Sunday, July 30, 2006

Midsummer

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, Illinois bundle flower, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, buffalo gourd, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, wild lettuce, hawkweed, horseweed, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower, purple mat, bindweed, goat head, toothed spurge, rose of Sharon, purple phlox, daylily, roses, sweet pea, faded bouncing Bess, heavenly blue morning glory, pink evening primrose, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, redtop and muhly ring grass, farmer's sunflower, pumpkin. Corn in most gardens has tasseled, color is visible in some apple orchards.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black eyed Susan, blanket flower, golden spur columbine, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flowers, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, yellow cosmos, creeping zinnia.

Looking east: Biennial yellow evening primrose, garlic chives, California poppy, winecup, floribunda (Fashion), small and large flowered soapworts, pink bachelor button, coral beardtongue, hollyhock, Shirley poppy, sweet alyssum.

Look south: Zinnia, crimson rambler morning glory, sensation cosmos, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid (Elisio) roses.

Look west: Perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower, white spurge, frikarti aster, lead plant, catmint, blue flax, sea lavender, Russian sage, purple ice plant, caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnia, supersweet 100 tomato. First tomato visible.

Animal sightings: Brown birds have nest on other side of fence, either in Russian olive or metal building; pair of hummingbirds; quail family; ants; dragonfly; rust colored grasshopper with wings; bees in caryopteris, catmint and golden aster.

Weather: Rainy, but no rain. Smell of sweet alyssum and chocolate flower strong yesterday from humidity. Leaves of young globe willow turned brown Friday; they hadn’t been watered since the first rains and could no longer survive on promises that are flooding Albuquerque.

Weekly update: Roses of Sharon are blooming in town. A woman raised in southeastern Ohio once told me she associated them with the end of summer, because when they bloomed it wasn’t long before school started.

Here, midsummer arrived a week ago Thursday, July 20. When I walked around the house in the morning I found the first zinnia, creeping zinnia and morning glory flowers. The sensation cosmos, still short, showed all three colors, and buds were visible on marigolds and yellow cosmos.

By last Sunday, there were flowers on a catchfly, an annual baby’s breath and a mauve love-in-the mist. On Tuesday, a pink bachelor button opened, on Wednesday the yellow cosmos and a blue love-in-mist on Thursday. Today, the first annual candytuft appeared. The nigella seeds were planted last year, the others this spring.

Seed grown annuals are replacing the perennials of early summer, the roses and hollyhocks, daylilies and sweet peas, that now bloom only where conditions are good or growers attentive. In my garden, the columbine and coreopsis will soon disappear; the flax has lasted longer than usual.

The changing of the guard came almost one month after the solstice and about two weeks after our first, and so far only, real rain. I don’t know if the change is caused by the changing location of the sun or the presence of water, if both are needed, or if the water in the air matters or the water in the ground.

After the rain, golden eye germinated and sunflowers started to grow. Both produced spring seedlings that had gone dormant. Yesterday, someone near the village had large, single sunflowers hanging over the wall.

Other sunflowers are beginning to bud. The Maximillans are growing about a foot a week, and are now taller than the fence. Some tahokia daisies and native helianthus have their first, preflorescent flowers.
Alas, pigweed and Russian thistle follow the same pattern, and pigweed is especially prevalent, about 2' high, along the road. A week ago Friday my neighbor cut his to the ground and removed the cuttings; there were back 2" high Tuesday night. Goat heads sprout every day.

Two days after my first flourish of annuals, yellow evening primroses were scattered in the village and along the main road. By last Saturday, wild lettuce filled some fields while white evening primroses appeared along the road nearer my house. Bigleaved globeflowers are now 3' high and beginning to bloom daily.

This change of seasons is disguised in many gardens by modern hybrids. Tea roses flower all summer if they’re happy. Bedding plants can bloom from the day they’re transplanted.

If one depended on seeds, there would be little from June until the cosmos and zinnias. Many years, there would nothing but trumpet creeper in July.

It’s a Hobson choice which is better, the garden filled with reliable color all season or the one that follows the seasons and weather alternating periods of dormancy with bursts of excitement.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Shirley Poppies

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, Illinois bundle flower, datura, buffalo gourd, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, wild lettuce, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, Queen Anne’s lace, bigleaf globeflower, bindweed, goat’s head, toothed spurge, rose of Sharon, purple phlox, daylily, roses, sweet pea, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, muhly ring grass.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black eyed Susan, blanket flower, golden spur columbine, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flowers, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, butterfly weed, miniature rose (Rise and Shine), creeping zinnia.

Looking east: Biennial yellow evening primrose, California poppy, winecup, small and large flowered soapworts, coral beardtongue, holly hock, Shirley poppy, sweet alyssum.

Look south: Zinnia, crimson rambler morning glory, sensation cosmos, blaze and rugosa roses.

Look west: Perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower, white spurge, frikarti aster, lead plant, catmint, blue flax, sea lavender, Russian sage, purple ice plant, caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnias, supersweet 100 tomato, zucchini.

Animal sightings: Small hummingbird still mining the coral beardtongue; ants dragon fly; large grasshoppers back, probably migrating in from prairie; birds and crickets are heard but hidden.

Weather: Hot days, cool nights; passing storms bring water in the air, but none in the ground.

Weekly update: One perfect poppy, coral pink in the sun, justifies all the seed scattered to the wind for a decade.

The Shirley poppy, with three layers of petals, resembled a peony with its slightly ruffled petals standing at various heights to hide the center when it opened last Sunday morning. It was fading Monday night, gone when I got home on Tuesday. Some petals on the ground, a seed capsule, and four buds promising more.

I started growing poppies to the east of the house around 1997 when I put some Thompson and Morgan seed it that had been lying around for a couple years. It grew, reseeded, and continued to grow through 1999.

When I went to order more, I discovered the company had stopped selling that particular seed. So I tried others from Stokes and Wildseed, from Lake Valley and Northrup King, Burpee and even Ferry Morse when it was available. At best, a few flowers each year, no reseeds, no success like my first year.

I blamed myself, planted in the fall, on the snow, early spring, summer if there were leftovers. Nothing. I considered all the seed predators, the gopher burrowing under the bed, the convoys of ants, the voracious rabbit.
Then I blamed the wind, which howls along the eastern fence. Last year, dozens of plants came up beyond my gate in the bed my neighbor was developing for wildflowers. I didn’t know if it was my seed or hers. Then, just as they were ready to bloom, she yanked them. Apparently, no volunteers were wanted among the wildflowers.

This year, too late to help, I put up the southern fence to moderate the wind.

With all the seed and all the experiments, I have no idea who gave me the poppy. Most likely it’s a Ryburgh hybrid, but it could be anything; the seed can lie dormant for decades. I have one tall single orange plant that’s 20" high, when most of the single red and orange flowers are 12". This one was 18" while the tiny pink flowers are about 7". A few are double, most are single; a few have yellow anthers, most are black.

Shirley poppies were derived from red corn poppies which anthropologists speculate evolved in southern or eastern Europe and traveled with humans in the bronze age. Why is more elusive. They may have hidden in more valuable seed, they may have been grown for their seed which produces oil, still used in Germany and Austria. Rhoeadine, a mild sedative used in cough syrups and French aperitifs, can be hypnotic in larger doses.

William Wilks assumed the vicarage in Shirley, England, in 1879. The next year he noticed one flower had "had a very narrow edge of white." Educated at Oxford before natural history and natural theology diverged, he’d become a fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1867, the year after he was ordained.

He saved the seed and began experimenting with selective breeding, until he had removed the characteristic blotch at the base, and changed the stamens and anthers to yellow or white. He retired to the RHS just a few years before Joel McCrae’s poem, "In Flanders’ Fields," produced a commercial market for the red flower.

Others continued his work, producing pinks and oranges, whites and pastels, picotee and solid colors of all heights, singles and doubles. Most of my seed probably comes from the United States and is open-pollinated. Some has come from Holland and Germany, and may be sterile hybrids.

Apart from its medicinal use, Papaver rhoeas has had no place in agriculture, except as a nuisance at harvest time. Mayfair Drugs tells us, it has no scent, produces no honey. It relies only on its "short lived, brilliant colour" to attract insects to pollinate it.

Only on its beauty. What more does an insect or bronze age human need? Why else do we garden?
Notes:Mayfair Drugs. "In Flanders Fields where poppies blow...," available on-line.

McCrae, Joel. "In Flanders Fields" (1915).

Wilks, William. Quoted by Croydon, "The Old Vicarage," available on-line.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Bundle Flower

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, Illinois bundle flower, datura, white evening primrose, velvetweed, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, Queen Anne’s lace, bigleaf globeflower, bindweed, goat’s head, toothed spurge, purple phlox, purple coneflower, daylily, roses, sweet pea, bouncing Bess, zinnia, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, muhly ring grass. More corn has tasseled, apples visible in some orchards.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black eyed Susan, blanket flower, golden spur columbine, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flowers, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, butterfly weed, miniature rose (Rise and Shine).

Looking east: Biennial yellow evening primrose, California poppy, winecup, small and large flowered soapworts, coral beardtongue almost bloomed out, Flanders poppy, sweet alyssum. Hollyhocks have few flowers left, but have new basal leaves, both here and along roads.

Look south: Cosmos; Blaze and rugosa roses.

Look west: Perennial four o’clock, white spurge, catmint, blue flax, sea lavender, Russian sage, purple ice plant, caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnias, supersweet 100 tomato, zucchini.

Animal sightings: Power line bird, long tailed bird, green hummingbird, gecko, ants, grasshoppers, white cabbage butterfly, bees on purple flowers, snake sprawled in the drive.

Weather: Clouded over early Sunday, rained at noon and again at midnight. By end of the week, weather returned to hot afternoons moderated by storms that passed by and cool nights.

Weekly update: A couple years ago, something resembling mimosa materialized in my septic field. Since it was in a place it could do serious damage, I needed to know what it was. My eastern neighbor has a Siberian elm growing over his tank that got started from ignorance, and now he can’t kill it.

The only thing I knew was that it couldn’t be mimosa, which naturalized in the southeastern United States (zones 6-10) and prefers acidic soil. Whatever I had emerged where the plasterer and mason mixed their mortar and intensified the already alkaline soil.

I looked in various wildflower books with no luck. Then this year I caught it in bloom, and now know it’s Illinois bundle flower.

The name’s misleading, since it’s a tall grass prairie plant found between the Mississippi and Rockies. André Michaux just happened to be in Illinois when he found it in 1803. I isolated it by it’s similarity to prairie mimosa which exists elsewhere in the southwest. Acacia angustissima has brown stems, while the plant in my yard, desmanthus illinoensis, has green ones.

Bundle flower settles in disturbed soil like the construction site over my septic field. It’s near a suckering rugosa rose and some white evening primroses. It and the rose are the only things the gopher didn’t kill in that area two years ago, probably because the root contains an insecticide, gallic ester myrictrin.

While bundle flower indisputably can grow in my yard, it’s not obvious how it got here. The most prosaic answer is the seed is offered by Plants of the Southwest in Santa Fe. Some neighbor may have bought it, and the wind decided.

However, mere availability does not explain why someone would buy it. While the leaves are nice, the flower balls are no more attractive than Dutch clover which they resemble from a distance. The answer may lie in the root, which also contains dimethyltryptamine, an hallucinogenic drug used as a substitute for South American plants in the shaman’s ayahuasca cocktail that combines harmala alkaloids with DMT.

This narrows it down to some neighbor beyond the big arroyo touched by the Santa Fe lifestyle.

The plant isn’t proscribed though the government frowns on DMT. In fact, it’s recommended for restorations because its legume roots shelter bacteria that stabilize soil nitrogen. High protein content makes it good range feed, and quail favor the seeds. I don’t remember if it was here before or after the quail, who migrated after the Cerro Grande fire of 2000. It’s possible they brought it, or that it was used to reseed the damaged Jemez.

All I know is it first appeared in 2003.

I’m still concerned about leaving it over the septic tank, with its "large, fleshy roots," its "deep taproot." The shrub isn’t supposed to get more than 3' or 4' high, and mine are about 24" in this cool summer. If the roots mirror the plant, then it’s probably safe until it spreads too far. The existence of the poisonous root is justification enough to let it grow if it protects the rose from the gopher.

Notes:Fleshy root, Klaus Trenary, "Desmanthus illinoensis" (1997). He has the best on-line description with details on the active agents and uses.

Deep taproot, "Illinois Bundleflower (Desmanthus illinoensis)," available on-line.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Mexican Hat

What’s blooming in the area: Illinois bundle flower, datura, white evening primrose, velvetweed, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, hawkweed, milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, bigleaf globeflower, tumble mustard, bindweed, buffalo gourd, toothed spurge, purple phlox, purple coneflower, roses, sweet pea, bouncing Bess, daylily, zinnias, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine. Large yucca down the road has bounced back after rain with remaining flower almost perpendicular. Corn has tassels in one vegetable patch, onions have heads in another.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black-eyed Susan, blanket flower, golden spur columbine, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flowers, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, miniature rose (Sunrise, Rise and Shine).

Looking east: Biennial yellow evening primrose, California poppy, winecup, coral bells, small and large flowered soapworts, coral beardtongue, Flanders poppy, sweet alyssum. Hollyhocks have lost their basal leaves here and in village.

Look south: Butterfly gladiola, rugosa rose.

Look west: Perennial four o’clock, white spurge, catmint, blue flax, sea lavender, balloon flower, purple ice plant, caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnias, supersweet 100 tomato, zucchini.

Animal sightings: Grey squirrel, power line bird, long tailed bird, two green hummingbirds, quail with young, stink bugs, aphids, small black ants swarm stalks of hawkweed, grasshoppers, bees on catmint, mosquitoes, sheep. Gopher has killed more tomatoes.

Weather: Cool nights, hot afternoons until storms moved in that left little water on Sunday, more on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Hard rain Thursday with hail. Arroyos down the road had water in bottoms, near arroyo ran with brown, churning flood waters; whitish foam landed on bushes in old roadbed. Road and roadside flooded in many places, with standing water in a number of level yards. Rain on Friday flood roads and yards again. Mosquitoes hatched. Uphill neighbor brought in backhoes to rework the drive and raised front garden.

Weekly update: Promiscuous is the word used for corn with its easy ways of fertilizing other varieties, much to the dismay of seed companies who want to protect their patents and organic gardeners who fear contamination.

It’s a word that comes to mind when I see Mexican Hats take over my garden, in a mix of pure yellow, mahogany with yellow edges, gold streaked with red, and ochre blotched with caramel. The color variations are similar to other composites like marigolds which David Burpee crossbred before altering chromosomes of Black-eyed Susans into gloriosa daisies.

I bought two yellow flowered plants in 1995 from Santa Fe Greenhouse and put them by the garage, where their only water dripped off the roof. They survived, so I bought one the next year for my main garden. In 1997, I added three red plants. Today, there are still some yellow plants blooming by the garage, but at least fifty are in the garden, plus another ten or twenty on the perimeter and a half dozen or so at my front door.

I installed the first section of cedar fence in the spring of 2002, and the next year, yellow and red flowers appeared among the Maximilian sunflowers. Apparently, the fence stopped their flight and they dropped and dug themselves in. I extended the fence across the north in the late fall of 2004. Right on schedule, seeds blowing north were halted and this year red plants bloom on the far side of the garage.

They’re best seen from afar, especially when bees hover. Wiry stems hold the flowers above open clusters of grey-green leaves. Their narrow blooms are at their peak now, unbattered by the rains, but will look ragged when insects eat the petals and the disk flowers climb the cone from the base, row by row, leaving a brown center with no rays that reverts to dull olive when the seeds are released.

Ratibida columnaris, to give it its formal name, is native to the limestone soils of the plains. The pubescent stems and leaves have coarse textured hairs that absorb water from the air. The perennial roots are shallow, but young roots have a crook that keeps them tethered in the winds. With time, the roots go deeper and develop subterranean branches.

The mixed colors appear where I first planted them in my garden, and at the eastern fence. The yellow, which is recessive, have colonized the edge of the drive while the red are moving by themselves into empty spaces in the garden. Either the yellow apparently can tolerate areas with less water, or they cannot mutate and so stay one color.

Hybridizers have turned to other composites, with greater commercial possibilities. After I plated some new sunflower seeds some years ago, my natives began to show streaks of color. I don’t know if it was natural or a result of my seed. When sunlight filtered through one of nature’s burgundy blanketflowers, it diffused the color markings into the same coral as the surrounding beardtongues.

The variant sunflowers and blanketflowers are not as plentiful as Mexican Hats, because sunflowers depend on water in the air and the other are just not as hardy here. In the nineteenth century, revivalist Charles Finney called on women to pray in public in promiscuous assemblies. Coneflowers alone answer the muezzin.

Notes:
Finney, quoted by Douglas M. Strong, "The Crusade for Women’s Rights and the Formative Antecedents of the Holiness Movement," available on-line.

For Burpee’s role, see "The Legacy of W. Atlee Burpee," at burpee.com.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Grasses

What’s blooming in the area: Yucca, datura, white evening primrose, velvetweed, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, hawkweed; goatsbeard, horseweed, wild lettuce, milkweed, bindweed, buffalo gourd, purple coneflower, sweet pea, roses, daylilies, bouncing Bess, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, grama grass, rice grass, three-awn grass.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black eyed Susan, blanket flower, golden spur columbine, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flowers, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, miniature rose (Sunrise).

Looking east: Biennial yellow evening primrose, California poppy, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink, small and large flowered soapworts, coral beardtongue, hollyhock, sweet alyssum from seed taller than bedding plants.

Look south: Butterfly gladiola, rugosa roses.

Look west: Asiatic lily, perennial four o’clock, white spurge, catmint, blue flax, purple ice plant.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnias, supersweet 100 tomato.

Animal sightings: Power line bird, small green hummingbird, geckoes, squash bug, aphids, ants, grasshoppers, bees, black widow. Sheep are still down the road. Something, either the rabbit or gopher, is attacking the tomatoes; seedlings to west sprout in night, disappear by afternoon.

Weather: Afternoon storms blow over, keep days from getting too hot; rain late Monday and Saturday evening. Pulled out foot high Russian thistles; neighbor’s pigweed has sprouted a foot since it was cut down last weekend. Should be good day to weed.

Weekly update: Now the heat’s set in, and the flowers of June are gone, replaced with what Lady Bird Johnson called the dang yellow composites. I’ve done all I can to plant and sow, and now must wait, provide water and eliminate weeds. I’ve turned my attention to my grasses, which are so dry they crack when they’re stepped on.

When I bought my land, the upward, northern section was primarily ring muhly grass, while the downhill area to the south was fairly pure needle grass with scattered clumps of blue grama or rice grass. After the house was relocated, I reclaimed the land to the west by moving needle grass that was in the way of the garage.

Over time, winterfat grew along the driveways and June grass crept in along the brick edging of the western border. Otherwise, the native vegetation was fine until the drought after the Cerro Grande Fire, when the ring muhly died. Yellowbrush and stickseed whitebristle moved in. Last summer, the needle grass to the west died, and winterfat and stickseed threaten.

About two years ago, people started using the prairie land to the south for ATVs, and Russian thistle is colonizing the bare spots. This spring, my wire fence was solid with dead tumbleweeds waiting to blow in. I figure I had only a short time to avoid losing my last section of prairie.

A couple weeks ago, I replaced the farm fence with cedar board. The fence builders churned up the soil, and stomped on most of the grass within 3 feet of the fence. In two days, they did more damage than the ATVs in as many summers. I immediately started hosing the area along the fence late in the day to revive the grass that was stepped on.

Interestingly, the ring muhly is coming back on its own. Apparently, it needs cool weather to grow, and this is the first year since the drought after the Los Alamos fire that conditions have been right.

The bunch grasses, on the other had, seem to need water. In good years, the seed stalks get to 4' and wave in the wind. This year they’re about a foot high, with far fewer seeds. Before the rain on Monday, the area by the fence already showed signs of recovery. Now, we’ll see if last night’s rain is enough to save the rest.

Note: Actually, Lady Bird was more colorful in her description of the DYCs, and was quoting one of the experts she hired to help her with her roadside wildflower program. See, Lady Bird Johnson and Carlton B. Lees, Wildflowers across America (1989).