Sunday, December 30, 2007

Seed Orders

What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, rose stems, Japanese honeysuckle, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks.

What’s red: Cholla.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Early in week, bird tracks in snow-covered beds, rabbit tracks in drive.

Weather: Cold Thursday killed many remaining green leaves; snowed around noon; since then, snow only melted on south side of house and from an exposed east facing bed.

Weekly update: I excuse my late fall laziness by claiming I let plants go to seed to give the best the chance to reproduce. Of course, I don’t rely on nature. So, the snow comes and goes, the birds leave tracks around abandoned stalks, and I spent the holiday reading this year’s batch of seed catalogs and ruminating on the earliest known American seed order, the one shipped in 1631 to Massachusetts Bay and reprinted by Ann Leighton.

When John Winthrop, Junior, bought seeds from a London grocer in July 1631, he, no doubt, had heard from his father, the governor, about the many deaths from cold and malnutrition the previous winter. He chose roots and leafy vegetables he knew would survive cold storage or drying and could be boiled in a single pot. His largest quantities were parsnips, carrots, cabbage, pumpkin, raddish, parsley, lettuce, skirret, and cauliflower.

Many of the other seeds he requested were herbs, like marjoram, basil, and chervil, that were added to the cauldron. Only a few were ornamental plants, perhaps the hollyhocks and stocks, and a very few, like monk’s hood, were exclusively medicinal.

Missing from his shopping list were the crop seeds, the grains and legumes, the wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans, and peas, the staples provided by the Massachusetts Bay Company. Daniel Slade says the proprietors also sent fruit stones; flax, hemp, woad and saffron seed for textiles; potatoes, and hop roots for brewing.

Winthrop’s selection seems commonplace enough. After all, the previous year Francis Higginson had told London that root crops, pumpkins, pot-herbs, and sweet herbs were doing well in Plymouth, founded ten years earlier. A generation later, John Josselyn found more than 40% of Winthrop’s species were commonly grown in Massachusetts.

What seems unusual about Winthrop’s receipt is that he bought ounce and half-ounce quantities of herbs. If he and his wife spent the first winter with his father, there were five adults and five children to feed. 80,000 thyme seeds, 40,000 savory, and 34,000 sorrel, the number offered today in an ounce, seems excessive for ten people, even granting Governor Winthrop was obliged to entertain.

I don’t know if Winthrop did the calculations I do when I plan a seed order, but I convert weight into number of seeds, and then into linear feet to make sure I don’t buy too much. As near as I can judge, adjusting for temporal differences in quality and cleanliness in seed, he would have needed at least five acres to grow all the seed he bought.

His father had more than enough land, certainly more than one of my immigrant ancestors whose three-acre town lot and six-acre crop land grant in Ipswich in 1637 would not have supported all Winthrop’s seed and also produced essential foodstuffs. In 1630, the governor had been granted a seventy-acre island now subsumed into Logan Airport, a 600-acre farm in what is now Medford, and a town lot.

However, like me, young Winthrop did need to consider how all those seeds were going to be planted, weeded, protected from birds, and harvested. The 25-year-old man had no intention of preparing five acres of virgin land himself before spring planting. His great-grandfather Adam, a guild leader in London, had purchased an estate when Henry VIII dissolved the abbey at Bury Saint Edmonds in 1552, his great-uncle John had claimed a plantation in Munster in 1595 when Elizabeth I opened the area to Protestants, and his younger brother Henry had gone to slave-owning Barbados in 1627. His father hired James Luxford a year later to manage the Ten Hills farm and used Indians on the island.

I suspect Winthrop thought he could make money from luxury seeds that were not supplied by the London company, for those were the ones he bought in superfluity. Perhaps he expected to sell some seeds in the spring, perhaps he expected to sell his surplus crop in summer. We know his father expected a profit from his farm because he later claimed Luxford sold the produce at below market prices.

I don’t know if my ancestor resented his dependence on seed and produce merchants, but other commoners rebelled against a profiteering nail importer in 1639. Even though I know I can enjoy the luxury of growing flowers, not vegetables, because entrepreneurs like Winthrop settled Massachusetts in the 1630's, the snow and the birds remind me life still depends on food, warmth, and good seed.


Notes:
Seed quantities per ounce from a number of sources, but the majority from Stokes Seeds, Growers Guide, 2008.

Avery, Clara A. The Averell-Averill-Avery Family, 1906; genealogy of one of my grandparent’s families gives details about William Averell from legal records.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed, 1989, discusses colonial diet and cooking techniques.

Higginson, Francis. A Short and True Description of New England, 1629.

Josselyn, John. New England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country, 1672, reprinted by University of Michigan, University Library with 1865 notes by Edward Tuckerman.

Leighton, Ann, Early American Gardens, 1970.

Slade, Daniel Denison. “The Colonies of Massachusetts Bay,” in The Evolution of Horticulture in New England.

Photograph: Bird tracks around Maximilian sunflower stalks, 25 December 2007.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Single-seeded Juniper

What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, roses, hollyhock, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks.
What’s red: Cholla.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.
Animal sightings: Rabbit and bird tracks in snow Saturday morning.
Weather: Cold all week; snow Friday evening.
Weekly update: When I was a child trapped in the backseat on my parent’s weekly shopping expeditions, I would pretend I was in a covered wagon moving west and the fallow fields passing the side window were virgin prairie.
Around the same time, Angélico Chávez was driving along the Rio Grande to La Toma trying to recreate the experiences of Juan de Oñate and the Franciscans who came north with him in 1598. He thought the "hunched junipers and piñons" would remind them, not just of their Estremaduran homeland, but of the olive groves of the Holy land.
I was too young to know the Michigan land had changed several times since whites had intruded in the 1830's. He may not have known single-seeded junipers had been encroaching on grasslands since the suppression of wildfires in the 1880's, and were more common when he saw them than they had been during the entrada.
Ecological facts would not have mattered to either of us seeking an imaginative leap into the past through the only thing that remained, the landscape.
Those who only know the juniper from photographs of perfect specimens would not understand the associations made by a Franciscan scholar born in Wagon Mound in 1910. Our native trees are clusters of gray trunks buffeted by high winds into asymmetric stabiles that rarely reach their full 40' height.
Juniper is one of the first plants to come back after fire, and its deep taproot and supporting surface roots have adapted to drought. Even in the best conditions, it only grows about 6" every ten years, a foot every score. While this Pinaceae may bear fruit when it’s ten years old, its best years come when the gray-green evergreen reaches 50 and last another 150 years.
Juniperus monosperma is more than an indicator plant for vegetation at our elevation between 5,000' and 7,500'. For centuries, the dark purple berries were a staple of the pueblo diet, replaced only when other foods became available. Santa Clara used the wood for bows and digging sticks, bound the shredded bark with yucca for torches. Spanish speakers used sabino wood for ceiling lath.
Hu seeped into Santa Clara ritual life where Robbins and Harrington heard juniper branches were substituted for the preferred spruce in dances, while women purified themselves the third day after childbirth with bath water infused by the fleshy, flat leaves.
To the west, Zuñi women drank hot tea of toasted twigs and berries during labor. Spanish-speaking women in northern New Mexico sipped a half-cup each morning during the last month of their pregnancies brewed from the herringboned branch tips.
Now winter has set in, the only green I see from my window is the scrubby juniper where the quail run for shelter. When I walk out, all I see are green bumps on the ranges rippling away from the river and arroyo. Even though I know the trees have probably only grown since the ranch beyond ceased operations, there is still something elemental about the dark dervishes clinging to the earth like Franciscans called to matins by Chávez’s hero, Junípero Serra.Notes:Chávez, Angélico. My Penitente Land, 1974.Cobos, Rubén. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995Johnson, Kathleen A. "Juniperus monosperma", 2002, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Juniper on the prairie, 22 December 2007.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Saint John's Wort

What’s green above the snow: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, vinca,, sweet pea, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, anthemis, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, purple aster.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks.

What’s red: Cholla, soapwort.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Bird tracks.

Weather: Snow Monday and Friday; ground frozen and heaving under gate.

Weekly update: It’s a week until the winter solstice, and the cold of winter has already set in. Almost everything has been buried by snow at least once this week, but one emblem of Midsummer’s eve, Saint John’s wort, poked through the icy crystals with tinges of red on the edges of its green, ovate leaves.

When I bought Hypericum perforatum in 2000, the store posted a warning it could become invasive. Since so few things grow in my garden, I thought it would be nice to have something that would fill in dry areas beyond the hoses, especially if it covered itself with bright five-petaled flowers.

Alas, my Helos cultivar has only bloomed three times, and then, rather than bouquets of stamens standing high above large, butter-yellow pads, the plants produced chartreuse tips. If any flowers were there, they were too insignificant to see.

However, as promised, it did spread.

I decided to move the plants from my front garden to an area where anything green was welcome, and discovered the rust-colored, serrated stems stood ready to protect their position. Whenever my arm brushed them, it started to itch. The likely cause is hypericin, a napthodianthrone that collects in the dark oil glands on the flowers and leaf margins.

That red chemical is the reason Saint John’s wort became commonplace after people with AIDS claimed it was a possible cure. Scientists have since found it is effective against T-cells and cancerous cells, but haven’t yet found a way to make it reliable enough to prescribe.

Maria Leach suggests this particular Hypericum species arrived in England with the crusaders who found it healed wounds in the middle east. In 1597, John Gerard still recommended using leaves, flowers and seeds soaked in olive oil to close cuts, a remedy repeated by Nicholas Culpepper in the 1650's.

Germans treat depression with hyperforin from the translucent leaf glands. This practice may be an extension of the traditional belief that it thwarts demons and counteracts spells, especially during the summer solstice when the spirits are active. The symptoms of the one may well be the same as the other, allowing for changes in language and the metaphors of emotional problems.

James Frazer believed the ancient Druid bonfires in England were the same as those in central Europe on Mid-Summer’s eve, only yellow flowers of mistletoe were collected to heal cuts and cure epilepsy. Saint Patrick is the one credited with substituting the name date of John the Baptist for the pagan rite.

Since I’m not ready to experiment with dosing myself with something that irritates my skin, I have no reason to leave the multi-branched interloper in my front garden. Its eradication is a constant struggle because the woody taproots have runners that break and regenerate.

In a way I’m lucky they don’t bloom. The hermaphroditic flowers are able to produce seed without being pollinated. Once buried, the seed can remain viable for ten years. In California they finally imported beetles from Australia to protect livestock from sickening when they ate it.

Since I’m not willing to combat one invasive species with another that might find other things to eat in my arid environment, I’m left with weeding, itching, and pondering the conflations of hyperforin with hypericin and Christmas mistletoe with snowbound Saint John’s wort.

Notes:Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, 1922.

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.

Leach, Maria. Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, revised 1972 edition.

Photograph: Transplanted Saint John’s wort in the snow, 14 December 2007.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Western Stickseed

What’s blooming: Sweet alyssum from seed.

What’s still green: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, lamb’s quarter, rockrose, California poppy, coral bell, snapdragon, beardtongues, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, catmint, Rumanian sage, vinca, tansy mustard, sweet alyssum, western stickseed, white sweet clover, sweet pea, sea lavender, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, snakeweed, coreopsis, anthemis, chrysanthemum, tansy, Mount Atlas daisy, Shasta daisy, perky Sue, Mexican hat, purple aster.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks, fern-leaf yarrow, golden hairy aster.

What’s red: Cholla, soapwort, hartweigii.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: Usual red-sided birds and quail continue to feed.

Weather: Cold, clear nights early in the week iced over standing water along the road; more recently, clouds moved in to scatter droplets at sundown; rain yesterday; more rain and a little snow last night.

Weekly update: Whatever is a spring annual like western stickseed doing germinating in my driveway now, when other plants are either going dormant or dying from the cold? Normally, I see the basal rosettes emerge after March 20th and start flowering the second week of April.

It’s a question that puzzles botanists like Kathy Freas and Paul Kemp, who know desert annuals sprout when there’s enough moisture at the right temperature. What they wonder is how does a species survive when a cool temperature plant like Lappula occidentalis germinates just before a drought or severe cold that kills seedlings.

When they compared plants that germinate in the heat of summer when moisture is more reliable in the Chihuahuan desert with those like stickseed, they found the cool-season plants had developed genes that controlled dormancy, while summer plants had not.

Dormancy allows plants to build seed reserves which can sprout when conditions change dramatically. Stickseed is one of the first plants to arrive after a fire, stays long after the soil has been trampled by cattle.

For years, western stickseed pushed up thin stems with tiny, five-petaled, bluish-white flowers. Those stalks would unfurl, much like their forget-me-not cousins, to produce more color on top while hairy, green balls replaced spent blooms. The taproot could send up multiple, sparsely leaved columns, but usually they remained small, delicate plants that crept along the edges of garden beds.

Then, in 2004 the upper yard was covered with clumps where the ground had been disturbed in 2001 to bury a natural gas line. That area had been colonized by muhly ring grass until the drought of 2002-2003. The flowers were equally prolific in 2005, but since, the annuals have put out fewer and shorter racemes.

Perhaps the seed bank has been exhausted, although seeds are the one thing I know have been produced abundantly. The hard, odd-shaped dark seeds start to form in May, and attach themselves to my socks and pant legs in June. They remain a nuisance after the plants have dried into brittle stalks, enough to keep me out of the area where they’re growing and, coincidentally, protect the nearby soil.

It’s just been in the past few weeks, the very time that the vagrants have been growing in my drive, that the dead clumps have disappeared, probably broken off by the high winds and blown elsewhere to drop whatever barbed seeds remain.

The plants may have been shunted aside by snakeweed which also appeared in that area after the drought, and is not polite enough to quietly leave at the end of the season. Or, the tiny Lappula may not have liked the higher levels of rain and snow in the past few years.

It’s impossible to predict what will happens next year; the crop is too dependent of whatever combination of temperature and water exists in early spring. All I can do when I stop to open my gate is look for the white-haired volunteers to see how long they survive the coming cold.


Notes:
Freas, Kathy E. and Paul R. Kemp. “Some Relationships Between Environmental Reliability and Seed Dormancy in Desert Annual Plants,” The Journal of Ecology, 71:211-217:1983.

Photograph: Two western stickseed seedlings, 8 December 2007, with tansy mustard in back.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Apache Plume

What’s blooming: Sweet alyssum from seed.

What’s still green: Conifers, grasses, Apache plume, roses, Japanese honeysuckle, hollyhock, winecup, columbine, lamb’s quarter, rockrose, California poppy, coral bell, snapdragon, beardtongues, bouncing Bess, blue and yellow flaxes, sea pink, yellow and pink evening primroses, hartweigii, catmint, Rumanian sage, vinca, tansy mustard, sweet alyssum, white bristle stickseed, baptista, white sweet clover, sweet pea, sea lavender, yuccas, red hot poker, iris, Saint John’s wort, snakeweed, coreopsis, anthemis, chrysanthemum, tansy, Mount Atlas daisy, Shasta daisy, perky Sue, Mexican hat, purple aster, chocolate flower, black-eyed Susan.

What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, pinks, fern-leaf yarrow, golden hairy aster.

What’s red: Cholla, soapwort.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.

Animal sightings: More birds than usual on utility line Friday morning when the storm was in the air; flock of small birds in abandoned road bed Saturday morning, probably migrating; quail and red-sided birds in yard, no see-ums; brown goat down the road, horses in the village.

Weather: Cold early in week, snow lingered until rain Friday night; water in the wide arroyo yesterday morning; balmy in the afternoon.

Weekly update: Anyone who has both rented and owned a home knows there is a difference. In both cases, you enjoy the views and interior layout, but only in the one do you become intimately familiar with septic systems and furnaces.

A similar experiential difference exists between growing a plant and seeing it from a car. Take Apache plume. Anyone can enjoy the five-petaled single white flowers and pink, feathery seed heads in summer. But you only see the leaves and stems if you can get close to the loosely-branched shrub.

Many simply say the leaves are tiny or finely divided. In fact, they resemble small hands with narrow lobes that are shorter on the sides than in the middle. They unfurl much like fists, and often remain cupped rather than opening flat. They no only do not upholster the stems, but are neigh invisible from a distance.

When people can’t routinely see something, they tend to see what they expect. Shaw and Monsen observed new leaves emerge on this thornless member of the rose family in mid-April in Boise and expand in mid-May. Many who see the still green leaves in winter assume they are the same leaves.

In fact, my leaves begin to turn yellow in autumn after morning temperatures drop: last year it was early September, this year mid-October, a week after the first severely cold morning. In the past few week new leaves have been developing where the old ones are turning brown. With luck, they’ll remain on the plant.

New leaves do appear in spring, and this past year they displaced tan ones that had persisted through last year’s snows. It could take several years for me to fully comprehend the pattern, because our climate varies so much from year to year. Now I’ve had the shrubs for 18 months, all I know is what to look for.

The plant grows wild here, but it’s taken three tries to find commercial cuttings that would settle in my yard. Even though Apache plume’s a Chihuahuan desert shrub that has expanded its range, it’s still discriminating. When I’m driving, plants appear randomly along the road and across the river near San Ildefonso. In fact, they prefer the edges of arroyos and other run-offs and the ones I see daily are growing along a paved road that crosses a wide arroyo where their dense rhizomatous roots can reach water stored by both.

It’s cultural range is much smaller than its natural one: all the native usages mentioned by Moerman are from New Mexico or Arizona. Many tribes used the straight, slim branches for arrow shafts, but the Havasupai and Haulapai used roots and branches for cordage. Both the Santa Clara, who talked to men from the Smithsonian around 1910, and Spanish-speaking women, who talked with Curtin in the late 1940's in northern New Mexico, used poñil leaves for hair rinses.

Most pueblo people do not mention an association with witchcraft. The Kayenta Navajo of Arizona believed witches used the plant to induce insanity, but local Spanish-speakers mixed dried poñil plumes with other ingredients to counteract illness fomenting magic. Only the Sandia admit their brooms made from Apache plume branches are kept in the house for their "spiritual presence," while others, including the Santa Clara, simply say the brooms exist for outside use.

The difference between a cultural range and a biological one is like that between the renter and the owner, the grower and the admirer. On its own, Fallugia paradoxa prefers life under trees. In return, its branches shelter piñon seedlings and its roots harbor a cancer-fighting species of penicillium.

In the net of civilization, Apache plume’s reduced to an object of beauty by Idaho gardeners and to raw material by Arizona natives. Still, along the Rio Grande where the pueblos and Spanish settlers exchanged beliefs in witchcraft, it’s been absorbed into views of the world and the origin of things bad that are no more public than the tiny leaves alternating along pealing stems.

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

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995, includes Sandia.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Lucille J. Watahomigie, Hualapai Ethnobotany, 1982; Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, Havasupai Habitat, 1985; and Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.

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

Shaw, Nancy L. and Stephen B. Monsen. "Phenology and Growth Habits of Nine Antelope Bitterbrush, Desert Bitterbrush, Stansbury Cliffrose, and Apache-plume Accessions," in Arthur R. Tiedemann and Kendall L.Johnson, Proceedings--Research and Management of Bitterbrush and Cliffrose in Western North America; 1982, cited by Jack McWilliams, "Fallugia paradoxa," 2000, in USDA Fire Effects Information System on-line database.

Simmons, Marc. Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, 1980.

Zhan J, E.M. K. Wijeratne, C. J. Seliga, J. Zhang, E. E. Pierson, L. S. Pierson III, H. D. Vanetten, and A. A. L. Gunatilaka. "A New Anthraquinone and Cytotoxic Curvularins of a Penicillium sp. from the Rhizosphere of Fallugia paradoxa of the Sonoran Desert," Journal of Antibiotics 57:341-344:2004.

Photograph: Apache plume leaves, after the snow, 29 November 2007.