Ladybells

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, buddleia, winterfat, daylily, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, sweet pea, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, goats head, silver-leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, zinnia, cosmos, wild lettuce, horseweed, dandelion, goats beard, Hopi tea, chicory, spiny and hairy golden aster, farmers and garden sunflowers, corn; toothed spurge, añil del muerto, and summer grasses coming up.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, nasturtium, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, tomatillo, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, pink salvia, pink speedwell, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed; buds on sedum, garlic chives, and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower; buds on David phlox, leadplant, and Monch aster.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Ground squirrel, gecko, hummingbirds, green bird on blanket flower seed head, hummingbird and nondescript moths, bees, ants, grasshoppers, earthworms after rain.

Weather: Finally more rain than the forces of the desert can steal in a day; 15:08 hours of daylight.

Weekly update: Of all the plants in my garden, ladybells are the most consistently disappointing. Every spring new leaves emerge promising a grand array of large bells strung along tall, single stalks, shimmering blue bangles for a parade of mummers. Then every July the dark triangular leaves disappear and only a few cinnamon stems rise to produce seed that renews the cycle.

This year’s weather has been a compendium of the worst climatic events of the past few years - no rain after the end of March, winds that didn’t begin until the first of April but haven’t stopped, temperatures that skipped from the chill of early spring to the high heat of early summer, and now a hurricane season that’s a month early.

Few plants have done more that endure. Almost no apricots or lilacs this past spring, dispirited roses in June, morning glories that only now are germinating. But the ladybells are flourishing, finally blooming in a great drift along the west side of the house where morning shade gives way to afternoon sun before the clouds roll through.

What on earth’s happening?

When I first bought a seedling in August of 1997, Santa Fe Greenhouses suggested Adenophora latifolia was good for dry semi-shade. It must need more because that’s exactly what it gets. Whenever I try to find what that might be, all I discover is the perennial’s from Siberia, a particularly useless piece of information since that term covers all the land east of the Urals drained by rivers flowing north, from desert to tundra.

It may have been introduced to the trade after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 when nurserymen hoped to find new treasures and waned when it found no market. The Santa Fe nursery only promoted it between 1994 and 2003, and almost no one offers seeds or plants on-line today. Ladybells are members of the Campanula family and differ from the more common bluebells in such minor ways they appear no different in the garden than the already familiar, moisture-loving flowers.

The initial discovery of Adenophora species by the west in the nineteenth century probably came from similar euphoric hopes for the east dashed by similar realities. Peter I first sent men looking for useful plants in his expanding Russian empire. When Aleksey Razumovsky inherited the Gorenki estate from his uncle, paramour to the tsarina, he built gardens even greater than the tsar’s and hired Friedrich von Fischer to manage them. Plant hunters again ventured east and south.

Fischer first recognized Adenophora as a separate genre in 1816 and published a description of ladybells in a Moscow journal in 1823. Harvard received its dried Amur specimen from Carl Maximowicz in 1855 when this country was forcing itself into Japan. Men reported the local peoples ate the thick, fleshy roots. Europe didn’t need another root vegetable to rival the turnip or beet. Men didn’t build their fortunes monopolizing the potato trade; empires were built on tea and opium, cotton and coffee.

It fell back into the obscurity of doppelgängers beyond western Europe’s horizons where it was also known as pereskiifolia and Fedor Bogdanovic Fischer and Karl Ivanovich Maksimovich slipped between Slav and German identities. Only recently have plant hunters been translated again, this time with more detail. Vladimir Komarov reported ladybells from forests, dry meadows, and stony slopes. Oleg Kosterin saw them growing in a forest of larch and silver birch near the headwaters of the Amur in 1997.

Forest lands and river basins fit neither the common image of frigid Siberia nor the xeric characteristics advertised in Santa Fe. I went out to look again at these mysterious flowers from a fairy tale land where Cossack shepherd boys like Razumovsky’s uncle attracted princesses and finally realized the reason they’re doing well: I have a leaky hose creating a stream bank.

Notes:
Fischer, Friedrich Ernst Ludwig von. Société Imperiale de Naturalistes, Moscou, Mémoires 6:168:1823.

Harvard University Herbaria. Index of Botanical Specimens, database available on-line.

Komarov, Vladimir Leontyevich . Flora SSSR, editor, 1934-1960, cited by Ken Fern, “Adenophora latifolia,” Plants for a Future project, available on-line.

Kosterin, Oleg. Wildlife Photography, available on-line.

Uphof, Johannes Cornelis Theodorus. Dictionary of Economic Plants, 1968 edition.

Photograph: Ladybells with Silver King artemisia, 20 July 08.