as a child failed to survive the 1970's when those run by middle class organizations were forced, by new charity rules, to open themselves to children unprepared for life outdoors. The ensuing clashes of cultures drove those interested in camping into private activities, while stranding the poor in remote cabins without electricity or running water. Many would have sympathized with Kate Gosselin who said, after spending a day with Sara Palin in the wilderness, “Why would anyone pretend to be homeless?”

The thing that most destroyed summer camps and the romantic view of nature, however, wasn’t the proliferation of celebrity lifestyles, but Adolph Hitler. Even today, many, especially those like Glenn Beck who didn’t go to summer camp as children, see any communal rural retreat as a Nazi program to brainwash the young.

Lemperg may, in fact, have been a Nazi supporter. Thomas Ster says that his political commitments lead to the decline of his business after the fall of Hitler’s Germany, and that the sanatorium closed after his death. It was taken over by Styria for the state’s agricultural and forestry school, which cut down the arboretum. Their reasons, like Lemperg’s politics, are obscured by postwar amnesia.

The hybrid soapwort, itself, is dependent on the continuity of human culture for its survival. The hairy ovaries are barren. When people no longer want their smooth green leaves, nurseries will no longer produce them. Then, when gardeners no longer make their own cuttings, the member of the carnation family will become extinct, less retrievable than information about Fritz Limperg on the web.

Notes:
Beck, Glenn. On his 25 July 2011 radio program he said the Norwegian camp targeted by Anders Behring Breivik "sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics?" The connection he made is commonly held by people with very liberal views who are more knowledgabe about the rise of Hitler than they are general nineteen century German culture.

Boissier, Pierre Edmond. Flora Orientalis Sive Enumeratio Plantarum in Oriente a Graecia et Aegypto ad Indiae, supplement 83, 1888.

Gosselin, Kate. On the episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska that first aired 12 December 2010. A girl at the camp I talked to made it clear she’d rather be at a resort with a swimming pool and hired help.

Johnson, Magnus. Interview with John Howells reproduced as “John Howells Talks to Magnus Johnson,” available on-line.

Lemperg, F. “Duplicate Roentgenogram with One Exposure,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 56:1933:1929.

_____. “Gangrenous Dissecting Cystitis,” Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, Leipzig 50:1203:1926.

_____. “Induced Ankylosis of Knee,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 48:486:1921.

_____. “Rectal Anaesthesia with Ether Oil,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 56:43:1929.

Lemperg, F. “Northern Albania,” New Flora and Silva 7:79-83:1934, cited by Peter Barnes and Petrit Hoda, “Plant Exploration in Albania,” Curtis's Botanical Magazine 18:170-179:2001.

Simmler, Gudrun. “Monographie der Gattung Saponaria,” Denkschrift der Akademie der Wissenschaft, Vienna 85: 433-509:1910.

Ster, Thomas. “Der Alpengarten Rannach,” Joannea Botanik 5:9-21:2006, says “sein politisches Engagement riss ihn mit dem Untergang Hitler-Deutschlands in den Abgrund.”

Warren, Peter. “The Evolution of the Sanatorium: The First Half-Century, 1854-1904,” The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 23:457-476:2006.

Photograph: Large-leaved hybrid soapwort, 30 July 2011.

Silver-Leaf Nightshade

2011-07-24T08:22:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, corn.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Santa Fe thistle; toothed spurge germinating.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories, sweet alyssum from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster; buds on David phlox.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Despite a bit of rain Tuesday night, it’s still so hot and dry I’m watering twice as much and not staying even; last slight rain 7/19/11; 15:34 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The origins of cheese are shrouded in Neolithic mists when people in the near east were first domesticating plants and animals.

Once they learned to milk their cattle, sheep and goats, they needed methods to preserve the harvest. Milk was churned, boiled and fermented. Historians believe cheese was discovered when they stored milk in animal pockets, specifically the fourth stomachs of young calves which contain an enzyme, chymosin, that reacts with casein in milk to precipitate solid curds and leave liquid whey.

No one knows where the discoveries were made: evidence points to central Asia. The knowledge of rennet spread west when groups moved across the Danube. There’s some possibility people living in the area of modern Switzerland were raising cattle for milk and using baskets and wooden tools to process it in middle Neolithic times. Otto Tschumi thinks it possible a form of goose grass, Galium palustre, was used as a curdling agent.

The subsequent development of copper tools created a need for ores that moved the emerging Bell Beaker cultural complex into the Iberian peninsula around 2500bc. Animal remains suggest there were more female than male animals in Beaker settlements and those animals were older when they died. That, in turn, implies dairy practices accompanied the mines. Perforated bowls have been found at many sites which archaeologists believe were used to strain cheese.

No one knows when the technology of cheese moved through the south. The first pictorial record comes more than a thousand years later from a painting in the tomb of Ipy, sculptor to Rameses II. The first written record is from The Odyssey in which Homer described Cyclops milking ewes and kids to make cheese that he strained through wicker.

The Phoenicians, then the Romans conquered Spain and the north to consolidate and centralize trade. In the decades after Christ’s death, Pliny the Elder listed cheeses coming to Rome from as far away as the Alps, Nîmes, and Bithynia.

Within the Empire, Columella, who had family in southeastern Spain, said Romans commonly used lamb and kid’s rennet, although thistle flowers, false saffron seeds and fig tree twigs could be substituted. The cardoon thistle is still used on the steppes of Estramdura with merino milk to make the semi-hard, whitish Torta de la Serena.

Centuries later, when the conquistadores left Estramadura for México, they took cheese and the idea it could be made with vegetable rennets with them. Someone, or somebodies, experimented with local plants to discover the pea-sized fruit of silver-leaved nightshade would work in place of the European Cynara cardunculus.

Trompillo is still used to make the semi-hard, white asadero cheese in Chihuahua where it’s used in any food that requires melted cheese. Javier Cabral says his mother’s foster sister in Zacatecas still makes it daily from the “extra-fatty” leche de apoyo the cow reserves for her calf. He says his Aunt Marta “adds rennet” while the milk’s still in buckets, then lets it set. When the curds have formed, “she wraps them in cloth, places them in a hollowed-out log with a drainage hole drilled in it, then sets heavy stones on top to press out some of the whey.” Later she adds salt.

The knowledge of vegetable enzymes, if not cheese making, moved north both with the Spanish and through native communications networks. When Matilda Coxe Stevenson visited the relatively isolated Zuñi in the late nineteenth century, they were using ha’watapa berries with goat’s milk. Instead of waiting for the curds to congeal, they used the first stage as “a delicious beverage.”

To the west, the Pima, who had even less contact with Europeans until the Gadsden Purchase, combined the Spanish use of Solanum elaeagnifolium with European methods by mixing powdered berries in milk with “a piece of rabbit or cow stomach” to produce a drink.

To the east, where Spanish influences were stronger, the Cochiti used ashika to curdle milk like the local Spanish speakers, who called the blue-flowered plant tomatillo del campo. The more nomadic Navajo used dried or fresh berries with goat’s milk, while the Davis Apache in Texas used berries to thicken the goat’s milk they carried with them when they traveled. The tiny tomatoes survive on dead stems into the next blooming season.

Silver-leaf nightshade has a wide range, from northern México to Colorado and Nebraska east, but hasn’t been utilized outside the southwest settled by the Spanish where it may have proliferated on lands disturbed by the settlers. Many of the areas to the east were settled by Germans who had such a strong cheese making tradition based on cattle rennet that it would have been hard for them to imagine a vegetable substitute.

Today, when cheese can be bought at the grocers, the one to two-foot high members of the nightshade family have been abandoned to bloom along the road. If the webbed flowers, with their five petals pulled back and yellow stamens pushed forward, are considered at all, it’s as a pest. Not only do the fruits produce 60 to 120 seeds that can live ten years in the soil, but the herbaceous perennial can reproduce from root fragments that crowd out crops like cotton.

However, if you go into an Española grocery, to the side of the packets of highly processed American and Swiss cheeses and bags of shredded Monterrey Jack, cheddar and mozzarella, you’ll see packages of sliced asadero from California made from pasteurize grade A and skim milk, sea salt and enzymes along with sodium citrate and soy lichen.

If you look a bit more, you’ll find some piles of octagonal white cheeses in square vacuum-sealed packages that have come from México through Anthony, Texas. They only say they’re made from pasteurized milk, salt and rennet.

Notes:
Cabral, Javier. “Mexico Feeds Me: Exploring Mexico's Culinary Heritage,” Saveur website, 2 May 2011.

Castetter, Edward F. “Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest I. Uncultivated Native Plants Used as Sources of Food,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 4:1-44:1935, on uses by Cochiti and Spanish-speakers.

Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus. De Re Rustica, anonymously translated in 1745 as L. Junius Moderatus Columella of Husbandry.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. By the Prophet of the Earth, 1949, on Pima.

_____. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore, on Davis Mountain Apache.

Garrido-Pena, Rafael. “Bell Beakers in the Southern Meseta of the Iberian Peninsula: Socioeconomic Context and New Data,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16:187-209:1997.

Homer. The Odyssey, eighth century bc.

Ipy. Photograph of wall painting depicting cheese making available at the Sabor Artesano website page, “A Brief History of Cheese.” Rameses II reigned 1279-1213bc.

Jacob, Mandy, Doris Jaros and Harald Rohm. “Recent Advances in Milk Clotting Enzymes,” International Journal of Dairy Technology 64:14-33:2011, on la Serena cheese.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Morris Steggerda, “Navajo Foods and Their Preparation,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 17:217-25:1941.

Organisation Européenne et Méditerranéenne pour la Protection des Plantes. “Solanum elaeagnifolium,” Bulletin OEPP 37:236-245:2007.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, book 11, section 92, translated by Harris Rackham, 1940.

Rodríguez-Torres, K., J. A. López-Díaz and N. R. Martínez-Ruiz. “Physicochemical Characteristics and Sensory Properties of Asadero Cheese Manufactured with Vegetable Rennet from Solanum elaeagnifolium,” 2008 Food Science and Food Biotechnology Congress.

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

Tschumi, Otto. Urgeschichte der Schweiz, vol 1, 1949, cited by Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory: A Survey, 2002.

Photograph: Silver-leaved nightshade growing in Virginia creeper near an alfalfa field, 17 July 2011.

Asiatic Lily

2011-07-17T06:18:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa; corn tasseling, tomatoes visible; bleached leaves on catalpas having problems.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, amaranth, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, dandelion, Santa Fe thistle.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories.

Looking west: Caryopteris, lilies, ladybells, Goodness Grows speedwell, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, snapdragon, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, cricket, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: A few minutes of rain last Sunday was not enough; afternoon humidity low since; it gets harder every evening to replace the water that’s been lost in the day; 15:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The plants we value most tend to be those that made the great leap from species to domestication so long ago their ancestors can only be guessed.

Despite their many symbolic uses, lilies have only been hybridized since new varieties were imported from Asia some 170 years ago. For the first time we can see how botanical innovation occurs and how quickly, when conditions are right.

The Japanese began experimenting with closely related forms of Lilium maculatum in the middle 1600's. The descendants of their highly selected cultivars were among the plants Philip von Siebold began sending to Holland in 1830.

They arrived at a time when Europeans were already experimenting with crosses between newly introduced species and their familiar ones. Henry Groom, whose observations on geraniums were read by Charles Darwin, began breeding the new maculatum varieties with the European bulbiferum to produce what were called Lilium hollandicum hybrids.

The next generation of nurserymen continued working with hollandicum lilies to produce Sappho, a soft orange, slightly shorter lily, and Alice Wilson, a lemon yellow dwarf. According to Brain Porter, both appeared in 1877. While each remained popular for years, the commercial stock became infected.

Following the recognition of Gregor Mendel’s work, experimentation became more deliberate as academic professionals began work. Isabella Preston was crossing maculatum with a subspecies of davidii in the 1920's. A few years later, George Slater was experimenting with Alice Wilson, while Foreman McLean was mixing tigrinum with maculatum and the maculatum-bulbiferum hybrids.

Soon their discoveries and techniques moved back to the shops of commercial growers. Jan de Graaff, heir to a family of bulb traders, moved to Oregon from Leyden in 1934 where he began taking bulbs from other breeders and making his own crosses, especially between the child of a tigrinum-Sappho cross called Umtig 8 and Alice Wilson. In 1941 he released the coral orange Enchantment, with upward facing flowers on plants that were disease free and vigorous enough to survive the American climate.

Others continued his experiments with lily cultivars and closely related species to produce two distinct groups of bulbs, Asiatic lilies that followed from Enchantment and Oriental lilies. More recently, botanists have been using new techniques to try to cross the natural barriers each group developed against exogamy.

Once the Asiatics were introduced into the Netherlands in 1960, they were seen as potential cut flowers because they weren’t susceptible to the ethylene that escapes ripening produce and the upward thrust of the flower clusters fit the cellophane sleeves used by sellers. They also were relatively inexpensive to grow, had no fragrance to pervade crowded rooms, and some released no pollen to soil table cloths.

What’s important to me isn’t that I can buy a few stems of Asiatic lilies in the local grocery store, but that I can grow them in my yard. Most of the forebears of Asiatic lilies tolerate a wide range of soils and that trait has been retained.

In the fall of 1998, I bought several lily varieties. The Asiatic white Avalanche have bloomed every year, usually with clusters atop stems that get about two feet high. I can’t tell if they’ve actually expanded underground, but they do produce more stems and have lived longer than the ten years Schulte’s Greenhouse suggests I could have expected “under ideal conditions.”

This summer another plant failed to appear and I thought I would add more Avalanche bulbs, rather than experiment. Alas, Van Engelen stopped carrying them in 2000, and doesn’t even carry any reasonably tall white alternatives. Indeed, they are offering fewer varieties now than they did in 1998.

I don’t know if that’s a consequence of changing tastes, market saturation, or bankers who are less willing to lend money to breeders and importers. The first two are prods that can influence the direction of new experiments, but the last can sap the entrepreneurial spirit and kill the spark of innovation that only appears sporadically.

Notes: Maculatum is now known as Lilium pennsylvanicum; it’s also been called dauricum, elegans and wilsonii. Tigrinum is now called Lilium lancifolium.

Anderson, Susan Heller. “Jan de Graaff, Tamer of the Wild Lily, Dies at 86,” The New York Times, 9 August 1989.

Benschop, Maarten, Rina Kamenetsky, Marcel Le Nard, Hiroshi Okubo and August De Hertogh. “The Global Flower Bulb Industry: Production, Utilization, Research,” Horticultural Reviews 36:1-115 :2010.

Darwin, Charles. Letter to Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 14 Sept 1844, on something Groom wrote in the previous issue.

McRae, Edward A. Lilies: A Guide for Growers and Collectors, 1998; McRae apprenticed with Graaff.

Porter, Brian. “A look at Asiatic lilies of the Past 3 Centuries. Are They Still Here?,” on his Old Lily Hybrids and Species website.

Schulte’s Greenhouse and Nursey. “Avalanche Lily,” on-line catalog.

Photograph: Cluster of Avalanche Asiatic lilies, 10 July 2011.

White Mullein

2011-07-10T05:09:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall and red yuccas, daylily, Russian sage, buddleia, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, larkspur, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, brome grass; pods on sweet peas.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native and common dandelions; buds on old man cactus and Santa Fe thistle; berries formed on Russian olive, beginning to emerge on junipers.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess peaked, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort; buds on Shirley poppies; oriental poppy leaves turning brown.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla; raspberries dried up before they were fully ripe.

Looking west: Lilies, Rocky mountain beardtongue, ladybells, Goodness Grows speedwell, blue flax, catmints, first calamintha florets, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein; buds on Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana, tomato; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, small bees, hornets, grasshopper, cricket, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants. Someone’s black cat has taken to coming into the yard at night to hunt whatever burrowed under the cholla and hide from the surrounding dogs and coyotes.

Weather: Heat and fire continue to take more out of the ground than I can replace; short gentle rain Friday night; 15:46 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: My white mullein sat out last year. When it didn’t appear, I assumed it had finally died in the cold winter.

I bought it in the fall of 1997 when I was trying white flowering plants along the garage that were tall enough to see from the house. The nursery said its spike could reach 36" and the base spread to 24.

Album is a horticultural selection of Verbascum chaixii, a species with light yellow flowers on towering stalks that rise from nests of fuzzy grey leaves. Once the plants become established, the stalks branch.

My spikes never got more than a foot high, and were always hidden by the surrounding phlox. There’s only ever been one stalk, and some years not even that. Indeed, there have been years when the leaves didn’t emerge.

The native range of nettle-leaved mullein reaches across central Europe from Italy to Poland. On its southern boundary, from Spain to Yugoslavia, it evolved into the subspecies, chaixii. From the Balkans north it’s identified as austriacum, a plant used in the Giulia region of Italy’s Friuli-Venezia to treat hemorrhoids, clean eye problems and for a "spring cure." To the northeast, from Romania into Russia, it morphed into orientale.

In southern Poland, Wohciech Baba found austriacum was a migratory plant in semi-arid limestone grasslands. He observed 100 plots in the upland Ojców National Park each June for five years. Mullein was one that persisted in some, disappeared from others only to reappear another year, disappeared completely or appeared in new locations.

Some of the movement could easily be attributed to the fact the species easily self-seeds. With his annual visits, he couldn’t judge if the reappearing plants were new seedlings or ones like mine that had gone dormant for a year.

This year I discovered the paddle-shaped grey leaves the first of June when I was planting seeds in the area. Two weeks later a flower stalk shot up. It began blooming June 22 and has been opening florets if different locations up, down and around the spike since.

I must confess I not only stopped looking for the perennial member of the figwort family in spring, but didn’t pay it much notice when it did bloom. I saw the florets flushed with deep pink as I walked by, but never stopped to look.

Then, two weeks ago, I sat on the ground to look for the beard of the Husker White penstemon and noticed the flowers for the first time. In the center of the five white petals was a yellow-green ring that threw out a long, nearly translucent tongue to catch pollen from passing insects. On each petal, a thin arch of purple supported by three pillars bordered the ring.

More extraordinary than the style were the five purple filaments that resembled a spider’s hairy legs. Each ended in a bright orange shoe.

My mind flashed back to someone I hadn’t thought about in 30 years, a woman in Chicago who edited a science fiction fanzine called Purple and Orange. Young and outrageous as we were in those days before punk was even a word, ready to redefine ourselves every day, Joy would sometimes come to work with her hair dyed orange, sometimes purple.

She wasn’t particularly interested in plants. She published, and sometimes wrote, fiction based on characters from Battlestar Galactica. However, she did tell me about the recently released cult film, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

My white mullein belongs in such a film. It has the necessary europamittel ancestors.

Notes:
Baba, Wohciech. “The Small-Scale Species Mobility in Calcareous Grasslands - Example from Southern Poland,” Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae 74:53-64:2005.

Lokar, Laura Coassini and Livio Poldini. “Herbal Remedies in the Traditional Medicine of the Venezia Giulia Region (North East Italy),” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 22:231-279:1988.

Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Notes on Verbascum chaixii distribution on Flora Europaea website.

Photograph: White mullein, 4 July 2011.

Summer and Smoke

2011-07-03T05:47:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall and red yuccas, daylily, Russian sage, buddleia, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, larkspur, Shasta daisy, squash, alfalfa, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native and common dandelions; buds on horseweed, prickly pear and old man cacti.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bells, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort, reseeded morning glory.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla.

Looking west: Lilies, Rocky mountain beardtongue, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein; buds on Mönch aster and purple coneflower.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan; buds on chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, house finches, other small birds, gecko, bumble bee, smaller bees, hornets, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Afternoon temperatures in 90's; high winds Sunday and Thursday day spread fire in the western mountains and broke off small branches from cottonwood trees; a storm passed over yesterday that left us without power but with 1/8“ of water in dry ground; 15:52 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Last Sunday morning I walked north beyond the narrow arroyo to see if the prickly pear cacti were blooming yet. As near as I could see none were or had been. Many had had a tough winter and the drought continues.

As I was standing in the field of needle grass, I realized that land must once have been flooded through the break in the hills to the east. The arroyo comes from somewhere back there and marks the southern edge of the small plateau.

It was in that opening that I watched smoke from the Pacheco fire near Tesuque rise through the rows of foothills like a quiet volcano.

I returned to the house for a few minutes, then walked out to the main arroyo to the south. As usual, I was wearing thick wool socks to protect my feet from seeds armed with harpoons, static electricity and velcro.

The ground was so dry the clay was no longer detectable; the land was reduced to a shallow beach hot enough to send heat through my shoes. When I reached down to see if it was the sand or my socks, it was the land.

Few things were blooming. Everything that’s come into bloom has rushed to maturity, producing seeds as quickly as possible. Almost nothing on the prairie has stayed in flower for more than a week. Trees and shrubs in town have leaves that are losing color. The lack of water is felt everywhere after the hot solstice.

The winds started tossing the black locust around 1:00. An hour later I took a nap. When I woke about 4:00, I noticed the light coming in the east window of my bedroom had changed. The sere needle grass was silvery white. I couldn’t see it as well from my back porch. When I started round the building I noticed why the light had changed: a huge plume of smoke was rising from the area of Los Alamos.

The Las Conchas fire had erupted while I was sleeping.

Smoke dominated the view during the day. At night, I could see a line of orange. The next morning the smoke shut down visibility. There were charred pine needles in the drive.

The fire settled into a routine marked by changes in smoke patterns until Thursday when ferocious winds returned and the fire spread north across P’opii Khanu, the headwaters of Santa Clara creek. After dark, I could see another line of orange, this one backlighting bare tree trunks about twelve miles from my porch.

People, forced from their homes in Los Alamos by potential winds capable of driving such rapid variations in fire behavior, have been fretting that someone might sneak past the guards and loot their homes.

The Santa Clara tribal governor Walter Dasheno reported two-third of their forest had been destroyed and added the burned out land “is the source of our Santa Clara Creek that we rely upon for irrigation” It was their source for “wildlife, clean water, culturally-significant trees and medicinal plants.”

Fortunately, almost everyone can now buy most of their food, because the destruction of the acequias is yet to come. When it finally does rain, and this drought can’t last forever, the waters will rush over the charred land, strip off the fragile top soil, and send the silt and dead wood down towards the river.

Native plants will eventually recover. Most adapted to fire long ago. Unlike humans, they haven’t yet forgotten.

For now, their reactions can be read in chromatic changes. I’ve learned many plants alter their chemistry during the heat of the day, moving from absorbing the sun’s light in the morning to rejecting it by noon. The reflection of light by their chemicals creates the sensations I perceive as color.

Friday when I was driving home from Santa Fe, the grasses in the fields beside the road were silvery when the sky was grey.

As I approached Pojoaque at the base of the canyon that leads up to Los Alamos, the sky turned brown. The grasses retreated back into a bleached neutrality that blends into the soil, while the limestone layers in the rocks became more prominent. They too are alive, organic compounds of calcium carbonate that will burn when heated enough.

Later that evening, as the light faded, the grasses turned golden brown and the grey-green native salt bushes were bright green. Only the non-native Siberian elms were unaffected, still green to view.

Notes:
Dasheno, Walter. Quoted by Joe Baca, “Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.

Photograph: The fires, 1 July 2011. The smoke coming from behind the mesa is from the Los Alamos area. The smoke rising from the ridges at the right is from Santa Clara land. The dark green of the Siberian elms and lilacs is relatively normal for 7:15 at night. The four-winged saltbushes are a much brighter green and the grasses more golden than in normal light. The white square marks the border of a patch of Santa Clara land on the east side of the river.

Penstemons

2011-06-26T04:25:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey and hybrid tea roses, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red yucca, daylily, Russian sage, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, larkspur, squash, alfalfa, brome grass; fresh peas for sale.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, showy milkweed, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native dandelions; buds on prickly pear.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bells, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, sea pink fading, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross peaked, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla; begin to see color on raspberries.

Looking west: Lilies, Husker Red and Rocky mountain beardtongues, blue flax, catmints, flowering spurge, sea lavender; buds on white mullein and ladybells.

Looking north: Catalpa fragrant in evening, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower fragrant in morning, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan; buds on chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, house finch in four-winged saltbush, other small birds, bumble bee, smaller bees on columbine and catmint, hornet, cabbage butterfly, small flying insects, small black ants on Virginia creeper flowers, harvester ants, uncover earthworm; hear crickets.

Weather: Hot afternoons fed the Pacheco fire which could be seen from my back porch; although most of the smoke blew in other directions, some particles still filtered my way; last rain 5/19/11; 15:57 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: God the great clockmaker has been transformed into an ergonomic engineer.

Botanists agree on the general characteristics of the Penstemon product line. They have funnel shaped flowers arranged in spikes. A pair of stamens lie under each of the two upper petals. A sterile stamen sits above the middle of the three lower lobes. The pollen bearing anther pads tend to be at the front. The luring nectar source lies at the back behind a pinched waist.

When scientists look at individual species they see design changes made to accommodate the differences in pollinators. Color, shape and nectar are the elements they use to define niche markets.

The bright coral-red Penstemon barbatus coming into bloom on the north side of the house has been adjusted for humming birds. Its long, narrow corolla tube is pointed down, its lower lobes pulled back. The stamens have no hairs to obstruct movement to the nectary filled with diluted sucrose. The birds, which feed in flight, incidentally bump the anthers and fertilize the stigmas.

The other common beards tongues are for bees. The foxglove penstemon blooming on the north side of Santa Fe, where it apparently was introduced by someone from the humid southern plains, has a much larger tube to accommodate bumble bees. The five lobes flare back, the anthers are white, but the staminode is a large, humped golden brush that forces the bee to move above it and collide with overhanging stamens.

The exterior color of the local Penstemon cobaea is pale pink, but the interior of the upper petals is purple. Darker purple stripes mark the center veins on the lower lobes. Like the coral beardtongue, the plants have tall stems and most plants growing along side the road have only one or two. They tend to be about 2' apart.

The purple colored Rocky Mountain beardtongue blooming on the west side of the house is fertilized by a variety of bees. The upper lobes are pulled back, but the lower ones, with lighter colored lines, protrude to form a landing platform. The tube itself is shorter, the nectar scarcer and more concentrated than barbatus.

Penstemon strictus anthers are dark, but covered with white hairs. The sterile stamen is white with white hairs. The shorter stems grow above clumps of green foliage that make it easier for the bees to go from stalk to stalk, spreading pollen from one flower to another.

Engineers rarely work in isolation. One of their special challenges is to alter an existing object to make it appealing to some new market. Penstemons emerged in the Rockies, and spread from there south and east.

Coral beardtongues grow in the mountains of Colorado and Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Rocky Mountain penstemons have a slightly larger appeal, reaching a bit farther north into Wyoming. The foxglove species lives on limestone soils between the Mississippi and the mountains.

When it reached the Mississippi, the genus faced new challenges that required more tinkering. The Penstemon digitalis cultivar going out of bloom by the garage has twelve sets of four chromosomes, instead of the usual two. Although it seems to prefer glacial soils around the Great Lakes, it has spread to most parts of the eastern United States and Canada.

The latest master mechanic has been Dale Lindgren, recently retired from the University of Nebraska, where he experimented with the smooth penstemon to develop Husker Red with its maroon colored leaves. He later crossed it with Prairie Splendor, itself a cross of cobaea and triflorus, and patented the result as Dark Towers for the university.

My Husker Red has relatively small, white flowers tinged by purple hairs on the outside, near the bulbous base which contains mainly sucrose. The lower petals extend farther than the recurved upper ones, the anthers are dark, and the staminode white and hairy. In 15 years, it has expanded into a clump that produced 18 short stalks this summer.

Engineers like to reduce complexity to simple rules. Despite the number of variables they’ve used to attract consumers, they’ve learned color is the only trait they notice. Hummingbirds see more red, bees more ultraviolet. Although digitalis flowers are white, Gregg Dieringer and Leticia Cabrera found that all parts reflect UV light except the purple lines in the center of the petals.

In Missouri the species is pollinated by bumble bees, while smaller halictid bees are common visitors in Ohio. In Illinois, Gregg Dieringer and Leticia Cabrera observed mainly small and medium bees. When no bee succeeds, the flowers in Missouri are capable of fertilizing themselves.

Once a product succeeds, engineers are often tasked by their employers with reverse engineering the work of their competitors to determine how they work and how they’re made. A team led by Maria Clara Castellanos altered strictus flowers one trait at a time, until they resembled those of barbatus to see which, in fact, were important to hummingbirds and which to bees. Dieringer and Cabrera removed the fifth stamens of digitalis to see what affect they had on bees.

Both groups found evidence that supported their theories. They also found the engineering was more complex than they expected, and the customer-product relationship more malleable to changing circumstances.

Notes:
Castellanos, Maria Clara, Paul Wilson and James D. Thomson. “‘Anti-Bee’ and ‘Pro-Bee’ Changes during the Evolution of Hummingbird Pollination in Penstemon Flowers,” Journal of Evolutionary Biology 17:876-885:2004.

Dieringer, Gregg and Leticia Cabrera R. “The Interaction Between Pollinator Size and the Bristle Staminode of Penstemon digitalis (Scrophulariaceae),” American Journal of Botany 89:991-997:2002.

Hubbard, John P. “Penstemon spinulosus Wooten and Standley: New Mexico Endemic, Error or Introduction?,” The New Mexico Botanist, 6 July 1999; on Penstemon cobaea around Santa Fe.

Wolfe, Andrea D., Christopher P. Randle, Shannon L. Datwyler, Jeffery J. Morawetz, Nidia Arguedas and Jose Diaz. “Phylogeny, Taxonomic Affinities, and Biogeography of Penstemon (Plantaginaceae) Based on ITS and cpDNA Sequence Data,” American Journal of Botany 93:1699-1713:2006.

Photograph: Two Rocky Mountain beardtongue flowers, one open, one spent; 25 June 2011.

Purple Mat Flower

2011-06-19T07:36:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey, hybrid tea and miniature roses, buddleia, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red yucca, lilies, daylily, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, Jupiter’s beard, alfalfa, brome grass; some cut hay.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, showy milkweed, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, tumble mustard, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, woolly plantain, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, wild licorice mainly seeds, loco, white sweet clover, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, golden hairy and strap-leaf asters, native and common dandelions; buds on prickly pear and Virginia creeper; bush morning glory up; native yucca leaf points turning brown.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, raspberry, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bells, baby’s breath, Bath pinks peaked, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia.

Looking south: Pasture, floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla.

Looking west: Husker red beardtongue, blue flax, catmints, Rumanian sage, flowering spurge, sea lavender; buds on white mullein; tulip leaves turning brown.

Looking north: Catalpa, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan; garlic leaves turned brown.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird on coral beardtongue, goldfinch on chocolate flowers, other small birds, gecko, hummingbird moth on columbine at sunset, bees, black butterfly with yellow stripe on catmint, small flying insects, grasshoppers, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Smoke from a fire near Tesuque has been added to that from Arizona as temperatures stay high; last rain 5/19/11; 15:57 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I first saw purple mat flowers blooming in a sidewalk crack in Los Alamos.

Tiny, five-petaled flowers covered a plant that sprawled on concrete with dense narrow leaves. It rather resembled a moss phlox, only the leaves were plumper and furry. When the flowers aged, the petals curved down and the leaves collected sand.

Nama hispidum is generally considered to be a desert annual that grows from northern Arizona and south Texas down into San Luis Potosí. Early in the last century Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley said it grew on dry hills and plains west of Santa Fe, as well as in the Four Corners, the headwaters of the Pecos and other mountainous parts of New Mexico.

As an annual, it moves about, appearing in whatever congenial place its yellow seeds have landed. It appeared in my north-facing garden from 1995 to 1997, then spread east and south until 1999 when I didn’t see any plants. In 2000 they were in the drive and close to a block walk along the side of the house where they ranged until 2008. I haven’t seen any since, but they’ve been wandering along the upriver side of the road leading to the narrow arroyo since.

This year I saw the characteristic hump of greyish-green leaves in an area of the prairie left bare by ATV’s on Easter Sunday. That same day I saw a small one, more flower than plant, blooming by the road near the other arroyo.

Another three weeks passed before I saw purple mat plants again, this time in the middle of the sandy ranch road leading to the large arroyo. It was blooming two weeks later, and had flowers for another week when I also saw a few more, larger plants blooming in the other direction, along side the road.

Last week there were a half dozen plants blooming along the main road, but nothing on the prairie. The last was 13" across and piled 4" high; smaller ones were only 2" tall.

The small petals open from long yellow funnels, much like nicotiana. The Mayo of southern Sonora noticed the resemblance: they call the one goy tobaco or tobaco de coyote and call Nicotiana obtusifolia goy biba and tobaco de coyote. Leaves of the small lavender flowered plant, which smell when they’re rubbed, are scorched and, alone or in an alcohol solution, put on stiff joints. Leaves of the yellow flowered, 3' plant are boiled into a tea that’s “applied to stiff joints and drunk for rheumatism.”

Despite the floral similarity, purple mat isn’t a member of the nightshade family but of the Hydrophyllaceae. Recently, botanists have determined the waterleaf family is probably a subgroup within the borages.

Within the Nama genus, species can be distinguished by both their external and their chemical characteristics. However, hispidum is sufficiently variable that, over time, it’s acquired multiple Latin names. Wooten and Stanley gave two other names, Marilaunidium hispidum and Conanthus hispidus.

Around Tucson, Beth Kinsey says it blooms “in the springtime, and then again in the fall after the summer monsoon rains.” Closer to the border with Sonora, Tohono O’odham Community College in Sells, Arizona, says the “seedlings sprout in mid-winter” while José Jesús Sánchez Escalante says that, in Sonora, moradita “appears every year for the ‘waters’ (summer rainfall).”

Here it blooms in May and June. Blossoms may continue into July when the monsoons appear, but are usually gone by the end of the month. Only in 2006 did I see flowers in October.

Apparently, temperature is as important as water for germination. Norman Deno found the tiny seeds emerge in two to six days when temperatures are 70 or when they’re exposed to the growth hormone, gibberellic acid-3.

This year we had some rain on April 6, 18 days before I saw the first plant. Temperatures in the intervening days were in the 70's when I got home, though mornings were still below freezing. Presumably the daily bouts of heat stimulated the production of GA-3, which in turn led to sprouting.

To survive, annuals have to do more than bloom, they have to produce viable seed. The pollen is eaten by bees, who happen to fertilize the flowers while they’re foraging. Jerome Rozen has found some varieties that feed primarily on sand bells in Arizona, but researchers have observed at least twenty bee species visiting the plants in Sonora.

The mystery to me is why a native plant, left undisturbed and obviously able to reproduce, keeps dying out. Perhaps the seeds spread away from the parent, and my sources have been destroyed by neighbors who continually scrap their yards bare of any but the worse vegetation. Or maybe, the growth of grasses in my yard became too much for a species I usually see in open spots.

For now, if I want to see a purple mat, I have to walk along the shoulder with my eyes downcast, much as I did when I walked the streets of Los Alamos.

Notes:Deno, Norman C. Seed Germination Theory and Practice, supplement 1, 1996.

Escalante, José Jesús Sánchez. “Moradita (Nama hispidum),” Nuestras Plantas Sonorenses website, 15 July 2006, translated by Google from “durante ‘las aguas’ (lluvias de verano).”

Kinsey, T. Beth. “Nama hispidum – Bristly Nama,” The Firefly Forest website.

Newberry, Michael, Teresa Newberry and Ronald Geronimo. “Nama hispidum,” Tohono O’odham Community College Plant Atlas website.

Rozen, J. G. “Nesting Biology and Immature Stages of a New Species in the Bee Genus Hesperapis ( Hymenoptera : Apoidea : Melittidae : Dasypodinae),” American Museum Novitates 2887:1987.

_____. “Nesting Biologies and Immature Stages of the Rophitine Bees (Halictidae) with Notes on the Cleptoparasite Biastes (Anthophoridae) (Hymenoptera: Apoidea),” American Museum Novitates 3066, 1-28:1993.

University of Rochester. “Bees and Floral Hosts of Rancho San Bernardino,” school website.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Yetman, David and Thomas R. Van Devender. Mayo Ethnobotany, 2002.

Photograph: Purple mat flower blooming along side the road, 12 June 2011.

Showy Milkweed

2011-06-12T04:38:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey, wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, buddleia, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, wide-leaved and red yuccas, lilies, daylily, red hot poker, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, Jupiter’s beard, alfalfa, brome grass; corn about 6" high.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, four-wing salt bush, showy milkweed, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, tumble mustard, alfilerillo disappearing with heat, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, gypsum phacelia peaked, woolly plantain, purple mat flower, nits and lice, goat’s head, wild licorice, loco, white sweet clover, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, native and common dandelions, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper and stickleaf; needle grass only bloomed along my drive, not in the yard or on the prairie; cottonwood cotton collecting on ground.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, raspberry, winecup mallow, coral bells, small-leaved soapwort passing, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia; buds on baby’s breath; oriental poppy petals had white blotches Monday from whatever blew in from Arizona.

Looking south: Pasture, floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla.

Looking west: Chives, vinca, Husker red beardtongue, blue flax, catmints, Rumanian sage, flowering spurge; buds on sea lavender.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis; buds on butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan and fernleaf yarrow.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, impatiens; buds on nicotiana; peppers still struggling with the heat.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Small and large hummingbirds, house finches and other small birds, gecko, bees on catmint, cabbage butterfly, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Air smelled of burning chemicals Monday from fires to the southwest; all week the Jemez grew slowing indistinct at sundown, sometimes disappearing altogether while the sun turned red as it entered the layer of dust and ash; some mornings temperatures fell into the 40's and others they didn’t go below 60; last rain 5/19/11; 15:55 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The biggest milkweed I’ve ever seen is blooming above the village ditch.

When I get on the bank, last year’s grey, furrowed pods are as high as my nose; when I stand on the road side, they’re above my head.

This year’s flowers reach my biceps. Fuzzy leaves, 7" long and 3 1/2" wide at their base, cuddle 3" balls dotted with pale pink stars. The supporting stems are about 3/8" thick.

This showy milkweed’s larger than any in the parent colony a mile away to the southeast where plants grow about two feet in a ditch bottom and along its inner banks. The difference is that water flows through the one ditch more often than it does the other. Even though this milkweed species ranges west from the great plains, it still needs water.

We’re outside any path used by migrating monarch butterflies, so this member of the milkweed family has been free to respond to the arid environment. Leaves and stems of Asclepias speciosa contains much less latex than those of the common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, or the broadleafed Asclepias latifolia found on the edge of a monarch path in west Texas. However, they contain more than is found in the horsetail variety, Asclepias subverticillata, used by the Zuñi to the west.

While the absence of monarchs has meant a need to expend less energy to defend against predators, it has also meant the plant has to attract some other insect to fertilize its flowers. Large blossoms and great quantities of nectar are two obvious devices of allurement.

Their green centers contain consolidated reproduction units that snare the legs of unwary insects. As they free themselves, they dislodge packets of pollen which they shake off or drop when they approach the next flower.

The bee I saw land on one of the flowers was extremely cautious, approaching the cluster from the base and attacking a flower from one of its bottom points.

Unfortunately for the milkweed, the insect is likely to go to the next available flower on the plant instead of flying to another plant and a plant can’t accept its own pollen. Matthew Finer and Martin Morgan found plants they deliberately pollinated produced more pods than those in the wild where insects alone did the fertilization.

What’s surprising is that the plants they hand pollinated, but left available to insects also produced fewer pods than the ones they pollinated but covered so insects couldn’t reach them.

Susan Stone Bookman thinks the reason is showy milkweed plants have a finite ability to feed themselves and so are forced to kill off more than 95% of the flowers and potential pods. Mature pods contain two to seven times the amount of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus as young ovaries.

From this, it’s easy to see that flowers that are pollinated first would be most likely to survive than those visited later, and that afternoon fertilizations, when the plant is more stressed, would be less successful. What’s not self-evident is that, if enough time passes, Bookman found another flower in a cluster can be successfully pollinated.

While very few pods survive to tower above the living mass of grey-green leaves, the dark flat seeds they produce are extremely viable. In one test, 95% emerged the first year, most in May, and the rest before the end of July. They can even survive some time in water and still germinate.

Young seedlings concentrate on developing what will become long taproots which allow them to survive the early summer droughts that precede the monsoons. As a result, they can be choked by surrounding vegetation before their stems rise into the sun.

The milkweeds in the village landed near a fence covered by Virginia creeper. The warm weather perennials don’t put out their leaves until after the vine, and so must shove their way through their competitors every year.

Although most are single plants rising from a crown, some specimens apparently can produce additional plants from their roots when conditions require. However, the presence of nearby clones increases a plant’s problem with endogamous pollen.

Botanists raised in a world where they’re told market forces rule supreme like to do cost-benefit analysis or energy efficiency assays for plants, hoping in the process they are finding the key to evolution. Perhaps I’m a hopeless romantic when I think the lives of milkweed are more than a series of sacrificial tradeoffs made to survive an irrational climate, that their moments of grandeur are more than feeding opportunities for bees.

I know they don’t exist for my aesthetic pleasure, that the slim chance of my noticing them as I drive by is of no concern to nature. Still, such events occur and just might also aid their survival. After all the ditch holding the parent colony is cleared every year, and the milkweeds persist.

Notes:Agrawal, Anurag A., Marc J. Lajeunesse and Mark Fishbein. “Evolution of Latex and its Constituent Defensive Chemistry in Milkweeds (Asclepias): a Test of Phylogenetic Escalation,” Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 128:126–38:2008; the latex levels they found were: subverticillata: .277, speciosa: .819, syriaca: 1.540, latifolia: 5.925; all by syriaca occur in northern New Mexico.

Bookman, Susan Stone. “Costs and Benefits of Flower Abscission and Fruit Abortion in Asclepias speciosa,” Ecology 64:264–273:1983.

_____. “Effects of Pollination Timing on Fruiting in Asclepias speciosa Torr. (Asclepiadaceae),” American Journal of Botany 70:897-905:1983.

Conrad, Jim. “Milkweed Flowers,” Backyard Nature website, has a clear description of milkweed flowers with good pictures.

Finer, Matthew S. and Martin T. Morgan. “Effects of Natural Rates of Geitonogamy on Fruit Set in Asclepias speciosa (Apocynaceae): Evidence Favoring the Plant's Dilemma,” American Journal of Botany 90:1746-1750:2003.

Ulev, Elena D. “Asclepias speciosa,” 2005, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System on-line database; summarizes research of others, including W. S. Chepil’s “Germination of Seeds. I. Longevity, Periodicity of Germination, and Vitality of Seeds in Cultivated Soil,” Scientific Agriculture 26: 307-346:1946.

Photograph: Showy milkweed growing with Virginia creeper outside a 4' fence atop a village ditch bank, 5 June 2011; last year’s pods rise on the brown stalks in back; a flower opened wide at the bottom left shows the green center.

Wild Licorice

2011-06-05T04:55:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, purple-flowered locust, wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, wide-leaved yucca, onion, daylily, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia; buds on lilies; datura up.

Beyond the walls and fences: Russian olive, tamarix, Apache plume, four-wing salt bush, common and showy milkweeds, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, tumble mustard, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, wild licorice, loco, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper. Winds have dislodged salt bushes from crevices high in the arroyo walls.

In my yard: Black locust, beauty bush, privet, Dr. Huey and rugosa roses, raspberry, chives, red hot poker, oriental poppy, winecup, vinca, golden spur columbine, coral bells, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved soapwort, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Maltese cross, blue flax, Hartweig and pink evening primroses, pink salvia, catmints, Rumanian sage, chocolate flower, coreopsis; buds on hollyhock, butterfly weed, bouncing Bess, Mexican hat, fernleaf yarrow, blanket flower and anthemis; morning glory seeds breaking through; daffodil leaves turning brown.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose; buds on nicotiana; tomatoes and peppers still wilting every afternoon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, bumble bee on baptisia and catmint, small bee on catmint, small butterfly on blue salvia, hornet on pink evening primrose, cricket, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Winds early in week, followed by smoke from the west; everything lay in suspension as the sun turned red and futile storms foregathered; last rain 5/19/11; 15:49 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Is the wild licorice blooming along the ditches near the village a native plant or a weed?

In the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley described the legume with its prominent white spikes and prickly pods as a “common weed in cultivated ground and along ditch banks.” Among the places it grew were Zuni, San Juan, Ojo Caliente, Chama and Raton.

More recently, a group in Colorado wanted to know which plants were part of the natural under story for cottonwoods, willows and salt cedars, so the land could be properly restored along the Rio Dolores when tamarix was removed. They found Glycyrrhiza lepidota was an indicator for a willow canopy.

It was the same kind of quest for the remnants of the real rather than the ruderal that sent Lenora Curtin down a wagon track near La Ciruela in the late 1940' where she found a woman with ten children near a “willow-sheltered streamlet” who told her that she drank a strained extract of crushed licorice roots three times a day from the third day after giving birth to her first menses. She especially recommended it “in cases of retention of the afterbirth.”

Curtin doesn’t reveal anything more about the woman.

Angelico Chavez, however, tells us his great-great-grandfather, José Encarnación Chaves, helped found the village in former Comanche territory after the United States established Fort Union in what is now Mora County in 1851. The mountain community, originally settled by people from places like Belen, boomed in the early 1880's when it supplied ties for construction crews of the Santa Fe railroad, then withered away. Chavez’s grandfather Eugenio moved to Wagon Mound around 1885.

More interestingly, Chavez tells us José Encarnación’s grandfather, Christóbal Chaves, married a woman whose family was from Mexico City, María Josefa Núñez. His mother was appalled when he married outsiders, but his grandchildren began to call themselves los Chaves Mexicanos. Eugenio came to believe his own grandfather had come from México.

When he died, his cousin Bernardo Chaves wanted to marry the widow. His first wife had been a plains Indian servant. She refused.

It’s traditions associated with María Josefa which are important for wild licorice. Many of the plains tribes had discovered the same thing the Europeans knew, that a saponin in the root of many members of the genus was good for treating coughs and the throat in general. Only the Europeans used it as a gynecological aid.

In first century Dioscorides included licorice in his section on herbs used as abortifacients, without explicitly saying it would serve that purpose. John Riddle found it used thereafter in formulas for treating delayed periods or removing the remains of the placenta. He believed its efficacy in the first instance arose from the fact it contains estrogenic chemicals.

Recently, Finnish researchers may have discovered why it works to clear the body after labor. They found children of women who ate licorice flavored candy when they were pregnant were more likely to have impaired cognitive functions that led to behavioral problems. The group hypothesized that the active agent, glycyrrhiza, weakens the embryonic sac and thus inhibits its ability to act as a protective barrier from harmful chemicals that pass from the mother into the fetal brain.

The knowledge of wild licorice in northern New Mexico may have developed in several phases. Since lepidota is the only species growing in North America and its range doesn’t extend into México, people raised in places like Durango may well have forgotten the plant. The trait local settlers noticed was that the root foamed in water like the amole or yucca, and so it was called amollilo.

The folk knowledge derived from the Spanish Glycyrrhiza glabra could have arrived separately, and then spread. Curtin found a woman in Chimayó who mixed it with rice in water as an emmenagogue and another who used the unstrained pulp in water to produce “a good cleanser of the uterus.”

While it’s easy to think there was one group of settlers who came with Juan de Oñate and who returned after the Pueblo revolt, the histories of Angelico Chavez’s family and of Chimayó suggest that, under that seeming uniformity, there were a great many opportunities for new ideas to be introduced and enough internal migration to diffuse medicinal lore and plants.

The woman, or women, who first used the plant didn’t have to have seen the Spanish plant, only an imported root. The preparation Curtin heard described, mashing the roots in water, is much simpler than the European technique of crushing them under millstones, then boiling them and evaporating the liquid to produce sticks.

What’s not widespread is wild licorice. Its deep, fleshy taproots demand a moist environment. While the long pea-shaped flowers are fertile, the reddish-brown seeds have relatively low germination rates. To compensate, a single plant expands into a colony from creeping rhizomes which can be transplanted.

The area where the Santa Cruz flows down from Chimayó to enter the Rio Grande was once a wetland where wild licorice could easily have grown. However, after the Santa Cruz was damned and the area drained to eradicate malaria, much of the original riparian vegetation disappeared. The plants growing along the local ditches could be survivors from that past or something introduced, a potential weed in an increasingly suburbanized community.

The transition from one status to the other, from valued native to unwanted weed, may be as slow, as subtle and undeliberate as the family legends that transformed the reality of María Josefa into the romantic grandfather of Eugenio.

Notes:
Chavez, Angelico. Chavez, 2009.

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

Julyan, Robert Hixson. The Place Names of New Mexico, 1996, on La Ciruela.

Korb, Julie E., Cynthia Dott and Sara Bombaci. “Understory Plant Community Variability among Tamarisk, Cottonwood, and Willow Canopy Types along a Regulated Reach of the Dolores River, Colorado - Implications for Ecological Restoration ,” Tamarix Coalition website.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes ethnographies of plains and other tribes.

Räikkönen, Katri, Anu-Katriina Pesonen, Kati Heinonen, Jari Lahti, Niina Komsi, Johan G. Eriksson, Jonathan R. Seckl, Anna-Liisa Järvenpää and Timo E. Strandberg. “Maternal Licorice Consumption and Detrimental Cognitive and Psychiatric Outcomes in Children,” American Journal of Epidemiology 170: 1137-1146:2009; most candy sold in this country as licorice in fact is flavored with anise, not licorice.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992, discusses Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica.

_____. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, 1997.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Wild licorice growing on a ditch bank near the village, 20 May 2011.

Glasswort

2011-05-29T11:34:00.008-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, silver lace vine, iris, red hot poker, onion, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia, sweet pea; buds on daylilies. People have been planting.

Beyond the walls and fences: Russian olive, tamarix, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, tumble mustard, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, wild licorice, loco, yellow sweet clover, perky Sue, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper.

In my yard: Beauty bush, privet, skunkbush, peony, oriental poppy, winecup, vinca, golden spur columbine, coral bells, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved soapwort, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, catmint, chocolate flower; buds on chives, hollyhock, sea pink, Rumanian sage, coreopsis and anthemis; cosmos and zinnia seedlings breaking through.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon; buds on nicotiana; recent transplants began having problems with the heat on Wednesday.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Gecko, bumble and small bees, hornet, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Summer began this week with warmer days and nights that changed my comfort level in the house; wind never stop for long; last rain 5/19/11; 15:40 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Aquatic plants represent an alien world to this land lubber. I discovered cattails and water lilies when I went to summer camp, but paid no attention to whatever else was growing in and around the lake.

Now, when I see something unusual growing near a river, I only know it comes from the watery world, but have no idea what it is and or how to find out.

Last May I noticed some leafless green stems about a foot high along the sides of the village ditch. The branchless stalks grew in clumps of two to six, apparently from a common base, and were crowned with dark pointed cones. Last weekend I saw them again.

They look like thin onions until you see the hollow stalk is divided into segments about an inch and half long which can be pulled apart. The main part of each section is yellow green. The areas at the slightly swollen joints are more yellow and the part just before the yellow at the top of each piece is a darker shadow of the vertical grooves.

Each ridge appears to end in a piece of dark brown fringe which merges into eight picots, usually composed of one tall central thread and two shorter, curving ones. Last week the dark tip looked like a compressed group of segments waiting to elongate. Yesterday the stems were taller and the tips much smaller.

When I put one in water, it started to smell after a few days: although it remained firm, the injured area, where it was picked, was rotting rather than putting out a root. When I left it on the counter, the round stalk dried into a rectangle. The two wide sides had deep indentations. Internally, the stem is composed of eight vascular bundles, two of which become leaves. The deep grooves may represent those critical bundles.

The nearest drawing I could find is one of the upper part of a slender glasswort in Roger Peterson’s wildflower guide for northeastern North America. He says Salicornia europeana’s found along the coast from Nova Scotia south and occasionally in the Great Lakes states.

Peterson’s drawing doesn’t look at all like the one in the guide for this area, which says slender pickleweed is found in the southwest and Texas, nor does it look like the photographs of any of the glassworts found in the United States. It’s least like the dwarf species, Salicornia bigelovii, reported in Chavez County which has shorter, plumper sections.

It doesn’t help my identification when experts say “because of the succulence of the plants and the highly reduced morphology, it has been difficult to develop a satisfactory taxonomy of the genus” or that the term europeana has been used as a synonym for “I don’t know.”

Glassworts are commonly associated with saline waters. Indeed, a group led by Gudrun Kaderit believes it diverged from a perennial Salcocornia during the Miocene in the area between the Mediterranean and Tethys seas, and that the genus proliferated as the glaciers were forming. They believe it became an annual to survive the cold. Salt moderates freezing temperatures, and the tolerance to salinity may have arisen from the same need to survive where it was slightly warmer.

Another group, this led by Anthony Davis, found glassworts tend to live in coastal salt marshes where they’re doused daily with sea water, but live on saline or alkaline soils fed by fresh groundwater.

Their life cycle is closely tied to variations in water. Different species germinate at different time between February and May when tides are less active and they can live in truncated, that is branchless, forms without enough sodium chloride. In late summer the uppermost segments produce two clusters of three flowers arranged in triangles close to the joint. Each bisexual flower produces one yellowish-brown seed which winters over near the parent.

I don’t remember what happened to the plants last June, if they disappeared with the heat, drought and competition from other plants, or if I simply didn’t notice them later. The fact the seeds are only viable for a year implies they either were able to reproduce or their population was replenished.

The local ditch was originally dug by Spanish-speaking settlers to divert the Santa Cruz river. It became part of a network of inland waterways when the river was damned below Chimayó in the 1920's to better capture the snow melt and provide more reliable irrigation all summer. As it is, the ditch is relatively dry in winter and alternates between being full and draining during the summer in ways similar to coastal tides.

In southeastern Alberta, Lloyd Keith discovered that when fresh water was impounded it raised the level of the water table and permitted water from the saltier aquifer to flow into man-made lakes. As the water became more saline, the surrounding vegetation began to change, with glassworts appearing in some places.

I don’t know anything about the groundwater in Chimayó, but I know my well had 78 milligrams of sodium per liter in 2002. While that’s below the 1,900 found in standard sea water, it’s above the one to two percent solution found optimal for many species by Davy.

It’s actually easier to understand how such an obscure member of the goosefoot family could arrive in the local acequia than it is to name it. The reservoir is now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, who has turned it into a recreation area and stocked it with trout.

Boats are promiscuous. Texas fishermen may stop in Chavez County on their way to Lake Mead. Some locals go from lake to lake within the state. Any seed can hitch a ride on the bottom, on a trailer tire, or in a can of muddy water.

As often happens with wild flowers too insignificant to be included in field guides, I’m left to call this anything I choose, until someone corrects me, even if the name is fanciful or wrong. As Gertrude Stein suggested, the name doesn’t matter if its thereness is there. And glasswort* is definitely there.

Correction, 6/5/11: Vicki (see comment) recognized this as Equistem hyemale, commonly known as scouring rush, a member of the only surviving genus of a group of very ancient, primitive vascular plants. It is mentioned by Wooten and Standley, but is not in Peterson or the other field guides for the region.

The only thing above that is specific to glasswort is the description of the vascular bundles. The rest is based on observation or are comments on the locale.

In the last week the plants have grown at least another foot.

Notes: Water test done by National Testing Laboratories of Cleveland.

Ball, Peter W. “Salicornia Linnaeus” on eFloras’ Flora of North America website; includes the quotation.

Davy, A. J., G. F. Bishop and C. S. B. Costa. “Salicornia L. (Salicornia pusilla J. Woods, S. ramosissima J. Woods, S. europaea L., S. obscura P.W. Ball & Tutin, S. nitens P.W. Ball & Tutin, S. fragilis P.W. Ball & Tutin and S. dolichostachya Moss),” Journal of Ecology 89:681-707:2001.

Kadereit, Gudrun, Peter Ball, Svetlana Beer, Ladislav Mucina, Dmitry Sokoloff, Patrick Teege, Ahmet E. Yaprak and Helmut Freitag. “A Taxonomic Nightmare Comes True: Phylogeny and Biogeography of Glassworts (Salicornia L., Chenopodiaceae),” Taxon 56:1143-1170:2007.

Keith Lloyd B. “Some Effects of Increasing Soil Salinity on Plant Communities,” Canadian Journal of Botany 36:79-89:1958:

Peterson Field Guide. A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northestern and North-central North America, by Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny with illustrations by Peterson, 1968.

_____. Southwestern and Texas Wildflowers, by Theodore F. Niehaus with illustrations by Charles L. Ripper and Virginia Savage, 1984.

Photograph: Glasswort picked from village ditch bank, 22 May 2011; photographed the same day.

Woolly Plantain

2011-05-22T06:31:00.005-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Snowball, Persian yellow, pink shrub, hybrid tea and miniature roses, pyracantha flowers above last year’s dark berries, wisteria, silver lace vine, iris, peony, oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia; grapes killed by cold and those that hadn’t broken dormancy both leafing; buds on daylilies.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, purple and tumble mustards, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, American licorice, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; cheat grass turning red; buds of Russian olive and loco; Virginia creeper seedlings and tree of heaven suckers coming up.

In my yard: Beauty bush, privet, skunkbush, winecup, vinca, yellow alyssum peaked, golden spur columbine, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, catmint, perky Sue and chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, sea pink and coral bell; seed pods appearing on Siberian pea tree; rose of Sharon developing new leaf buds after existing ones killed by cold; put in tomatoes and warm weather seeds.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Cows brought into village pasture; hummingbird around Bath pinks, gecko, white spider crawled out of iris flower, hornet tried to land on snowball in the wind; harvester and small black ants, earth worm.

Weather: Some rain late Tuesday, followed by near freezing temperatures Thursday morning that punished some plants and flowers; winds most afternoons; 15:17 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The most amazing thing about woolly plantain is where it grows. While it’s interesting the little annual has bloomed at least three years along the road, it’s astounding the only place it grows outside the arid west is Patagonia in southern Argentina and Chile.

Nina Rønsted’s team believes Plantago diverged within the Plantagina family a little over seven million years ago in the Miocene when grasslands developed and that the genus began spreading about 5.47 million years ago. Most of the subgenera existed before the formation of the great glaciers two million years ago.

Some species of Plantago emerged in the historic record in Patagonia some 17,000 years ago when the glaciers were receding. Vera Markgraf’s team found pollen in cores that suggest the area around Coyhaique in the Aisén province of Chile was drying into an open ground shrub-steppe. The genus increased between 13,700 and 11,000 years ago when grasses dominated the steppe and fire activity declined. The pollen then disappeared from their soil samples when the amount of charcoal increased.

Farther south Rodrigo Villa-Martínez and Patricio Moreno found Plantago pollen in soil cores from 12,600 years ago drilled in the Torres del Paine National Park. It was disappearing from the strata by 10,800 years ago when the westerly winds began moving and moisture levels began changing.

Today the South America range of woolly plantain extends from Patagonia into the pampas north of Buenos Aires, but stops at the Amazon drainage. In Chile, it doesn’t reach as far west as the coast.

One would guess Plantago patagonica began as a grassland species that survived in refuges during the glaciers to reemerge when conditions dried. The grasslands would never have had to be contiguous for it to spread between the tip of South America and New Mexico, just close enough for migrating animals to spread the reddish-tan seeds.

Today, the short plant is primarily found on the western plains and in the intermountane region from Baja and Sonora north into the prairie provinces of Canada with scattered populations through the upper midwestern areas freed late from the ice. In Ohio, the only known population grows on “an old beach ridge associated with pre-glacial Lake Warren” in Williams County, which borders Michigan. In Michigan, the taprooted annual’s been found in the band of counties north of the glacial hills separating the state from Ohio and near Lake Michigan.

Rønsted’s group implies the fires that came with a changing climate and forest vegetation is what reduced its range. A team led by Todd Esque found that recent burning caused a significant decline in the number of Plantago species seeds in the ground in the Mojave, and the loss was greater for plants that grew under shrubs than in the open. While a single fire wasn’t enough to exterminate the plants, the repeated fires east of the Mississippi could certainly have had that effect, if they had once grown there.

In the areas that remained grasslands, grazing may have limited woolly plantain’s population. It’s eaten by guanaco and sheep in South America, and cattle and prairie dogs in this country. All those mammals prefer grasses, but the winter annual is eaten because it’s there when other vegetation’s scarce and it’s neither poisonous nor prickly.

If the plants are able to survive long enough to reproduce, the seeds are collected by harvester ants. However, if the seeds survive, they can last some time in dry soil to germinate when conditions are right.

In my yard, the narrow spikes appear for a few years, then disappear. They bloomed in my north-facing garden from the middle 1990's until about 2001. In 1999 they emerged along the east side of the house where they grew until grasses took over in 2004. By then, some seeds had settled in back where they were last seen in 2008. They can survive competition in the desert, but perhaps not in wetter areas where plants become more muscular.

If patagonica is a species that once had a much larger range and has been forced to retreat to disconnected environments hostile to other plants, it has persisted because it modified itself into a winter annual rather than a perennial. Unlike the common plantain I knew as a child, which had broad leaves that lay on the ground, this has narrow leaves that stand erect to collect the sun without being overly exposed.

Most important, the plant has developed an ability for a single seed to germinate and reestablish a colony. The tiny, four-petaled flowers appear in dense, short stalks covered with white hairs that isolate each flower. They fertilize themselves by activating the male anthers when the female stigmas are receptive. Most plantains are out-breeders.

Edward Voss thought woolly plantain probably wasn’t native to Michigan because the earliest report was from Washtenaw County in 1928. Judging from the plants in my yard and growing down the road, it seems to be a native plant that’s constantly being reintroduced back into its historic range, perhaps by vehicle and heavy equipment tires since the 1920's. Then, it dies out for the same old reasons, because nothing really important changed in its absence.

Notes:
Esque, Todd C., James A. Young and C. Richard Tracy. “Short-term Effects of Experimental Fires on a Mojave Desert Seed Bank,” Journal of Arid Environments 74:1302-1308:2010.

Kartesz, John T. Floristic Synthesis of North America range map, available on John Hilty’s Illinois Wildflowers website for “Plantago patagonica (Woolly Plantain).”

Markgraf, Vera, Cathy Whitlock and Simon Haberle. “Vegetation and Fire History During the Last 18,000 cal yr B.P. in Southern Patagonia: Mallín Pollux, Coyhaique, Province Aisén (45°41'30¢ S, 71°50'30¢ W, 640 m Elevation),” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 254:492-507:2007.

Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Division of Natural Areas and Preserves. “Plantago patagonica Jacq., Woolly Plantain,” available on-line.

Rønsted, Nina, Mark W. Chase, Dirk C. Albach and Maria Angelica Bello. “Phylogenetic Relationships within Plantago (Plantaginaceae): Evidence from Nuclear Ribosomal ITS and Plastid trnL-F Sequence Data,” Linnean Society Botanical Journal 139:323-338:2002.

Sharma, Namrata, Pushpa Koul and Awtar Krishan Koul. “Pollination Biology of Some Species of Genus Plantago L.,” Linnean Society Botanical Journal 111:129-138:1993.

Villa-Martínez , Rodrigo and Patricio I. Moreno. “Pollen Evidence for Variations in the Southern Margin of the Westerly Winds in SW Patagonia over the Last 12,600 Years,” Quaternary Research 68:400-409:2007.

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

Photograph: Woolly plantain growing along the shoulder, its spike shrouded in white hairs, 15 May 2011.

Western Goat's Beard

2011-05-15T05:20:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Snowball, Persian yellow, tea and miniature roses, peony, oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, golden spur columbine, moss phlox fading, donkey tail spurge darkening; people set out pepper plants.

Beyond the walls and fences: Fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless crypthanka, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, rice, three awn and cheat grasses; June grass shedding seed; tree of heaven coming back from cold; goat’s head coming up through road paving; buffalo gourd and goldenrod up.

In my yard: Spirea, Siberian pea tree nearly gone, skunkbush, iris, vinca, yellow alyssum peaked, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, chocolate flower; buds on privet, catmint, sea pink and baptisia; black locust recovering from cold; butterfly weed, white spurge, calamintha and lead plant emerged; creeping mahonia has new leaves; wind blew petals off tulips early.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird and small brown birds, gecko, small dark butterfly with orange spots, harvester and small black ants, earth worms.

Weather: Wind relentless as temperatures creep higher; last snow 5/01/11; 15:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Flowers on western goat’s beard remind me of those imitation crystal snowflakes sold in December to put in the window or on a tree. The thick, clear plastic doesn’t reflect or refract light, nor does it let it pass through. The ornaments are visible simply because they block light.

Tragopogon dubius flowers are concentric rings of long, narrow straps. The outermost are pointed, light-green bracts, usually 13 in number. Inside there’s a shorter row of light yellow, five-pointed petals, sometimes offset from the bracts, sometimes overlapping, that gives them their unique sunburst character.

Each afternoon, the bracts fold, shutting the flowers for the night. The following morning, usually about the time I go to the post office on Saturdays, they reopen facing the sun. While the flowers respond only to light, they don’t have to be directly in the sun to open, only close enough to sense it. I have several growing in back that open a little after nine before the sun actually reaches them.

Each day, the center of the inch and a half wide inflorescence expands. The mound of ray florets - for this composite has no disks - has a central core of still unopened flat yellow envelopes that are narrow at the base and pulled tight at the top. Inside each is a brown tube that leads to a white threadlike ovary and black anthers, which John Hilty says, are pressed against the dark style.

The outer row of unopened petals pulls away from the tip, elongates and opens in the center to form a protective tent around the reproductive organs. Narrow yellow tubes at the tops of the styles lengthen, then branch into lighter colored Y’s to capture the darker yellow pollen spread by insects from this or neighboring plants.

Later, the stigmas darken and fall away, sometimes caught like corn silk when the bracts close and trap the pollen. When the next row of petals begins to swell, the already opened ones are pushed against the previously opened florets and eventually lie against the frame.

When all the florets have opened, the ovaries harden into seeds and the receptacle, that sits on a hollow cone, reflexes. The white hairy sepals surrounding each floret elongate into winged parachutes that form a ball, like that found on the closely related dandelion, only much larger, usually two to three inches across, and tawny.

The outer seeds, the ones formed first, are darker and heavier because they contain more phenolic compounds. When a wind comes, they fall closer to the parent plant than the lighter, younger ones. The larger seeds germinate later and produce larger, taller seedlings.

The waxy leaves are as fustian as the flowers. Many describe them as grass-like, because they’re long and narrow. However, they’re immediately identifiable along my drive, because they don’t look anything at all like the surrounding bunch grasses. They’re darker green, taller, and curve inward into claws. It’s obvious they surround a single stalk and are not so many independent blades rising from a crown.

The basal rosette emerges in late summer when newly ripened seed has fallen and temperatures are still between 59 and 72 degrees. The biennial doesn’t bolt until the root crown expands beyond .11 centimeters, and is most likely to bloom when its about quarter inch across and the plant has undergone some period of coolness.

Although an urn of leaves and its supporting root may store carbohydrates for years before conditions are right for it to flower, a stalk usually rises the following spring. The spaces between the original leaves lengthen into a mop.

At the current stage of many in my yard, the conical bud at the tip of the stem peaks up from the nest of leaves. As it pushes from its skirt, new leaves will open from swollen joints on the stem, each wide at the base, then narrowing into a folded blade like the lower ones.

As the stalk grows, it may branch, with each subordinate stem also pointing upwards. The plant will continue producing terminal heads as long as conditions are favorable. Although they usually peter out by late summer, last year there were flowers until frost in late October.

When they die, the hollow stems harden into inverted wooden umbrellas one to two feet high. The plants that grow in the drive become dangerous to the car and must be removed. Undisturbed plants break away in winter and join the tumbleweeds.

I usually pull them after the monsoons when the ground is throughly wet. The taproot is deep, thick, and strong enough to come out in one piece. When the ground is dry, like it is now, the stem snaps and a white milky sap is released. The only way they can be controlled early in the season is by cutting them before they go to seed.

Even then, western goat’s beard puts up new stalks, sometimes shorter ones, and continues to produce flowers so out of scale with their surroundings they draw attention to themselves. Like the plastic snowflake that doesn’t deliver the promised light, my fascination with the flower shape is deadened by the sheer size and rigidity of its internal and external parts.

Enlargement destroys delicacy when it makes things too visible.

Notes:
Clements, David R., Mahesh K. Upadhyaya and Shelley J. Bos. “The Biology of Canadian Weeds. 110. Tragopogon dubius Scop., Tragopogon pratensis L., and Tragopogon porrifolius L.," Canadian Journal of Plant Science 79:153-163:1999.

Gross, Katherine L. “Predictions of Fate from Rosette Size in Four "Biennial" Plant Species: Verbascum thapsus, Oenothera biennis, Daucus carota, and Tragopogon dubius,” Oecologia 48: 209-213:1981.

Hilty, John. “Western Goat's Beard,” Illinois Wildflowers website.

Maxwell, Christine D., Alicja Zobel and David Woodfine. “Somatic Polymorphism in the Achenes of Tragopogon dubius,” Canadian Journal of Botany 72:1282-1288:1994.

Photograph: Western goat’s beard, picture taken while plant was still in shade around 10:35 on 8 May 2011 and old enough to have a reduced core but no so old that the outer petals are flattened yet.

Peony

2011-05-08T04:14:00.004-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Late apples, lower branches on snowballs, first pink peony, first bright orange oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, moss phlox, purple salvia, donkey tail spurge; grape leaves killed by cold. There’s a lot of bare stems in rose bushes from winter kill.

Beyond the walls and fences: Fernleaf globemallow, western stickseed, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, rice and cheat grasses; Virginia creeper and tree of heaven leaves killed by snow and subsequent frost; Virginia creeper already recovering.

In my yard: Sour cherry, Siberian pea tree, tulips, iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax; spirea and lilacs were having a wonderful year until the frost killed the flowers; catalpa and black locust leaves destroyed by snow and cold temperatures; sweet alyssum, California and Shirley poppy seeds germinating; leaves emerging on wisteria; flower buds on Persian yellow rose and perky Sue.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, house finches and other small brown birds, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Snow Sunday that turn into ice on plant surfaces before it melted; cold temperatures Tuesday morning formed frost on plants; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:49 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: If peonies didn’t bloom every year in the village I never would have planted them. I associate the large, voluptuous flowers with the humid midwest where a friend of my parents in Michigan had a row growing in the narrow strip between the foundation of the house and the concrete drive that got the runoff from 35" of precipitation a year. Every June we’d admire her border.

Until this year nothing happened to challenge my childhood perceptions. I planted bare roots of Festiva Maxima in the fall of 2003, knowing, in the best of places, the rhizomes would take at least three years to become established. Mine struggled along on an average 10" of natural water a year, supplemented by hoses. They only bloomed in 2006 and 2009, while the ones in the village flowered each year, bathed in the moist air that rises from the river and the ditches.

Mine finally grew dramatically last spring after our unusually wet winter. They were covered with buds that simply stopped developing when conditions suddenly changed the end of May from cool and wet to hot and dry. When they’d bloomed in the past, it’d been the first week of June.

This winter was unusually dry. I expected nothing. After all, the daffodils didn’t bloom. I was surprised when the plants emerged in early April as vigorously as they had last year. I finally realized it was last year’s cold that had been important, not last year’s moisture.

The life of the peony is governed by temperature, not water or sun angles.

After they finish blooming in June, the plants begin developing buds at the bases of their stems that will be next year’s stems and flowers. The existing verdancy doesn’t increase, but continues supporting the underground activity which changes from bud to root formation in late summer. Before the first frost, the current year’s vegetation turns tan and sere.

During winter, the underground buds need more than 900 hours of cool temperatures to produce flowers. Once the quota is filled, nothing more happens until the soil warms in spring. Then the eyes push up red stalks that rise to carry the season’s complement of compound green leaves and terminal round buds. The flowers open soon after, so long as temperatures remain moderate.

I’m sure my perception that peonies require a warm, moist climate can be traced to the fact the plants come from China and entered the midwest after they’d been hybridized by Europeans. Festiva Maxima was released in 1851 by Auguste Miellez, a rose breeder in Esquermes-les-Lille, an area that gets 25" of rain a year and average January temperatures only fall to 32.

Nothing in their early Chinese history would have disabused me of my beliefs. They were first described by Zhang Zhong Jing of Changsha in modern Hunan province and by Hua Tuo of Bozhou in modern Anhui. The first averages 52" of rain a year and a January low of 43 degrees. The other has 31” of annual precipitation and a January average low of 33.

What’s extraordinary about the two men is not that they lived in areas with similar climates, but that they lived at the same time, when the Chinese civilization was first developing as a civilization. For centuries past, peasants had endured the wars between men who were trying to centralize power and those who resisted.

The Han dynasty had been founded by Liu Bang in 202 BC, and been disrupted by wars, before being reestablished by Liu Xiu in 25 AD. There followed years of prosperity, when trade was opened along what would become the Silk Road to the west, and knowledge began to be valued: Hua could study with a man trained in Ayurvedic medicine, while Zhang learned from Zhang Bozu.

When Cai Lui improved the methods for producing paper in 105 AD, he not only freed silk for trade, but also gave the sons of bureaucratic families a way to record their work.

When Hua and Zhang were living late in the dynasty, war fare and epidemics were threatening again. Instead of turning to traditional remedies or superstitions to treat the sick and injured, as people had in the past, the two applied what we recognize today as scientific principals.

Hua grew every plant reputed to be efficacious, and tested them. He found peony plants and flowers to be worthless, until he had a vision of them as a woman. Popular tradition says he’s the one who then discovered the roots were useful for treating gynecological problems.

Zhang classified plants into three groups, those that could be taken in any quantity, those that should be taken carefully and those that were dangerous. He mixed white peony root from the second category with the safer cinnamon, Chinese licorice, and Chinese jujube into a broth to treat fevers.

Chinese medical theory defines diseases as hot (yang) or cold (yin), and prescribes medicines with the opposite attribute to restore balance within the body. The stripped white root of the herbaceous peony is considered cold while the red root still encased in bark is considered cool.

The healing properties of shao yao must already have been known by Zhang’s and Hua’s ancestors because the species isn’t native to either Hunan or Anhui. Paeonia lactiflora grows in the woods and grasslands of the more northern and western provinces and beyond into Mongolia and Siberia where the climate is both colder and dryer. It was deliberately brought to their areas.

My plants have had their requisite period of cold, and now await the opportunity to bloom. Last Sunday night the buds were covered with snow that turned to ice when the sun rose the next morning. Tuesday, temperatures again fell below freezing and frost developed on any warm, organic surface. The spirea and lilac flowers that survived the snow were dead Wednesday afternoon.

The peony buds were still covered by their calyxes, which may have insulated them, but on Wednesday the buds had expanded enough to begin to split that protective coating. Now, I’m reduced to that state before Hua Tuo and Zhang Zhong Jing when men were helpless in the face of fate and could only watch things unfold, unable to influence events in any way.

The peony buds will either open or not. The flowers will either be magnificent or deformed. This will either be the year of the peony or it won’t.

It all depends on tomorrow’s weather in northern New Mexico.

Notes:
Hong, Deyuan, Kai-yu Pan and Nicholas J. Turland. “Paeonia lactiflora Pallas,” efloras Flora of China website.

Hua, Tuo. Texts destroyed.

Rodrigo-Lopez, Maria Jose. Floriculture as a Diversification Option for the Rural Economy of Northern Ireland, 2010.

Zhang, Zhong Jing. Shanghan Zabing Lun; text lost and reconstructed by Wang Shuhe.

Wang, Guangyao. “The History of Chinese Herbal Medicine,” available on line, on Zhang.

Photograph: Festiva Maxima peony about 8:00 AM Monday morning, 2 May 2011, as the snow was turning to ice before melting completely.

Tree of Heaven

2011-05-01T07:56:00.003-06:00

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, iris, moss phlox, donkey tail spurge; lawns and hay fields beginning to green near road where water flows from ditches.

Beyond the walls and fences: Choke cherry, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless cryptantha, hoary cress, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, purple mat flower, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grass; buds on Virginia creeper; milkweed and ragweed coming up.

In my yard: Sour cherry, spirea, Siberian pea tree, lilacs, tulips, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, blue flax; buds on snowball, peonies and Bath pinks; tomatillos coming up.

Bedding plants: Pansy, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird and bumble bee on Siberian pea; smaller bees around lilac; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain early Monday and Tuesday mornings, followed by cooler nights and more winds; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There’s something worse than a Siberian elm. Trees of heaven not only produce viable seeds and resprout when pruned like elms, but they also sucker from their roots into copses and exude chemicals that keep other plants from their territory.

The team writing the environmental impact statement for widening the road from Española to Los Alamos on the other side of the river found Alianthus altissima growing around Santa Clara creek and recommended it be eradicated as a class B pest. Siberian elms are only class C nuisances and so not proscribed by the state. They can, however, be destroyed during construction without penalty.

Trees of heaven have gotten started along one of the village ditches at the northern end where water from the Santa Cruz enters the acequias. In one area, they’re competing with Siberian elms between the ditch and the pavement. This past winter both were cut back to keep the narrow road clear, but neither was fazed. One is bright green with new leaves. With last week’s warm weather, the other was beginning to leaf at its branch tips.

Ch’un shu is known in China as the spring tree because it’s one of the last to break dormancy, and thus signifies the end of winter famine. According to Shiu Ying Hu, it was primarily used for cooking fuel. However, the dried bark removed from felled trees could also be sold in markets for medicinal purposes as ch’un-po-pi.

The tree entered the western world under false pretenses. A French Jesuit priest, Pierre d'Incarville, thought he was sending back seeds of the tree the Chinese used to make lacquer. When they germinated in Paris, the saplings were mistaken for sumac, because the long leaves broken into pairs of smaller leaflets were similar.

William Prince introduced it commercially in this country as Sicilian Tanner’s Sumac, after Archibald Thompson sent him plants under that name from his West End nursery outside London. Once Prince realized the confusion and offered it as Chinese Ailanthus in the 1820's, the tree began to sell so well his Flushing nursery had problems meeting the demand because he only had male trees. They’re more floriferous than the females and the taller form was considered more aesthetically pleasing.

The market had already been created in Paris where American visitors saw Grand Vernis du Japon growing along the boulevards, especially on the left bank in the fifth arrondissement of Montparnasse. In those years of early industrial life, when coal was burned to produce steam and heat homes, the air was polluted with soot that killed many species. Insects attacked others. The fact the five-petaled male flowers smelled didn’t matter when horses were used for transport.

By the 1840's, Andrew Jackson Downing, the primary popularizer of romantic landscapes in this country, noted the Celestial Tree was “much planted in the streets and public squares” of New York and Philadelphia and that it was especially picturesque on lawns where “the foliage catches the light well, and contrasts strikingly with that of round-leaved trees.”

The tree grows rapidly its first years, concentrating its efforts on height. After about five years it begins to branch. After ten to twenty years, the females produce seeds. Then, home owners discover the problems with seeds, suckers and the smells they released when gardeners try to remove them. By 1851, Downing had turned against the grey barked tree and was recommending “graceful elms and salubrious maples” for street use.

However, a hundred years later Rosalie Doolittle was still telling Albuquerque gardeners that, despite its “reputation for being untidy,” a tree of heaven was “really attractive when the sprays of pods turn brilliant red and yellow as falls approaches.” Even a few years ago Baker Morrow advised New Mexicans the much maligned tree “can make a very pleasant shade or street tree in the right setting.”

They’re correct the tree is attractive when allowed to grow naturally into a wide, low canopy. Both males and females are covered with yellow-green flowers at their branch tips in late spring. Then, in late summer, pink seed heads appear above the leaves, resembling mimosa from a distance.

In Santa Fe, I’ve seen trees growing in courtyards shading working class homes built in the 1950's. Although they tolerate a wide variety of soils, the strong tap roots prefer the lime rich soil of the area. Unfortunately, they need more water than the arid west provides, a minimum of 14" a year, and so they send out suckers to the water conserving yard walls and foundations. Seeds, and possibly discarded suckers, found their way into the nearby ditch, neglected since it was no longer used for irrigation.

Here, trees of heaven not only are growing along the ditches and road sides, but it looks like the member of the tropical simaroubace family has been planted deliberately by a few people, probably from free suckers. In one place down the road, a mature tree shading a double-wide deflected a flying seed, and now has a Siberian elm sapling amongst its suckers.

Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1953, revised 1967.

Downing, Andrew Jackson. A Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1841.

_____. “How to Popularize the Taste for Planting,” The Horiculturalist 7:297-301:1852, quoted by Behula Shah in “The Checkered Career of Alianthus altissima,” Arnoldia 53(3):21-27:1997.

Gannett Fleming West, Inc. NM 30 Improvement Project, Environmental Assessment, January 2011.

Hu, Shiu Ying. “Alianthus,” Arnoldia 39(2):29-50:1979 .

Morrow, Baker H. Best Plants for New Mexico Gardens and Landscapes, 1995.

Murrill, William A. Shade Trees, 1902; on use in Paris.

Prince, W. R. “Introduction of Lombardy Poplar,” The Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser 3:80:1861; on his father’s activities.

Photograph: Tree of heaven leafing along a ditch near the village already colonized by bright green Siberian elms, 24 April 2011.