Sunday, June 24, 2007

Blanket Flower

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, roses, cholla, prickly pear, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, lilies, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, velvetweed, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, English and wooly plantain, locoweed, yellow sweet clover, goats head, Shasta daisy, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, native dandelion; white seeds floated through; harpoon needle grass and halberd downy chess and three-awn grass seeds attached themselves to everything that passed.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, veronica, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, California and Shirley poppies.

Looking south: Tamarix, sweet pea, daylily, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian and purple salvia, purple and white beardtongues, purple ice plant, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender; buds on Monch asters and purple coneflowers.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; plants beginning to grow and put out more flowers.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird on coral beardtongue, geckos, bees, ants, grasshoppers, squash bug, small tan moth; white, yellow with black, and black with yellow butterflies; small, indistinguishable insects.

Weather: Hot days, evening winds, cool mornings; some days the air held fumes; some plants dying that were encouraged by wet spring but are not near water or have weak roots; others spurting with heat; last rain June 11.

Weekly update: Thursday marked mid-summer’s eve and the last of the rose-hued flowers of spring are blooming. If there are to be more flowers this summer, they must be the yellow composites of the American prairie.

Retail nurseries know this and plantsmen continually watch for tamer possibilities for small gardens and decks. It’s been years since they first introduced blanket flowers that formed low mounds skimmed by large flowers. Ernst Benary began marketing the latest, Arizona Sun, in 2005.

These tetraploid Gaillardia x grandifloras resulted from crosses between perennial arista and annual pulchella. The first, native to the northern plains, has single terminal flowers on hairy stalks that flop in good soil and long-lived taproots. The second, recognized by the western Keres speakers of Cibola county, has a longer blooming season.

Now breeders are eliminating the garish orange-red petals with yellow notched tips. Last year, Georg Uebelhart released Amber Wheels, a muted yellow aristata selection with a milk chocolate core. Rosemary Hardy patented a pastel child of Dazzler as Oranges and Lemons in 2004.

Last summer my neighbor bought some Arizona Sun and Amber Wheels. She set them more than a foot apart, which emphasized their contained habit. As summer stretched into the cool autumn and she continued feeding them, the plants doubled in size, the spaces between them shrank, and the mounds collapsed into shapeless jumbles of recumbent stems. I almost liked what they became.

Then, miraculously, they put out new leaves the end of March I was so impressed by their hardiness, I bought some special varieties myself. The existing buds on the Oranges and Lemons opened, then no more. Nothing yet from Arizona Sun. I still don’t like them very much.

When I first considered blanket flowers in 1996, the only potted variety available was Goblin, promoted as an 8"-12" dwarf. It lasted a few years, then died out. Allan Armitage blames that on the pulchella heritage. It’s one of the few plants I didn’t regret losing. It was a matter of proportions. The flowers were too large for the compact plant, and looked freakish.

Since I couldn’t buy simple, full-sized Gaillardia like my mother grew, I resorted to seeds sold as aristata. Instead of disciplined hemispheres, I whelped scraggly single stems that behaved like biennials and were probably grandiflora hybrids. If there were too many of them, the consistent shading from red to yellow seemed mechanized and strident.

I have a hard time recalling why I’m growing something that doesn't look good as a specimen or in clusters, in its native coloring or disguised for subdued suburbs. But this summer I remember. After last year’s wet summer nurtured seed and this year’s wet fostered seedlings, I have a bed filled with coreopsis, golden-spur columbine and blacked-eyed Susans, each in a self-selected area. Scattered between are blanket flowers.

Unlike roses and azaleas that need a background of green, blanket flowers require more color, dense color, denser that a single plant, denser than it can amass by itself. When it’s growing among the coreopsis, the edges diffuse into the surrounding yellows, leaving shadows. Like a baritone among the tenors or the drum below the fifes, the sheer vitality of the burnt orange transfigures the monolith yellows.

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

Hardy, Rosemary. Patent application for "Gaillardia Plant Named ‘Oranges and Lemons’," 2004.

Swank, George R. The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany on-line database.

Vickerman, Larry, collector of seed that became Amber Wheels. "A Better Gaillardia," available on-line.

Photograph: Blanket flower and coreopsis grown from seed, 10 June 2007.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Floribunda

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, hybrid roses, cholla, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, daylily, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, velvetweed, purple mat flower, amaranth, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, English and wooly plantain, locoweed, yellow sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native and common dandelion, grama grasses; goatshead and prostate knotweed showed up; corn and sunflowers growing; rice grass releasing seeds; needle grass seeds becoming a nuisance.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed; sour cherries turning red

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, California and shirley poppies, Kellerer yarrow.

Looking south: Iris, sweet pea, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian salvia, purple and white beardtongues, purple ice plant, sea lavender, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird at coral beardtongue, bumble bees on blue ones; smaller bees on coreopsis, blanket flowers and catmint; ants on peach; aphids on roses; black butterfly on thrift seed ball; small grasshoppers bouncing everywhere; young male rabbit in drive.

Weather: Attempted showers during week, temperatures warmer; high winds yesterday, but little water reached the ground; strong manure smells along back road of village.

Weekly update: Roses are ablaze in the village, both pastel and florescent. Once again, I’m envious.

When I told a friend last year that my last tea rose from the year before had been killed by spring winds, he said, "oh, my wife, doesn’t plant stuff like that; she only uses xeroscapic plants." Apart from aesthetics and snobbery, her preference is probably derived from the perception that roses, especially those descended from the first Chinese teas, are too tender to survive without pampering.

As soon as roses entered the China trade in 1752, men studied them in their gardens. Around 1802, John Champneys discovered Rosa chinensis had yoked itself with Rosa moschata on his Charleston area plantation. His neighbor, Philippe Noisette, experimented with the seedlings, and sent his fledglings to his brother in Paris, whose nursery introduced the first tender Noisette in 1814.

Rose multiflora arrived in Europe from the newly opened Japan in 1860. Scmitt tried it with different hybrids before releasing Aglaia in 1896 from a Noisette. He sold the yellow rambler through the Rhineland’s Peter Lambert, who promoted an Aglaia seedling as Trier in 1904.

Wilhelm Kordes opened his nursery in Holstein in 1887, and soon after sold Lambert’s roses. His son, Wilhelm II, united Trier with a polyantha to produce a hybrid musk. While invigorating the Mediterranean moschata, he fortuitously intensified the multiflora heritage because polyanthas had evolved from Jean-Baptiste Guillot’s attempts to combine the flower clusters of multiflora with the repeat blooming and bush habit of chinensis.

Meanwhile, Svend Poulsen was commingling polyanthas with hybrid teas to increase flower size. When Jackson and Perkins hired the son of a French cotton mill owner to establish their breeding program in 1930, Jean Henri Nicolas not only extended the Dane’s experiments with polyanthas, which he called floribundas, but also negotiated exclusive marketing rights for Kordes roses in this country.

His assistant, Eugene Boerner, had become a close friend of Wilhelm II by the time he removed 10,000 seedlings from Europe in 1939. Later, Bourner crossed a Kordes tea rose, Crimson Glory, with a Kordes floribunda, Pinocchio, to beget Fashion in 1949. In 1952, he marketed one of Fashion’s children as Ma Perkins. A Ma Perkins scion was introduced as Gene Boerner in 1968, two years after his death.

The only rose I have that has survived drought, cold winters, high winds and grasshoppers is a coral pink Fashion I bought in 2000. The only rose I added last spring that’s blooming is a pale pink Gene Boerner. Both are large flowered, clustered headed floribundas.

Apparently, I owe my ability to grow my own roses to one Wisconsin born grandson of Saxon immigrants who absorbed continental breeding ideas. When Americans encountered Rosa multiflora in 1866, they saw utilitarian graft stock for the preferred tenderer roses.

In the 1930's, the government promoted multiflora for erosion control, because it grows on bad soils, including claypan, sand and gravel, to naturalize by seeds, suckers and rooted branches. More importantly, it tolerates dry conditions.

Fortunately, germplasm, even in the most refined tea, diffuses men’s ideas of the possible so that when I go to the local store to buy cheap roses, it offers floribundas, polyanthas and climbers amongst the hybrid teas because they all bear large bright flowers in black pots. I’m anxious to know if the ones that survive this year, if any, are the ones with the indefatigable multiflora ancestors, or if the floribunda is yet one more chimera in my quest for roses on my windswept prairie.

Photograph: Gene Boerner, floribunda rose, 10 June 2007.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Golden Spur Columbine

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, four-winged saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, locoweed, oxalis, yellow sweet clover, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, velvetweed, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, bindweed, wooly plantain, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, Apache plume, pink shrub, tea and other hybrid roses; rice and black grama grass. Needle grass seeds are beginning to stick to pant legs, three awn grass seeds beginning to work loose; pink evening primroses back in yard where Japanese beetles decimated them in 2003. One farmer is letting bales of hale cure in his field.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; buds on bouncing Bess, Shirley poppy and hollyhock.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea, iris, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses; buds on daylily.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, purple and white beardtongues, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies, sea lavender and Rumanian salvia.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; buds on acorn squash.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, gecko, bees on baptista and catmint, white butterfly on snapdragons, grasshoppers, ants, stink bugs.

Weather: Warming days and cold nights; rain last Sunday and yesterday; high winds Wednesday knocked fruit off peach, broke branches on locust and deflowered shrubs and trees.

Weekly update: My golden spur columbine is as much a wildflower as the novel Ramona is a realistic description of Indian life.

It’s not that they didn’t begin life as wildflowers and history, but that over time they changed into garden plants and a romanticized view of the past. When Henry King filmed Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel in 1936, he cast Loretta Young as the half-breed girl and Don Ameche as the Indian. It would have been impossible to do otherwise with a story of white reactions to miscegenation.

If my plants were still the species, the two seedlings I bought in 1997 would have died by now. Instead, they fill an area 5' by 8'. Two years ago, the grasshoppers left mere stubs that didn’t bloom last year. But now, they’re back.

Golden columbines have been slowing disappearing since the Pleistocine. Today, they grow in moist canyons east of the Continental Divide, usually in areas with igneous rock. Mine grow in sand and clay derived from volcanic ash in an area with morning and late afternoon shade.

Large-winged hawkmoths, with tongues that reach through the flower to the nectar in the spurs, are the species’ most important pollinator. The only sphingids I’ve noticed here were hummingbird moths in 2000 and 2001 in other parts of the yard. So far as I know, I’ve never seen a white-lined sphinx which feeds on columbine and is reported in Rio Arriba county.

The male anthers in the species mature earlier than the female organs, so they can only produce seed when moths transfer pollen from one flower to another. Then, the seed germinates best when air temperatures are between 77 in the day and 68 at night.

My flowers still have the adaptations for the moths: the long tails, the open petals that don’t close at night and face every direction to ensure an insect moves from one to another. However, commercial breeders like Keift Bloemzaden could not have afforded to perpetuate such idiosyncratic reproductive requirements.

Even though found primarily in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and Mexico, seeds from the Colorado exclave are probably the ones used by early breeders. Silver mining that began near Georgetown in 1864 attracted the Union Pacific. Transportation, in turn, brought cultured tourists. Harvard botanist Asa Gray visited the area in 1872, when Charles Parry named a mountain for him. A year later, Gray officially described Aquilegia chrysantha.

A mere five years later, Jackson went to Colorado Springs looking for a clean air for her lungs. On her carriage rides into the Cheyenne mountains, she saw the columbines in ravines and had heard their Latin name.

Since European columbines were known to interbreed, plantsmen in eastern America and Europe would have been eager to experiment. Robert Nold believes most of the commercially available flowers today are "Yellow Queen" or one of its descendants.

Anything that can crossbreed or reproduce like my columbines is free to become a wildflower again. Jackson’s allusions to such variability of the species are still too controversial to admit historic re-enactments on her novel. At most, if anyone dared film Ramona today, Hispanic and Indian actors would be hired.

Notes:Gray, Asa. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Proceedings 8:621:1873, cited by Nold.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. "The Procession of Flowers in Colorado," Bits of Travel at Home, 1878.

_____. Ramona, 1884.

Nold, Robert. Columbines: Aquilegia, Paraquilegia, and Semiaquilegia, 2003.

Opler, Paul A., Harry Pavulaan, Ray E. Stanford, and Michael Pogue, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2006, database available on-line.

Photograph: Golden spur columbine, 3 June 2007.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Bearded Iris

What’s blooming in the area: Russian olive, catalpa, white locust, locoweed, oxalis, yellow sweet clover, four-winged saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red hot poker, short yucca, datura, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, bindweed, wooly plantain, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native and common dandelion, Apache plume, pink shrub, tea and other hybrid roses, rice, needle, and three awn grass; first batch of hay cut and baled.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, iris, golden spur columbine, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis; buds on coral beardtongue; nasturtium seeds emerge.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort peaked, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; one budded hollyhock reaches above my shoulder; squash seeds have first leaves.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea; rugosa and floribunda roses; buds on Blaze and daylily; raspberry forming fruit.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, baptista, purple beardtongue; buds on sea lavender, Valerie Finnis artemisia and Husker beardtongue.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, sweet 100 tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium; buds on coral honeysuckle.
Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbird, small insects hovered around flowers at dusk and dawn; bees in beauty bush in afternoons; grasshoppers getting to be a problem; horse was eating a volunteer cottonwood in field last Sunday.
Weather: Temperatures warmed, and some weak plants died; whatever rain was in the area dropped only enough water to pattern sidewalks and feed air roots and thorns. Last actual rain, May 25.

Weekly update: My bearded iris taunt me with how little I know about how they are bred and mass produced.

Normally, I would only care if I heard something unethical was being done, like overharvesting from the wild. But, in 1996, I bought some Superstition rhizomes from a mass market catalog that were dark indigo in the shade and luminescent in the sun in the spring. The year after the petals were greenish brown.

My curiosity was quite natural. I wanted to know if my plants were diseased. I moved them to an isolated area where the color was less discordant and they’ve colonized the slope. This year the flowers were more coffee than dirty brass.

Now I have another puzzle. A white iris started blooming across the ditch from them last Saturday. These are the first flowers since the sword-shaped leaves showed in the area a few years ago.

The plant should be the untrue child of a nearby cheap yellow hybrid, but more likely is the offspring of my only surviving white iris, an Immortality growing some 25' to the northeast behind a spirea, which normally is upwind.

Long ago, nature advertized it would inbreed Iridaceae species and permit recessive traits like white coloring to self-select until stable varieties emerged. J. C. Wister determined Iris germanica, my bearded iris, developed from natural matings between blue Iris pallida and yellow Iris variegata. The bluish-white Iris florentina is now recognized as a spontaneous creation of germanica.

It took a Cambridge biologist to make the next logical step: Around 1889, Michael Foster began experimenting with pollen from new species discovered by the expanding British Empire Over time, shorter bearded iris and remontants appeared, as well as more varied colors. Now, Richard Ernst at Cooley’s Gardens is asking Oregon State molecular biologists to go farther, and introduce genes from different genera into Iris germanica.

All of which may explain my white iris. Lloyd Zurbrigg released it in 1982 as a descendant of Gibson Girl, a two-season pink iris introduced by Jim Gibson in 1946. He, in turn, was inspired by Hans Sass who experimented with dwarf species to produce shorter stalks for Nebraska winds and, incidentally, developed the reblooming purple Autumn King in 1924. Sometime during those years when ideas were diffusing from scientists and techniques were spreading among breeders, the innovation of florentina was duplicated.

I still don’t know what transformed my fifteen Superstition into greenish brown interlopers, but I can sympathize with growers who were testing new techniques to mass produce the 1977 cultivar from Schreiner’s Gardens. After all, I’ve just spotted another unexpected set of leaves, and have to wait at least three years to see if they represent another discardable experiment by nature or something nearer Immortality.

If anyone does know what methods grower used that would cause an advertised iris to metamorphose into something else, please let me know.

Notes:
Oregon State University and Cooley’s Gardens. Zoran Jeknic, Richard C. Ernst and Tony H. H. Chen, Iris Transformation Method, patent granted 2002.


Wister, John C. The Iris, 1927, cited by Flora of North America Association. "Iris germanica Linnaeus."

Photograph: White iris, probably Immortality, 28 May 2007 around 6:15 am.