Beauty Bush

What’s blooming in the area: Roses of all kinds including Austrian copper, yellow Persian, pink shrubs, teas and miniatures; Apache plume, Russian olive, locusts, catalpa, four-wing saltbush, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, oxalis, tumble mustard, Jupiter’s beard, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; native sunflowers coming up; milkweed visible. More people are preparing their vegetable gardens.

In my yard: Rugosa rose, spirea, beauty bush, snowball, iris, flax, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, golden spur columbine, pink evening primrose, hartweig, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue, chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, purple beardtongue, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, anthemis, blanket flower, coreopsis, and Mexican hat; zinnia seeds coming up.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, French marigold.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Geckos, hummingbirds, ants, grasshoppers, small moths; bees on beauty bush; bumble bee on pinks; rabbit in upper neighbor’s yard; four cows brought into pasture in the village.

Weather: Winds whipped themselves into such a frenzy Wednesday they produced a funnel cloud near White Rock. When I heard the weather bureau warnings, I wondered how the topography would channel its northeast path. I drove home an hour or so later with the sun shining and the roads dry until I crossed the ridge into my valley where the edges of the road were wet to my house and the sand was gone that had been covering my seeds. Last rain 5/28/08. 15:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When Linnaeus used Latin to name plants in 1753 he was affirming a belief in the possibility of a set of values shared across cultures and continents.

Roman Catholic missionaries sent to China in the late nineteenth century still believed they could safely explore unknown manifestations of God and report them back to their peers in France and Italy. By 1901, so many had explored and steamships had become so efficient Ludwig Diels could publish a survey of central Chinese flora that included Paul Graebner’s description of a Shaanxi shrub with leaves and new growth that look like honeysuckle on gray-brown branches with shredding bark that Giuseppe Giraldi had only seen bearing seed in the early 1890's.

Reports of exotic new species had already aroused the commercial instincts of nurseryman Harry Veitch. In 1900, he sent Ernest Wilson to western Hubei to meet a customs official, Augustine Henry, who had been asking people to bring him samples of local plants he feared would be lost to deforestation. Veitch’s Coomb Wood nursery planted seeds Wilson collected in the area and was rewarded when one lined it branches with clusters of pale-pink tubular flowers in 1910.

No one had noticed when Graebner named that particular plant for a fellow Berlin botanist, Richard Kolkwitz, that he was confirming Latin no longer was a spoken language. The anachronistic mix of syllables from people who’d fought in antiquity didn’t bother the British upper classes who used their classical educations to separate themselves from the rising masses. Leonard Messel, the son of Berlin-born banker Ludwig Messel, won the Royal Horticultural Society Award of Merit in 1923 for a Kolkwitzia amabilis grown from a Veitch cutting.

When Kolkwitzia was introduced into the United States after World War I, it was renamed beauty bush because, in our xenophobic climate where nothing could have a German name and anything even slightly Slavic was disdained, the idea of universal culture was rejected. No one complained about a stereotypic pop culture rendition of pidgin Chinese. When I bought my container grown cutting in Albuquerque in 1997, the store label didn’t even include the Latin name.

The Caprifoliaceae were popular in suburban gardens between the wars, but fell into disfavor in the 1950's. Alan Summers believes when nurseries began growing stock in containers, the cuttings didn’t flourish enough to attract buyers. I suspect in the age of Joseph McCarthy anything with wanton form and profligate blooming habits that could not be pruned into conformity was distrusted.

The idea of universal culture has been in retreat ever since. Now environmentalists want to root out any plants in the wild that were not there in some prelapsarian age. When Reinhard Böcker and Monika Dirk studied germination patterns of potential invaders in Baden-Württemberg, they discovered Kolkwitzia seeds do better on limestone debris and pebbles than on standard soil, sand or loess.

Nature, of course, doesn’t know the difference between Anglo and Hispanic culture, doesn’t recognize the difference between Latin and Chinese. She created one Kolkwitzia species, perhaps when she was experimenting with plastid inheritance through both male and female cells. No more were seen in the wild until 1980 when the Sino-American Botanical Expedition went looking. Not enough is known about the protected rare shrub to determine if it failed to spread over a wide area or is now only a remnant of its former self. All the seedlings and cuttings grown in this country come from a cutting brought by Wilson from Veitch’s specimen in 1907 and planted by Jackson Dawson at the Arnold Arboretum.

Here in New Mexico my Kolkwitzia thrives on limey soil where weiglia dies back from grasshoppers, rose roots are devoured by gophers, and many woody shrubs can’t handle the daily temperature extremes. Linnaeus was right that a worldly nature requires a universal language to identify plants that can grow in both the upper Rio Grande below the Gorge bridge and near the headwaters of the Yangtze beyond the Three Gorges.

Notes:
Reinhard Böcker and Monika Dirk. "Distribution and Spreading of Alien Trees in South Western Germany and Contributions of Germination Biology," in U. Starfinger, K. Edwards, I. Kowarik, and M. Williamson, Plant Invasions: Ecological Mechanisms and Human Responses, 1998.

Diels, Ludwig. "Die Flora von Central-China. Nach der Verhandenon Literatur und Neu Mitegeieilten Orignal Materiale," Botanische Jahrbücher für Systematik, Pflanzengeschichte und Pflanzengeographie 29:169-659:1901.

Hu, Yingchun, Quan Zhang, Guangyuan Rao, and Sodmergen. "Occurrence of Plastids in the Sperm Cells of Caprifoliaceae: Biparental Plastid Inheritance in Angiosperms Is Unilaterally Derived from Maternal Inheritance" Plant Cell Physiology, 2008.

Summers, Alan. "Kolkwitzia Amabilis 'Pink Cloud'," Carroll Gardens web-site.

Photograph: Beauty bush, 31 May 2008, with Jemez Mountains and badlands in back.