Perky Sue

What’s blooming in the area: Roses of all kinds including Austrian copper, yellow Persian, pink shrubs, teas and miniatures; Apache plume, Russian olive, four-wing saltbush, yucca, red hot poker, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, oxalis, nits-and-lice, tumble mustard, hoary cress, Jupiter’s beard, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; lamb’s quarter germinated.
In my yard: Spirea, beauty bush, snowball, iris, flax, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, golden spur columbine, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue, chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, purple beardtongue, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, anthemis, blanket flower, coreopsis, and Mexican hat.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Pair of small hummingbirds; too many ants and baby grasshoppers.
Weather: Hot, dry, windy days were replaced by cold, wet, windy ones; even so, parts of my front yard were still completely dry yesterday. Last rain 5/23/08. 15:35 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: The demand for wildflowers like perky Sue is greater than the inventory of mass producible varieties. When I bought two pots in Santa Fe in 1998, they were named Hymenoxys argenta. The rabbit ate them.

When I tried seven in 2001 the same store offered Hymenoxys scaposa. When I added five more in 2003, two were actually giant perky Sues labeled as Hymenoxys acaulis. I now have five of the first with narrow, dark-green leaves and one of the second with lance-shaped, grayer leaves. They haven’t all survived, haven’t gone to seed, haven’t naturalized. At best, two have expanded from their crowns.

I look at the yellow composites rising on bare stems from shrubby hummocks of wintergreen leaves, and wonder why they haven’t done as well as the neglected argenta plants growing in the gopher riddled median on the approach into Santa Fe.

Good Calvinist that I am, I always assume plant failure is my fault. Then, after I buy perennials year after year and treat them with different watering and transplanting techniques, I turn on the purveyors. After all, argenta is promoted for gardens in Arizona, scaposa by those in Texas and the Sandias, and acaulis for Colorado. The species whose thick taproot was converted to chewing gum by the Tewa and local Spanish-speakers in the early 20th century was richardsonii.

The last thing I consider is the possibility that nature may be the reason my natives fail. Wildflowers that are specific to a small location are inherently fussy. Apparently, the various Hymenoxys flourished on limestone soils during the dry, warm period after the Wisconsin glacier, then began adapting when the climate changed again.

At some time, the parent of the three commercially available species underwent enough genetic change that the descendants have been redefined as Tetraneuris, partly because they are the only ones that can double their sets of 30 chromosomes. One acaulis subspecies around the Great Lakes has retreated into such small, widely separated areas that the lake daisy has lost its ability to reproduce because the remaining plants are too similar to mate. Marcella Demauro found similar outcrossing, self-compatible populations in Illinois and Ohio could only breed with each other, but not within their own environments.

Another endemic in Valley Verde, Arizona, that Daniel Godec believes probably diverged from another acaulis variant, is found on only four gypsum hill tops because it has become too sensitive to soil and slope. Who knows what my particular plants need.

The local Hymenoxys, pingué, apparently was able to accept a more variable climate, for it ranges from New Mexico to Saskatchewan. It’s strongest adaptation has been the production of chemicals which poison sheep foolish enough to eat it. It apparently increased to cover vast areas when overgrazing eliminated more palatable forage.

It’s ironic that no one is offering this more forgiving species in the trade today because men have tried to grow the Colorado rubber plant commercially for the latex in the roots. Even its old uses and dangers have been forgotten since bovines replaced ovines. Michael Moore says the best many can conjure today is that it was used "to get rid of too many sheep."

The memory of yellow covered hills still leads to the desire for the long-blooming native that is satisfied by plantsmen who believe their particular offering is the true perky Sue. They look enough alike to fool all but the trained botanists, and sometimes they do actually naturalize. Just not in my garden.

Notes:
Campbell, Lesley, Brian Hubbard and Michael Oldham. "Cosewic Status Report on the Lakeside Daisy, Hymenoxys herbacea in Canada," 2002, available on-line.
Demauro, Marcella M. "Relationship of Breeding System to Rarity in the Lakeside Daisy (Hymenoxys acaulis var. glabra)," Conservation Biology 7:542-550:1993.
Godec, Daniel J. "Distribution and Taxonomic Discussion of Tetraneuris verdiensis, an Apparently Rare Edaphic Endemic from the Verde Valley of Arizona," Rare and Endangered Plant Conference, 2000.Moore, Michael. Commentary in L. S. M. Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947; revised by Moore for Western Eagle Press, 1997.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Range Plant Handbook, 1937; republished by Dover Publications, 1988.Photograph: Perky Sue, offered as Hymenoxys scaposa, more properly Tetraneuris scaposa, 24 May 2008.