Sunday, August 26, 2007

Dahlberg Daisy

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, velvetweed, toothed spurge, purslane, stickleaf, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, chamisa, Tahokia daisy, French marigolds, sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce, chicory; two goats were eating where man tried sheep last year.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemums; first squash to produce fruit is an Eight Ball zucchini..

Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, perennial sweet pea, sedum, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, tomatoes, Dahlberg daisy

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbirds, gecko, grasshoppers, ants, bees.

Weather: Last useful rain, August 6. After days passed without even a storm passing through and cooler mornings, some plant began to react: squash and tomatoes wilted, some cherry leaves turned yellow, ladybells went out of bloom.

Weekly update: Wildflowers don’t recognize political boundaries. They define their territory by soil characteristics too minute to interest cartographers.

Dahlberg Daisies like the shallow lime soils that overlay clay in the Tamaulipan brushlands that stride the lower Rio Grande on the gulf coastal plain that reaches to the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico and the Balcones Escarpment in Texas. R.E. Rosiere found the perennials growing with buffalo grass under scrub in Live Oaks County midway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio.

Move them beyond zone 9 and they become annuals. Gardeners in Plano and Gillett, Texas, told Dave Whitinger, their plants perpetuate themselves with volunteers. In Dallas, Sally Wasowski found no one who could winter them over, but a number who could naturalize them.

Move them to an area that gets more annual precipitation than San Antonio’s 25 inches, and they have problems with humidity. In Tampa, a Dave’s Garden contributor plants them in October and November after the humidity drops so they can bloom before it rises again.

Move them to an area that’s hotter and drier, and they die out in summer. C. A. Martin reports they will, however, reseed themselves for years in Phoenix.

Move them into containers or hanging baskets and they become a commercial product. Although they were offered in the mid-1950's by Thompson and Morgan as Golden Fleece, they were rarely mentioned by garden books until seedsmen began looking for plants that could withstand temperature and moisture extremes on decks and balconies.

Move them to my yard, and they survive the summers but don’t reproduce. I first planted them with marigolds, hoping to introduce some variety into my north facing yellow garden. The marigolds rarely survived the transition from nursery conditions and those that did usually disappeared with the grasshoppers.

Dahlberg Daisies have no such problems, although most years they remain fairly small plants with single composite flowers rising from bright green, ferny leaves. With last year’s moisture, the plants expanded in late summer and bloomed until late October. This August has been drier and my plants switched from flower to seed production this past week.

Book publishers care a great deal more about legal boundaries than do plants. Jean Louis Berlandier discovered Dahlberg daisies near San Antonio in 1829, but they rarely appear in field guides because the part of their range that lies in this country, the triangle of south Texas between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande, doesn’t have many book buyers, and the Spanish-speakers to the south are excluded by copyright laws and international distribution agreements. It doesn’t help editorial assistants that botanists changed its name from Dyssodia tenuiloba to Thymophylla tenuiloba.

Fortunately for me, nurseries have found a large enough outdoor living market in southern California and Arizona, that plants are usually available in Santa Fe or at a local hardware. I’ve bought plants with labels from Hardy Boys in Colorado and McK in Arizona. Most of the time, they arrive with generic Pixie labels that somehow suit a wildflower slipping from the rangelands of south Texas and northern Mexico into suburban life.

Notes:
Martin, C. A. “Thymophylla tenuiloba,” available on-line.

Rosiere, R.E. “Rio Grande Plains (Tamaulipan Brushlands),” range website.

Wasowski, Sally. Native Texas Plants, 1988, with Andy Wasowski.

Whitinger, Dave. “Dahlberg Daisy,” Dave’s Garden website with viewer contributors from ambercoakley, dale_a_gardener, and YardKat.

Photograph: Dahlberg daisies growing with blue-grey leaved California poppies and volunteer grasses, 25 August 2007.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Datura

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, English plantain, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, perennial sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, tomatoes, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, white butterfly, grasshoppers, squash bug, ants, bees.
Weather: Another week when storms passed through to cool the air but kept most of their water; last real rain, 6 August.
Weekly update: Last weekend the local hardware was selling off plants that still hadn’t sold. They probably couldn’t give away the half shelf of impatien seed mats, once dormant bare root Stella de Oro daylilies, or pots of boxwood.
It would be nice to consider impatiens again. Their tropical pastel, flat-faced flowers remain open from the day they’re put in until frost, all day, every day. But that constancy requires a moister environment than we have, so they’re now a memory from time lived in a more temperate clime.
Instead, I accept volunteers that have adapted to my dry air, and mix blue flax that drops by noon with purple ice plants that only open in the heat of the day. Down the road nocturnal white datura flowers are wilting when I drive by in the morning.
Our deep-rooted perennial Datura wrightii is related to Jimpson Weed, but Datura stramonium is an annual with smooth-edged arrowhead leaves. Our nightshade has more triangular leaves with scalloped edges. Ethnobotanists report uses for the first from California, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, while reports for the second are from southeastern tribes.
The Aztec knew the medicinal benefits of their sacred Datura inoxia, but also knew its dangers, that any part would kill. The mixture of tropane alkaloids can freeze the eyes into blindness at the same time they produces visions. The chemicals can alleviate bronchial spasms but also cause respiratory failure, can stimulate or stop the heart.
It’s perilous even to those who know it. The only tribes who distributed it to all adolescent initiates were in California. Farther south, Juan Matus hesitated to reveal it to Carlos Castaneda.
The Hopi limited it to shamans and the Zuni to rain priests who communicated with ancestors who had turned into clouds. Smithsonian researchers found it growing on Santa Clara stream terraces and talus slopes around 1910, but found no one who admitted using it. It’s not clear if that ignorance was universal, or if the select few who might have known the plant wouldn’t say. A Zuni creation tale warns the flowers are all that remain of two teenagers who learned forbidden things, then talked too freely.
Anything that mediates between two worlds, the living and the dead, the pubescent and the adult, is dangerous to the diurnal order. The pentagonal flowers come out with crickets that displace grasshoppers. Their narrow trumpets coexist with coyotes and gophers, long after ants and bees, quail and hummingbirds have gone into hiding. For descendants of medieval Europe, they cohabit with werewolves and witches.
My neighbors exile the rank smell to the boundaries between their land and the potentially threatening public road. But those plants did not just sprout near fences. The 5' bush crammed between a stored trailer and a broken pallet may be the relic of some Castaneda influenced hippie experiment with the unknown, but the 3' mound near the cholla cactus represents someone’s deliberate attempt to domesticate or perpetuate the wild.
As with most courtesans of the night, it’s beautiful in its prime. Just as light fades, the buds burst to release perfume that attracts white-lined sphinx moths. Next to them, impatiens would look tepid. Cultivated ladies and well bred, self-cleaning plants cannot compete with the excitement of the night.
Notes:Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany database includes Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915, and Alfred F. Whiting, Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Datura, 11 August 2007, about 10:00 a.m.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Hollyhocks

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, alfalfa, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, English plantain, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce, side oats and blue grama grass; watermelons and pumpkin visible; hay cut and baled during the week.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, perky Sue, chrysanthemums.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds; buds on hosta.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, bundle flower, perennial sweet pea, tomatilla, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy; first tomatoes ripe.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Deer mice, hummingbirds, quail, gecko, grasshoppers, stink bug.

Weather: Rain late Monday; corn and sunflowers more than doubled their height.

Weekly update: Hollyhocks must be the easiest plant for amateur artists: all that’s needed are vertical lines, a few spots of color, and some flat green splotches. There’s no need for draftsmanship or botanical detail; they can be rendered with pastels or watercolor. Viewers recognize synecdoches and respond appreciatively. Hollyhock dotted landscapes are among the easiest pictures for Santa Fe galleries to sell to tourists and neophyte collectors.
Actually, Alcea rosea, goes through several phases in the summer, and not all are photogenic. The one captured by painters occurs in early summer when multiple stalks on older perennial plants are covered with buds, the lower ones are fully open, the middle half, and the upper ones just showing color. Leaves are still green and fully lobed, reaching up from the base through the lower flowers.

Artists rarely show what happens when those early buds dissolve into beige seed cases and basal leaves die or disappear into the lacework of insect dinners. Then, stalks grow a little to put out a single bloom, then grow again to open another cup. Some summers the bedraggled stems reach over seven feet, but rarely have more than one blossom at a time clinging precariously to the top. Then they overbalance and tilt, lean, and finally flop.

Last summer’s rain and last winter’s snow made this a very good year. Plants shot up early and flourished for weeks. But now, porches in the village are palisaded by brown spotted shafts. Some have been cut down along stone walls, but others still have spidery monoliths upholding their solitary mementos. In the past, those discards would have been burned to prevent the incubation of bacterial rust that destroys leaves.

Along walls where plants have been allowed to reproduce, a newer generation is opening. They’re shorter, perhaps because there’s been so little rain since June. New branches are appearing low on older plants, and producing new color several feet below the stragglers high on the main trunks.

Meantime, seeds have been ripening. This week the valises began opening to dump dark, flat discs onto ground, where normally the outer rings would bury the notched ends in soil loosened by drought, then dampened by passing rains.

Last year’s kernels began germinating the end of March, and now are expanding into hairy rosettes that should remain green all winter. There were more volunteers than could survive, but grasshoppers and weather are winnowing away.

When you glance at single Malvaceae flowers they appear simple to draw, with their protruding pistols clasped by stamens that spill pollen. The five overlapping petals usually have smooth edges, but some of mine are distinctly fringed, and more are simply undulating.

Most people here begin with seeds, but they never harvest the color ranges shown on packages, and rarely the dramatic reds and whites found in paintings. Instead, plants in the village this year have been pale. Natural selection has reduced mine to deep rose and pale pink.

Some flowers have white or yellow centers, while others are solid. I have one that’s pale peach with a rose center, and others have green-ringed yellow tears at their bases. Veins emboss lighter striations that relieve the monotony of broad monochromatic planes. Morning sunlight penetrates the translucent corollas, shadowed by clasping calyxes. Later, petals become so opaque, light bounces away.

In a gallery one has the choice of artists influenced by the sunny impressionism of Childe Hassam or the darker abstractions of Georgia O’Keefe, but the variations within the season, even within the patch, or on the stalk can only be captured by folk artists with simultaneous, multiple perspectives that capture the details one’s eyes see darting far and near, up and down, at the moment and deep into the recesses of memory.

Notes:
Hassam, Childe. "Hollyhocks, Isle of Shoals," pastel on paper, 1902.

O’Keefe, Georgia. "Black Hollyhock Blue Larkspur," oil on canvas, 1930.

Photograph: Single hollyhock flower, 8 August 2007.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Russian Sage

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, rose of Sharon, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, morning glories, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, daylily, canna, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, bindweed, white sweet clover, goats head, yellow evening primrose, velvetweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, mullein, Queen Anne’s lace, heliopsis, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, hawkweed, horseweed, goats beard, wild lettuce, side oats and blue grama grass; apples much redder in orchards

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds..
Looking south: Bundle flower, perennial sweet pea, tomatilla, cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, tomatoes.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Humming birds, ants, grasshoppers, bees in caryopteris and catmint; insect webs; something, no doubt heavy birds, has been breaking off sunflower heads before they open; flock with white bands at the ends of their tails has been eating something along the east fence; few cherries left.
Weather: Some rain last night after week of storms that blew through, but left only drizzles and moments of humidity; not enough water yet to germinate áñil del muerto.
Weekly update: In this summer when the most spontaneous enthusiasm is immediately channeled into a media event suitable for commercial tie-ins, it’s pleasant to think maybe Russian Sage is a fad that escaped its handlers.
George Bentham described the central Asian Labiatae in 1848, and it remained a British novelty noted by people like William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, and Christopher Lloyd until the 1980's when someone began brokering it to the merchants who serve serious gardeners of the upper middle class. Wayside Gardens first offered the species, Perovskia atriplicifolia, in 1987. It was also sold by Milaeger and White Flower Farm that year. I bought it from one of them, and it quickly grew into a wide, 3' high herbaceous perennial that didn’t die back in Oakland County, Michigan.
The gray-green cut-leaf near shrub began its diffusion from the cognoscenti around 1991 when Mellinger added it to the catalog. That same year, Milaeger added a Swiss cultivar, Longin, that didn’t sprawl. Spring Hill promoted the species into the world of mass marketing the following year.
Its first major media campaign occurred in 1995 when the nurserymen’s trade association named it Perennial Plant of the Year. That generated press releases for writers, extension agents and other professionals who produce plant of the week or month columns, as well as fodder for magazines that tout new items in their early spring issues. Since the award didn’t list a cultivar, the label was applied to any Perovskia, but most often to Blue Spire, which Milaeger had begun offering in 1993.
Despite the publicity, despite the appearance of Ernst Pagels’ earlier blooming Filigran in Milaeger’s Perennial Wishbook in 1996, despite the availability of older varieties in more catalogs, the species was still difficult to find when I needed one in 1997. I finally located a cutting in the back display area of a Santa Fe florist that was preparing to sell its land for development.
That was pretty much the state until 2000 when Arne Maynard and Piet Oudolf won best garden in the Chelsea Flower Show competition, and Oudolf released books on natural garden design with Noel Kingsbury and Henk Gerritsen. He’d opened his own nursery in 1982 and helped Aad Zoet form a Dutch grower’s cooperative to market perennials to wholesalers in 1998. One of the first plants they featured was Little Spire, patented in 2000 by Herbert Oudshoorn.
Russian Sage spread through the next tier of suppliers. One Future Plant customer, Van Bourgondien, offered Little Spire in 2001. Jung added Blue Spire in 2002. Santa Fe Greenhouse offered more varieties. But there the plant stayed, languishing in catalogs, not spreading to the cheapest outlets in Bloomington, Illinois, not available in the local hardware stores.
Then about two years ago, the two-lipped blue flowers were ubiquitous in late July and August. Monrovia, among others, was suggesting Little Spire was a good substitute for lavender. A friend tells me that was a bad strategy, because it you’re expecting the European herb, it stinks. Copywriters prefer to say "pungent" or "aromatic."
Others, including the Denver Water Board, were promoting the deep-rooted Blue Spire as xeric. North Carolina planted the aluminum-white square stems in highway medians, and the coronal racemes materialized in parking lot islands in Santa Fe where the dark purple funnels fit the sun-bleached pallette favored by southwestern designers.
Pots appeared in local hardware stores, but didn’t sell until prices were reduced at the end of the season. Then it was used like forsythia: at least four planted it as a specimen near the house, more than dozen put a single plant or small clump near the outer fence or boundary. None yet have the natural plantings promoted by Oudolf, but one has a xeriscape complete with gravel.
Someone down the road used them to line a straight, asphalt drive. The house is a simple, low two-story brick ranch set near the rear of a long narrow lot filled with genuine green grass, kept clipped. The walk to the house and head of the drive are screened by pruned, formal hedges. Everything reflects the abstract art that spawned that 1950's geometric style.
I don’t know if they originally planned to line the drive, or did it on impulse, when the plants were available. Two weeks ago they received another dozen plants, which they added to the other side of the drive, either to extend the design or replace dead roots.
Those plants, blooming on one side, becoming established on the other, represent the future of an overhyped product in the valley when, like this year, it’s no longer offered in the local stores. It will spread when people give away cuttings and suckers, or when people, like my neighbors, make a deliberate decision that it fits into an existing aesthetic.
Photograph: Russian sage growing down the road, 25 August 2007.