What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, winterfat, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, fields of golden eye, tahokia daisy, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, horseweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower, purple mat, bindweed, roses, sweet pea, purple phlox, new flowers on bouncing Bess, canna, heavenly blue morning glory, cardinal climber, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, Maximilian, native and farmer’s sunflowers, muhly ring and black gramma grasses. Hay cut.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black-eyed Susan, blanket flower, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flower, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, yellow cosmos, creeping zinnia, nasturium, butterfly weed, chrysanthemum, miniature roses (Sunrise, Rise and Shine).
Looking east: Yellow evening primrose, garlic chives, California poppy, crackerjack marigold, tall zinnias, winecup, floribunda (Fashion), large flowered soapwort, pink bachelor button, Shirley poppy, sweet alyssum.
Looking south: Small zinnias, crimson rambler morning glory, sensation cosmos, heath aster, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid (Elisio) roses, tamarix.
Looking west: Perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower, white phlox (David), larkspur, frikarti aster, lead plant, veronica (Goodness Grows) catmint, sea lavender, Russian sage, ladybells, purple ice plant, caryopteris.
Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnia.
Animal sightings: Small green hummingbird, quail family, small chartreause bird with blank and white tail eating yellow cosmos seeds, middle sized brown bird, baby gecko, worm, bees on sedum, ladybug on horseweed, ants, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, flies, horse, sheep.
Weather: Rain Sunday, Monday morning, early Friday morning and spitting attempts yesterday; heavy dews on other days.
Weekly update: Last Sunday I transplanted piñon trees that had germinated around the house. When I tried this two years ago, I did it during a rainy spring. They weren’t ready for last year’s drought. This time I waited until rain had soaked the ground and there was a chance temperatures would be cooler.
I never have much luck moving trees because it’s so hard to get roots, and these were about 18" high. Piñon apparently have relatively short tap roots, and extensive, shallow roots that seek surface water. One was so small I tried a trowel and ended up pulling it up; the plant was 9" high, the woody root equally long, and the main lateral root as long as the two together.
I’m not absolutely sure these are piñon. They don’t behave like I’ve heard, but I don’t know what else they can be. They are blue or blue grey and obviously conifers. When I looked them up to confirm the identification I discovered they’re not the common trees found around here, Pinus edulis, which have clusters of two needles. These very clearly have thick, sharp, single needles on branches spaced along reddish brown stems. The only pine that meets that criteria, Pinus monophylla, grows farther west, over the mountains in the Great Basin.
The first seedling I noticed was in my neighbor’s yard growing under the eave of his metal barn. Some ten years later, it’s about 4' tall. A few year’s later one appeared under the down spout too close to my house.
I saw no more until the year after the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, when two appeared. Since I’ve had several emerge each year, always in a drip line or along a hose in a garden bed. I moved a dozen in 2004, and six this year. There’s another I can’t move without risking the flower bed, a fugitive I couldn’t find hidden among the Mexican hat, and I one I forgot growing near a hose with the yucca.
The life cycles of the two piñon are similar, and they’ve been known to interbreed. At one time, they were thought to be subspecies of Pinus cembroides. How it got here, who knows. Along the main road and in the village, blue and green conifers are mixed with other trees, and some have obviously been planted. Perhaps the owners brought them from land they had, far enough way to be the one-leaved variety, perhaps men working in Nevada or southwestern Colorado. It’s possible someone at the ranch estate across the arroyo transplanted seedlings from someplace like Arizona.
The introduction of the alien species had to have happened at least 35 years ago; it takes that long for the trees to produce seed. Piñon take 150 years to fully mature, and live at least 400 years.
Seeds take three years to form, then have a relatively short potency period. The single leaf variety usually drop near the parent and are moved by birds or rodents. Rodents plant the natives. Although seeds are wingless and rarely fly, I’m assuming mine blew from the south or southwest and landed where wind currents changed around buildings. I find it hard to believe deer mice carry food a mile then hide it in the wettest places available.
Piñon usually require what’s called a nurse plant to shelter them during their early years. Even then seedlings grow about an inch a year, and growth is determined by the water supply. Apparently my house is acting as a wet nurse and they grow quickly. The one I noticed in 1999 by the down spout was 6" high the next year, and a foot in 2001.
When I lived in Michigan, I had problems with maple and box elder seedlings. The state warned they were responding to drought by producing more seed than usual in an attempt by the species to survive the death of mature trees.
I assume something similar is happening here. The combination of the fire, drought and bark beetles have severely threatened the trees. Any time you talk with people, they’ll tell you how many trees they’ve lost in the past few years, even here in the valley, down from Los Alamos.
Even though the forest service says it takes 20 to 30 years for piñon to begin to recover from a fire, that’s because it takes that long for protectiveshrubs to regenerate. My guess is the wet season of the 1997-1998 El Niño stimulated more seed that was ready for trees to process when threats materialized. Certainly high spring winds could carry seed to my unintended nursery.
If I botched the transplanting, they’ll die right away. More likely, they’ll succumb to the winter cold or next summer’s heat. If I still have them in a year in their less advantageous locations surrounded by winterfat, I may just be able to see them along the drive when I die. Statistics on growth don’t promise anything more.
Notes: United States Forest Service. "Pinus monophylla," available on-line.
What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, winterfat, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, buffalo gourd, golden eye, tahokia daisy, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, horseweed, toothed spurge colonies along road, pigweed, ragweed, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower in full bloom, purple mat, bindweed, roses, sweet pea, more purple phlox, bouncing Bess, crackerjack marigold hedge, canna, heavenly blue morning glory, cardinal climber, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, Maximilian and native sunflowers, muhly ring and black gramma grasses. Heads bent from weight of oil in farmer’s sunflowers.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black-eyed Susan, blanket flower, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flower, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, yellow cosmos, creeping zinnia, butterfly weed, chrysanthemum, miniature roses (Sunrise, Rise and Shine).
Looking east: Yellow evening primrose, garlic chives, California poppy, winecup, floribunda (Fashion), large flowered soapwort, pink bachelor button, Shirley poppy, sweet alyssum.
Looking south: Zinnia, crimson rambler morning glory, sensation cosmos, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid (Elisio) roses, tamarix.
Looking west: Perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower, white phlox (David), white spurge, larkspur, frikarti aster, lead plant, catmint, sea lavender, Russian sage, ladybells, purple ice plant, caryopteris.
Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnia. First ripe tomatoes (supersweet 100).
Animal sightings: Hummingbird on yellow zinnia, woodpecker on utility pole, bees, ants, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, sheep, beef cattle.
Weather: Rain Sunday and Monday nights, then again yesterday and early this morning; mid-week storms missed the area, but dew formed at night. Severe erosion into the near arroyo on the side where the shoulder was cleared. A backhoe upended the culvert dumping into the arroyo on other side, perhaps helping breed the mosquitoes that have been nastier than usual.
Weekly update: It’s county fair time back home in Michigan. My first year in 4-H that meant a jar of zinnias for opening day.
I don’t know why Zinnia elegans were proscribed for first year gardeners. The obvious reasons are they bloom during fair weeks, survive for judging as cut flowers and are reputed to be easy for children to grow. Just as important, seed companies had been promoting them for years.
My mother saved a Thompson and Morgan catalog from that year, probably one I requested for the 4-H project. They were offering Lilliput, which Peter Henderson had introduced here in 1910, and a number of the tall, large flowered varieties that John Bodger and David Burpee began introducing in 1920.
When I moved back to Michigan, I celebrated with my childhood plants. Most died before they were put out. I tried seeds. Few germinated. Only Cut and Come Again bloomed, once.
I was no more successful with zinnias when I moved to New Mexico. But someone down the road scattered seeds outside the wall of a new house, possibly the five packets for a dollar kind. This time of the year, it was a solid mass of 3' high, bright flowers.
They could grow here. And they had to come from seeds. Bedding plants still don’t survive for me, and the stores that carry them don’t have much better luck keeping them alive long enough to sell. As a result, nurseries are shipping single pots, and this year the local hardware was charging $2.00 a plant.
The most common potted varieties have been State Fair and Peter Pan. Ferry-Morse used colchicine to double the number of chromosomes in the first large-flowered tetraploid zinnia in the 1950s. John Mondry developed the dwarf after he noticed a plant with no male parts that was easy to pollinate in the Burpee test gardens. The first F1 hybrid was introduced in 1971.
Periodically, new varieties are marketed as improvements on the two. Oklahoma and Benary Giants haven’t made it to my local stores. Dasher and Magellan died as quickly as Peter Pan.
Since I have no memories of absolute failure in 4-H, I must have grown some zinnias that first year, no matter how few, and I kept wondering why I had worse problems as an adult. I thought maybe seed companies were more interested in commercial growers than people like me, and the seeds they produced required more uniform conditions than nature provided.
Stokes Seeds warns commercial growers the only seeds they should sow outside are open-pollinated ones. The only ones it explicitly identifies as OP are Burpeeana. Not even Burpee still sells them.
Each year, I buy a number of affordable varieties from both retail and mail order sources. Paintbrush bloomed in 1995, Lollipop, Lilliput and Thumbelina in 1997, Burpeeana Giant in 1999, Lilliput in 2001, Lilliput and Cut and Come Again in 2003, Thumbelina last year. But none bloomed very much, nothing could be predicted, and some years nothing happened at all.
This year I have the zinnias I was promised when I was ten. The days turned warm early, but the evenings remained cool. I sowed Lilliput, Thumbelina, and some tall varieties on May 20. Within a week the drawfs germinated, and they kept coming up.
Then, the plants went all but dormant at about 3" high until the rains of July. They resumed growing and put out their first flowers July 20. The first double yellow dahlia heads appeared two days later. Almost to the day, the promised 60 days from sowing.
So far as I can tell, the first dwarfs looked like pictures of Thumbelina, which Bodger introduced in 1963. Since, more have opened with the full domes of Lilliput. With time some singles have appeared among the taller double plants. The variation could be different seedsmen, or both Canary Bird and Benary Golden Yellow germinated.
I may finally have a gaudy garden, but my flowers are small and the stems short. In the village, two people sowed the larger, more traditional plants, and have flamboyant borders. They are the ones who would win blue ribbons. My consolation prize is wondering what will work next year, if I should ignore the frost warnings and plant before the days get long, if the fence will moderate the winds, if I’ve finally found the right sources and varieties, or if it’s all just a midway ring toss.
What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, winterfat, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, golden eye, tahokia daisy, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, horseweed, pigweed, white sweet clover, toothed spurge, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower, purple mat, bindweed, rose of Sharon, roses, sweet pea, bouncing Bess, canna, heavenly blue morning glory, cardinal climber, pink evening primrose, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, native and farmer’s sunflowers. More hay cut.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Black eyed Susan, blanket flower, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flower, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, yellow cosmos, creeping zinnia, butterfly weed, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Yellow evening primrose, garlic chives, California poppy, winecup, floribunda (Fashion), large flowered soapwort, pink bachelor button, coral beardtongue, h ollyhock, Shirley poppy, sweet alyssum, tamarix.
Looking south: Zinnia, crimson rambler morning glory, sensation cosmos, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid (Elisio).
Looking west: Perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower, white phlox (David), white spurge, larkspur, frikarti aster, lead plant, catmint, blue flax, sea lavender, Russian sage, ladybells, purple ice plant, caryopteris.
Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnia.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, bees, ants, grasshoppers, mosquitoes. Sheep are back.
Weather: Rain Sunday and again Thursday night; river still running brown; standing water in places all week. Neighbors, especially those who’ve recently moved near the flood plain, continue to use backhoes to reroute water to the nearby arroyo.
Weekly update: My white phlox is finally filling its heads with clusters of flat-faced florets. Down the road, purple ones have been blooming for more than a month. Indeed, the first flowers of July are already gone.
When I was a child, I associated phlox with daylilies and peonies, the costly plants that arrived in fall as bare roots. They can still be expensive and can still be ordered as dormant crowns, but they also can be found in pots in spring.
I associated them then with herbaceous borders I saw in photographs of grand estates. Even now, when I see mass plantings through the gates of the two local Santa Fe style rancheras, I count the flowers and multiply by 10. If their gardens were new, they would cost something like $500 to install. Mine would be $25 today.
Phlox began its ascension into the aristocracy around 1730 when John Bartram sent seeds to England. By 1851, Joseph Breck knew men there and in this country who were exchanging seeds that improved each generation and reproduced prolifically.
When distinguished amateurs produced better plants they stimulated interest among the more discerning gardeners who in turn provoked the efforts of commercial breeders like Victor Lemoine in Nancy, Wilhelm Pfitzer in Stuttgart and Karl Foerster in Potsdam. White Flower Farm still assures its customers garden phlox will establish "any well-bred border."
Genealogists haven’t tracked the pedigrees of individual plants the way they have roses, so experts only say modern hybrids are derived from Phlox paniculata. They rarely mention they’re part of the phlocideae branch of the polemonia family which Raven and Axelrod believe evolved during "a summer-dry climate" in the California floristic province about 13 to 15 million years ago in the Langhian Miocene.
Despite the veneer of Philadelphia respectability, the family developed in the wild west. And like all mainline families with their black sheep, cultivars insist on regressing back to the rosy purple species. Bissland says it happens when the roots get hot. Gardner suggests Darwinian selection occurs when the "vigorous magenta flowers...crowd out the superior strains." More likely, it’s the same inbreeding that makes F2 hybrids feckless.
Rancheras can’t enforce exclusive rights to purple phlox. A large colony grows under piñons along a wall near the village and another clump exists along a heavily shaded irrigation canal just a bit beyond the rancheras. One blooms under a trumpet creeper nearer my house and a large plant prospers in front of a single-wide near the orchards. They probably began as small gifts or purchases that found likely places, then naturalized.
My white phlox have yet to go native. I tried David and Miss Lingard in 1997 after I discovered plants could survive with little care under the drip line of the west side of the garage where the ground freezes in winter and there’s shade in the mornings.
The plants sputtered along a few years, then Miss Lingard failed. I replaced her with more David in 1999. Then last year, the year of the grasshoppers, they colonized and were one of the few untouchables to flower. Since my current 17 stalks are still in clusters, I assume the five plants put out new shoots from their crowns.
David is now touted as the ideal plant for reverse snobs, the women who join environmental groups to save the planet instead of garden clubs. The seedlings were discovered in the 1980s by volunteers for the Brandywine Conservancy.
Like all the cultivars ever introduced, some individual, in this case Richard Simon, believed it was commercially viable. The conservancy let several nurseries accumulate stock, and now, it’s available everywhere, emblazoned with its "plant of the year" stickers. But, the Perennial Plant Association intimates they’re not just any red, white or blue variety offered by the cheaper mail order catalogs; these could qualify for the DAR, just might be descendants of those seeds collected by Bartram.
David’s for sale, and it’s possible to locate strains with names like Blue Paradise, but the purple phlox down the road cannot be bought. Here in the valley, it’s a tough native, too democratic to be fenced in by conventions, and quite willing to prostitute itself with flowers in July.
Notes:Bissland, James H., quoted by Alfred Carl Houttes, The Book of Perennials, 1948.
Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden, 1851, reprinted by OPUS, 1988.
Gardner, Jo Ann. The Heirloom Garden, 1992.
Perennial Plant Association, "Phlox ‘David’," available on-line.
Raven, Peter Hamilton and Daniel Isaac Axelrod, cited by C. D. Bell and R. W. Patterson, "Molecular phylogeny and biogeography of Linanthus (Polemoniaceae).," American Journal of Botany 87:1857-1870:2000.
What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, Illinois bundle flower, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, buffalo gourd, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, horseweed, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower, purple mat, bindweed, rose of Sharon, purple phlox, roses, sweet pea, faded bouncing Bess, heavenly blue morning glory, cardinal climber, pink evening primrose, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, native and farmer’s sunflowers, pumpkins and beans. Hay cut in one field near 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: Yellow evening primrose, garlic chives, California poppy, winecup peaked, floribunda (Fashion), small and large flowered soapworts peaked, 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); red hips visible on rugosa rose.
Look west: Perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower, white phlox (David), 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.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, bees, ants, worm, grasshoppers on Russian sage, small snake near eastern bed. Quail crossed road with 20 young. Gopher killed a hollyhock and tomato.
Weather: Solid rain last night and this morning; gentle rain the night before as Chris dissipated in Caribbean. Earlier, the usual hot days, cloudy afternoons, cool nights, and no useful rain.
Weekly update: Evening primroses flourish this year. The tall yellow biennials are everywhere, the white cluster by the roadside, and solitary pink cultivars unfold in village gardens. In addition, velvetweed has established large colonies, and a willow leaved gaura sprouted at the road by my drive.
I haven’t driven along the other side of the river at the right time of day to see if the Hartweg and white primroses are blooming there as well. Calylophos hartwegii usually sprawl for a short stretch along the road through Santa Clara land.
It’s easy to ascribe their triumph to cool weather, but that doesn’t explain much with biennials. They had to have had their good season several years ago; I just removed unwanted plants that started growing before this year’s plants bloomed, and so must be last year’s offspring. This year’s flowers are from plants that grew between the grasshoppers of last summer and the invasion of Japanese beetles in 2003.
Botanists would tell us survival of the genes under extraordinary circumstances is a defining characteristic of the plant family Onagraceae. In 1929 Johansen theorized from chromosome counts that the family originated when two species crossbred and produced a fertile offspring that could breed with either of its parents. This created two related, but separate strains, the one tied back to the mother, the other to the father.
This is all posited to have occurred in the area of today’s intermontane southwestern deserts during the Eocene when the Rockies were first being formed and grasses were evolving some 34 to 54 million years ago. From there, Katinas, et alia, have traced the gauras, calylophus and oenothera eastward.
The primroses (oenothera) are the fifth descendant on the dominant side. Gaura emerged three stages later. And, they’re still propagating: Gaura neomexicana coloradoensis was first reported in 1895 around Fort Collins. A hundred years later, the population is still small enough to count in Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming.
For nearsighted people like me who only see external characteristics, yellow evening primroses (Oenothera biennis) have flowers with four large petals on tall, rangy plants that can be recognized from the road. Less obvious from a distance, the four sepals curve downward and the eight anthers protrude. The sepals of the Hartwegs merely point away from the flower, but otherwise look the same.
Velvetweeds (Gaura mollis) have smaller flowers that advertise themselves by catching morning light a foot above their leaves. It’s necessary to stop to see the tiny white petals clasped by pink sepals which survive after the petals have fallen. The anthers are as obvious.
Insects apparently don’t have the same problems recognizing them, but the sepal embracement of the petals creates a funnel that hides the nectar from all but the most specialized pollinators like moths, hummingbirds and some bees. I never see any insects or birds near my flowers; in the early morning the bees are at the catmint and caryopteris.
Velvetweed has compensated for the difficulty of attracting insects by developing rhizomatous roots. It may have been forming colonies for years underground, unnoticed until conditions favored their fluorescence this summer.
The white primroses are itinerant. When they appear, and they don’t emerge every year, they may be 50' or a 100' from their ancestors. Several years ago, they shimmered above a field near San Ildefonso for about a week. I don’t know if drought prevented them from reappearing or hungry cattle.
My natives remain short, with serrated leaves and no more than two flowers at a time that curve into shallow cups. The ones along the road grow about a foot and have a number of flowers with petals that lay flat like a cross and sepals that fuse at the tips. Mine, with their reddish stems, usually begin blooming in May and are gone by 7am. The ones by the road with their whitish stalks open this time of year and last until mid-morning.
Perennial pink primroses (Oenothera speciosa) reseed within a few feet of their parents, usually nearer the walk where there’s more water, but so far they have not naturalized. The ones that edged a drive in the village did not recover from the Japanese beetles.
The fickelness of the onagraceae clan is one feature that makes them interesting to grow, or rather watch, since they disdain domestication. Only Gaura lindheimeri is currently attracting nurserymen like Baldassare Mineo and time will tell if anything he produces survives as well as the little white primroses that migrate every year.
Notes:
Johansen, Donald A. "A Proposed Phylogeny of the Onagraceae Based Primarily on Number of Chromosomes," Proceedings, National Academy of Science 15:882-885:1929.
Katinas, Liliana, Jorge V. Crisci, Warren L. Wagner and Peter C. Hoch. "Geographical Diversification of Tribes Epilobieae, Gongylcarpeae, and Onagreae (Onagraceae) in North America, Based on Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity and Track Compatibilty Analysis," Annals, Missouri Botanical Gardens 91:159-185:2004.
United States, Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. "Proposed Threatened Status for the Plant Gaura Neomexicana ssp Coloradoensis," Federal Register 68 (56):14060-14065:24 March 1998.
What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, winterfat, lance-leaf yellow brush, datura, fields of golden eye, tahokia daisy, stickleaf, white evening primrose, velvetweed, horseweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, white sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, bigleaf globeflower, purple mat, bindweed, roses, sweet pea, purple phlox, new flowers on bouncing Bess, canna, heavenly blue morning glory, cardinal climber, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, Maximilian, native and farmer’s sunflowers, muhly ring and black gramma grasses. Hay cut.
