Sunday, August 31, 2008

Mönch Asters

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, blue vervain, mullein, white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, goats head, toothed spurge, stickleaf, pigweed, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, hawkweed, African marigold, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, sand, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, farmers, plains and native sunflowers, corn, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; buds on skunkbush; bittersweet berries orange.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Looking east: Hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian and garden sunflowers, cutleaf coneflower, zinnias from seed; hollyhock seed cases opening.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos; lilac buds forming, grapes getting larger.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

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

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea; beginning to need less water.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, finch, ants, bees, fewer grasshoppers.

Weather: Rain last Sunday as Fay hit Florida for the fourth time; rain again Tuesday before Gustav formed in the Caribbean; temperatures remained cooler, ranging from mid-50's to middle 80's; 13:38 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: If it weren’t for Agatha Christie, I doubt I’d be growing asters.

Michaelmas daisies locate her mysteries by season or class and serve as unobtrusive signs for the nearness of violent death. They aren’t the ones neglected or passing, but stand in contrast to "unevenly mown" lawns and "straggling chrysanthemums." They are the "great banners of Autumn" in a "neglected garden," the "last dying splash of purple beauty."

I tried with little success to grow asters in Michigan, but few were actually Christie’s flowers. Botanists have now determined the DNA of north American plants like New York, New England, heath and purple asters is not close enough to the Europeans, and have moved them into a separate genera on composites, Symphyotrichum.

It was with some reluctance I bought any here, and I was greatly surprised when Dunkle Schöne and Mönch actually survived for more than a season. The first is an alpine aster offered by Ernst Benary that grew low and bloomed in May until the winter of 2003. The replacement plants failed, and I abandoned the species. After all, true Michaelmas daisies should bloom near that feast day, September 29, which the British use as a synecdoche for autumn.

I’ve had better luck with the taller, yellow-centered Mönch. The small plants I ordered in 1997 lasted until severe weather weakened them in 2001. The ones I bought locally in 2003 and 2005 died out, but the cuttings I planted in 2006 are now covered with large lavender flowers on knee high stems that should last until severe cold takes them in October or November.

Mönch is the product of that happier time evoked by Christie’s novels when racism and fundamentalism hadn’t yet converged to deny Darwin and the reverend Charles Wolley-Dod could take two species and see if they would interbreed. His crosses between Aster amellus and Aster thomsonii disappeared, but other hybrids of the two were introduced in the 1920's by Carl Frikart from a nursery in Stäfa on Lake Zurich.

The purple-flowered amellis grows from southern and eastern Europe into bordering Asia. Gertrude Jekyll, the garden designer most responsible for the herbaceous borders that imbue Christie’s backgrounds with their moods, used amellis "in rather large quantity, coming right to the front in some places, and running in and out between the clumps of other kinds" in her 1908 plan for a Michaelmas border.

The lavender-rayed thomsonii was discovered by Charles Baron Clarke in Kashmir in 1876, and sent back to England so Wolley-Dod could show his new hybrids in 1892. They too evoke those better times when the tribal Himalayas were new territory for the British Empire, when Murder in Mesopotamia did not suggest suicide bombers, but archaeological digs with Dame Agatha’s new husband, and when Death on the Nile was not a killer of local livestock but a honeymoon adventure.

It’s ironic that Frikart’s Mönch asters are the only specimens on an English estate garden I’ve ever been able to grow, especially since our New York aster is now commonly sold there as the Michaelmas. However, one of its ancestors did come from the mountains of India through a stay in the Alps of Switzerland, before landing in England where Penelope Hobhouse now recommends the south-facing Mönch in place of amellis in Jekyll inspired borders.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. Cards on the Table, 1936, chrysanthemums.
_____. Death on the Nile, 1937.
_____. Evil Under the Sun, 1980, banners and neglected garden.
_____. Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936.
_____. Murder is Announced, 1950, dying splash.
_____. The Clocks, 1963, lawn.


Hobhouse, Penelope. Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening, 1983, compilation of writings by Jekyll with commentary by Hobhouse, including quotation from page 216.

Jekyll, Gertrude. Colour in the Flower Garden, 1908, reprinted by Elibron Classics, 2005.

Photograph: Mönch asters 30 August 2008.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Hopi Tea

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, blue vervain, mullein, white sweet clover, sweet pea, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, silverleaf nightshade, alfilerillo, goats head, toothed spurge, stickleaf, pigweed, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, African marigold from seed, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny and hairy golden aster, tahokia daisy, farmers, garden, plains and native sunflowers, cocklebur, sand bur, corn, redtop, barn and muhly ring grass; milkweed pods formed; buds on skunkbush; sweet corn for sale; both alfalfa and smooth brome hay being cut with whatever else was growing in the fields.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian sunflower, cutleaf coneflower, zinnias from seed.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa and Blaze roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; yucca seed pods splitting open.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Gecko, hummingbirds in trees, monarch butterflies, bees, ladybug, brick red grasshopper, 50 some small black ant hills appeared outside my gate.
Weather: Rained several times last Sunday, near arroyo was running; morning temperatures since have fallen into upper 50's, but afternoons still reached upper 80's with wind. 13:48 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: My need to know what’s growing around me began with a woody vine exploiting the area between neighbors’ fences in Michigan. I cut it back on my side with no harm, then touched the arm of a friend and left a rash. It turned out to be poison ivy, not in the "three leaves with red stems sprawling on the ground" phase, but something more akin to wild grapes.
Now when I walk along the roadside, it’s not simply because I’m curious about what’s blooming. I want to know the barbarians at the gates in all their stages, so if an undesirable volunteers, I’ll recognize it before its roots get too deep to remove.
Luckily, Hopi tea wouldn’t be a nuisance, because its young definitely would be difficult to detect. The composite has stripped itself to the barest essentials, produces only disk flowers and the scantiest of curling, blue-grey leaves on wiry, one to two foot stems. The yellow flowers are closed by mid-morning, unless it’s cloudy. Most of the time, all I see are tightened petals darkened by rust-colored veins, empty brown sepals, and reddish seed capsules.
Thelesperma megapotamicum grows in the intermontane west and arid great plains as far north as Montana in this country and down through Chihuahua and Coahuila to Zacatecas. A tea made from dried plants is one of the few foods common to nearly every pueblo, from the Hopi in the west to the nearby Tewa-speaking Santa Clara, and many Keres speakers between, including the Cochiti, Santo Domingo, Laguna, and Acoma..
The mild, slightly astringent drink spread to the invading Navajo and Apache, where the first also used ch’il awhéhé root to dye wool a yellowish-orange. The Hopi used ho hoysi flowers to stain yucca fibers a reddish brown for baskets, and it’s been used as a colorante in northern Mexico.
When the Spanish arrived several centuries later they adopted cota, usually with sugar. In 1997, 91-year-old curanderismo Gabrielito Pino was still gathering the herb after August 12 in the Mora valley for stomach, kidney, and urinary problems because that day was "consecrated to the Blessed Virgin." In older eastern church traditions, Dormition, when Mary’s body was removed to heaven, followed her death on the 12th by three days and this midpoint between mid-summer and the fall equinox was marked by ceremonies blessing the herbs in Europe. The 15th, Assumption Day, is still a Laguna and Zia feast day.
Somehow this close relative of coreopsis found its way to Argentina, perhaps with the Spanish. There té indio is used for gonorrhea, kidney and nerve problems. Zoncho Tso has been told by relatives that some of their fellow Navajo have used it for the venereal disease. His mother also told him he should say a prayer when he gathered this, or any herb, explain why he was taking the plant from its home, and always leave some behind.
I think the only people who don’t appreciate greenthread live in Los Alamos where the national lab doesn’t want any vegetation over its landfills which could disturb what lies below. The Earth and Environmental Sciences Division found Hopi tea to be one of the first plants to colonize a conventional cover.
Here it stays to the shoulder, where its taproot can reach the water shed by the pavement and it co-exists with gumweed and pigweed. This year, the visible plants don’t grow in dense colonies, but are scattered. So far, the perennial has shown no interest in my land or any inland fields, clinging instead to the moister edges of civilization.
Notes:
Arellano, Anselm. "New Mexico’s Healing Tradition: Curanderismo Survives 400 Years," Herbs for Health 46-52:March/April 1997. Pius XII formalized the chronology in 1950 when he set Assumption day as August 15. Since the Roman Catholic Church repudiates the more corporal aspects of Mary’s life, her physical death is not recognized like it is in eastern and older folk traditions.
Breshears, David D., John W. Nyhan, and David W. Davenport. "Ecohydrology Monitoring and Excavation of Semiarid Landfill Covers a Decade after Installation," Vadose Zone Journal 4:798-810:2005.Davicino, Roberto, María Aída Mattar, Yolanda Angelina Casali, Silvia Graciela Correa, Elisa Margarita Pettenati, and Blas Micalizzi. "Actividad Antifungica de Extractos de Plantas Usadas en Medicina Popular en Argentina," Revista Peruana Biología 14:247-251:2007.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database.

Tso, Zoncho. "Thelesperma megapotamicum" website.

Photograph: Hopi Tea growing beside the road between storms last Sunday, 17 August 2008.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Purple Ice Plant

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, silverleaf nightshade, goats head, toothed spurge, portulaca, stickleaf, pigweed, zinnia, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny and hairy golden aster, tahokia daisy, farmers, garden and native sunflowers, cocklebur, sand bur, corn, sideoats grama, redtop, barn grass. Chickens let out in several hay fields after they were cut.

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

Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, large-leaf soapwort, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink speedwell, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, cutleaf coneflower; buds on sedum.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa and Blaze roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, blue salvia, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Monch aster.

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

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, ants, grasshopper

Weather: Clouds hung around at night keeping early morning temperatures a bit warmer; dew Monday, rain pocked drive Thursday, hard rain before dawn Saturday and again last night; 14:05 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: My yard has spots filled with souvenirs from failed experiments based on faulty analogies. One is that succulents are like camels: since they store water, they don’t need much. I have an impressive list of sedums, sempervivums, and ice plants that proved that wrong.

Liberty Hyde Bailey knew better in 1930 when he said succulent only meant the green parts were thick and fleshy, nothing more. Indeed, he suggested, it was a mistake to think the roots could do without water for any length of time. The thick leaves might be an adaptation to an arid climate, but those environments have rainy seasons when these plants grow and expect water.

Still, I wasn’t the first. Early in the twentieth century, railroads planted various ice plants to stabilize the edges of track beds, including yellow-flowered Carpobrotus edulis and magenta-flowered Carpobrutus chilensis. Both naturalized in Mediterranean areas of California, even interbred, to cover banks with bright daisy-shaped flowers whose parentage is too mixed to identify.

James Raulston, raised in Oklahoma wheat lands still recovering from the dust bowl, saw chilensis, or some similar Aizoaceae, blooming in southern California in 1971, when he was about 31. Later, he photographed another ice plant, an unidentified purple Delosperma, in Wisely Gardens, Surrey, in 1984.

When the great migrations from the rust belt to the south and southwest began in the 1970's, they coincided with a drought that forced cities like Denver to restrict sprinkler use in 1977 and consider how it could survive with river allocation agreements written back when local economies were agricultural. The city’s water board began promoting xeriscaping in 1978.

Raulston moved to North Carolina State where he looked for non-native species that could grow efficiently in this country. He gave potted cuttings to nurserymen who attended his short courses, including the yellow-flowered Delosperma nubigenum in 1986. Four years later he promoted the magenta-petaled Delosperma cooperi with warnings that standard greenhouse practices like daily watering and constant fertilization weren’t as useful as benign neglect.

The next year, 1991, Santa Fe imposed water restrictions that forced greenhouse owners to make water-wise choices for themselves, if not their customers. Purple ice plant was in my first Santa Fe Greenhouse catalog in 1993. By 1997, when I bought my first cuttings, the ground cover first sent to Surrey by Thomas Cooper from modern day Lesotho in 1861 was being offered by all the major mail order suppliers.

Those first plants bought in August didn’t survive the winter, probably because they went from greenhouse conditions to hot New Mexico and weren’t able to develop good roots. I tried three more the following spring under a peach, where little seems to grow. They limped along after the cold winter of 2000 and disappeared the following year.

By then I’d planted three more cooperi under a Russian sage where they got extra water whenever hose washers needed replacing. In their native range, with wet summers and dry winters, they’re evergreen. Here the narrow, triangular leaves stay green here until November, then die to the ground leaving a maze of white, woody stalks.

They don’t much like standing water in winter, and were slow to emerge this spring. When new growth did appear in mid-May, several weeks later than usual, the thick stems were deep within the shrub and have shown little inclination to spread in the face of constant winds. The glistening flower petals have also been narrower. I don’t know if they can make it through the coming winter.

The lure of a completely new succulent that blooms from late morning to dusk all summer was too big a temptation for any of us. In Farmington, Daniel Smeal included cooperi in his xeric demonstration garden, and found it couldn’t survive when irrigation levels fell below 50% of transpiration. In El Paso, Genhua Niu and Denise Rodriguez hoped the perennial would do well with recycled water and found it lost body mass. Back at Raulston’s university, a graduate student, Amy Moran, tested plants for greenroofs and found purple ice plant one of the few to fail.

I suspect they all could tell their own version of the camel, the succulent, and the eye of a needle.

Notes:
Baily, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1930.

Moran, Amy, Bill Hunt and Greg Jennings. "A North Carolina Field Study to Evaluate Greenroof Runoff Quantity, Runoff Quality, and Plant Growth," Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference, 2004.
Niu, Genhua and Denise S. Rodriguez. "Relative Salt Tolerance of Selected Herbaceous Perennials and Groundcovers," Scientia Horticulturae 110:352-358:2006.

Raulston, James Chester. "J. C. Raulston's Slide Collection," available on-line.

_____. "Plants Distributed To Nurserymen - 1990 NCAN Summer Short Course," Friends of the Arboretum Newsletter (22)1991.

Smeal, Daniel, M. M. West, M. K. O'Neill, and R. N. Arnold. "A Differentially-Irrigated, Xeric Plant Demonstration Garden in Northwestern New Mexico," International Irrigation Show and Technical Conference, 2007.

Photograph: Purple ice plant under Russia sage, 13 August 2008.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Four O'Clocks

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, winterfat, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, goats head, toothed spurge, portulaca, stickleaf pigweed, zinnia, goldenrod, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny and hairy golden aster, May daisy, farmers, garden and native sunflowers, sand burs, corn, sideoats grama, redtop, barn grass; great piles of pulled pigweed waiting to be burned or hauled away.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, large-leaf soapwort, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup, pink speedwell, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed; buds on hosta, sedum, and cutleaf coneflower
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, rugosa and Blaze roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, blue salvia, perennial four o’clock, flax, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower, Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania; first tomato ripe.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: 4' long red snake about 1 ½" thick with a pattern that repeated every 3"; young birds chirping in peach, hummingbirds, noisy crickets, cabbage butterfly, garnet-colored dragonfly, bees, ants, grasshoppers.
Weather: Hot dry air before Edourdo spawned turbulent storms that eventually dropped rain on Wednesday and Thursday that left rivulets in my drive and collapsed the front bank of a neighbor’s yard; 14:36 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: There are plants, like four o’clocks, that enter cultivation, not because they’re beautiful, but because their external features match those of some familiar, already valued, plant.
When I tried Mirabilis jalapa in Michigan I was looking for older varieties that might grow when modern ones, altered for the bedding trade, simply wouldn’t. Catalogs described their habit of opening late in the afternoon when temperatures fell to attract moths with their sweet fragrance, and claimed they had been great favorites of Victorians like the Methodists who built my house. The seeds germinated into 2' plants with scattered flowers of pale colors that didn’t show or smell from a distance, but did drop seed to reproduce themselves.

I had less success here when I managed a few flowers a year between 1995 and 1997, then was lucky to get a flower every three years. By then breeders were releasing new varieties, and I turned to a native I’d heard was a hardy perennial. In fact, Mirabilis multiflora’s long funnel-shaped flowers are all pale magenta and it’s only good by itself. Each year the plant spreads to cover three to four feet then dries and breaks away, leaving a great bare area that can’t be touched until it reemerges in June lest the taproot be damaged.

Four o’clock’s success may always have come from the search for a replacement for something that no longer worked. After Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztec, he moved west to the mines of a subjugated tribe, the Purhépecha, whose leader was willing to become an ally against their shared enemy. Tangoxoán accepted the Franciscans in 1525, and, when several became dangerously ill, he sent them a purgative made from the roots of a morning glory, Ipomoea purga. Sometime in the 1530's, a Genoese adventurer returned to Seville, Pasquall Catano, convinced Nicolas Monardes that Mechoacán was more effective than existing medicines.

By the time the physician to Philip II was writing in 1569 the herb, now called jalap, had spread through the Spanish, Italian, German and Flemish-speaking Roman Catholic states to treat dropsy and was threatened with inferior substitutions in trade. One was the familiar four o’clock, called false jalap, whose flowers fascinated John Gerard in 1597 because they came in five colors, often with two colors on the same flower, and the colors varied from day to day on a single plant. He compared them to both tobacco and bindweed.

It’s not clear how Gerard got his plants, but it was grown in Persia by his contemporary, Shah Abbas, and was soon after taken to Malabar, probably by the Portuguese. The Marvel of Peru is perennial in zone 9 where temperatures may fall to 20 degrees and grows in coastal Ecuador and Perú where Pizarro’s cousin, Francisco de Orellana, founded Guayaquil in 1537, as well as in Bolivia’s Cochabamba valley where Garci Ruiz de Orellana bought land in 1542 to grow food for the Potosí mines.

While tubers may have moved from Lima’s port, El Callao, to the isthmus and across to Nombre de Dios for reshipment by Spanish carriers, John Parry suggests there was an illicit route to Potosí along an Amazonian tributary, the Paraná, used by the Portuguese and Dutch, after Franciso de Orellano found the Amazon from the Andes in 1542. Today, Laurimar Rocha says maravilha is common in the Brazilian coastal states from Paraná north and has been used to treat edema, the retained fluids once referred to as dropsy, as well as other problems. Gerard was more likely to have obtained his plants from a Dutch source.

It isn’t clear either which plant settlers here in the rio arriba knew, jalap or false jalap. It’s not even known if the medicas who talked with Leonora Curtin were descendants of families who came with Oñate or the later ones who moved north from Zacatecas in the 1700's. But it is obvious they transferred their expectations to the local four o’clock, maravilla, which they used to treat dropsy.

The local Nyctaginaceae apparently was known by farmer-hunters who used the Fresnal Canyon rock shelter in New Mexico’s Sacramento mountains sometime between 1700 BC and 100 AD. When anthropologists collected ethnobotanic information in the twentieth century, they found the perceptions of utility varied with the experiences of their informants with other plants: Keres speakers used the dried gray leaves like tobacco while the Hopi chewed the roots as an hallucinogen. The only ones who mentioned puhu for swellings, possibly of "dropsical origin," were the ones in this valley, the Santa Clara, who had had the most intimate relations with the Spanish.

It may be the idea of using the tubers of big-seeded, funnel-shaped purplish flowers that collapse into umbrellas after dawn to treat dropsy and other medical problems was brought by the Purhépecha from South America and adapted to the jalap. Their Tarascan language is unlike any in México and Joseph Greenburg suggests it may be related to the Chibchan spoken in lower Central America and Colombia where four o’clocks also grow.

The amazing thing is that all three plants have been proven effective by whatever paradigm scientists have chosen to test the consequences of a mental construct that moved from the four o’clocks of South America to the jalap of western México to Spain, and then back to México and up the Rio Grande to the local Mirabilis, at times abetted by an interest in new flowers that moved to England and back across the Atlantic to Michigan and down to the Española valley.

Notes:
Bohrer Vorsila L. "Recognition and Interpretation of Prehistoric Remains of Mirabilis multiflora (Nyctaginaceae) in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico," Torrey Botanical Club Bulletin 102:21-25:1975.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Dymock, William, C. J. H. Warden, and David Hooper. Pharmacographia Indica: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin, Met with in British India, 1890-1893, 1972 reprint by Hamdard.

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

Greenberg, Joseph H. Language in the Americas, 1987.

Missouri Botanical Garden. "Mirabilis jalapa L: Literature Based Distribution," available on-line.

Monardes, Nicolas. Dos libros, el uno que trata de todas las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de la medicina, y el otro que trata de la piedra bezaar, y de la yerva escuerçonera, 1569, translated by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the New Founde Worlde, 1577, and republished by Stephen Gaselee, 1925. Monardes calls him Caconcin Casique, the last the title for the tribal leader, calzonci. I found no confirmation for the miraculous cure.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932, and Alfred F. Whiting, Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Parry, John Horace. The Spanish Seaborne Empire, 1981.

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

Rocha, Laurimar Thomé. Importância de Investigação Farmacológica de Mirabilis jalapa Linn Validação de Sua Utilização, 2006.

Photograph: Local perennial four o’clocks, 3 August 2008.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Trumpet Creeper

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, winterfat, daylily, lilies, onion, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess almost gone, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, willow gaura, goats head, toothed spurge, portulaca, pigweed, silver-leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, zinnia, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, Hopi tea, chicory, spiny and hairy golden aster, farmers and garden sunflowers, corn, sideoats grama, redtop; tomatoes visible from road; second cut beginning for smooth brome hay.

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

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

Looking south: Rugosa rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos.

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

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

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium

Animal sightings: Gecko, hummingbird, large brown moths, bees moved to caryopteris, ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: High afternoon temperatures with few clouds have dried any evidence of last week’s rain; 14:52 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Recently one of my boss’s tenants complained about her bathroom. When our foreman went to look, he reported a tree had grown into the wall and knocked tile off the shower wall.

It was the first time I seriously considered the ways adobe walls differ from wood or brick, and realized there was another good reason this area developed an aesthetic that prefers bare ground around a house. It also made me hope Rosalie Doolittle wasn’t being literal when she suggested trumpet creeper was "effective against native homes" in Albuquerque.

Campsis radicans is native to the oak-hickory-pine forests that grow in the Mississippi flats north from Texas to Ohio, east along the Gulf coast, and over the Atlantic plain to southern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The roots spread through moist soil to send suckers some forty feet up tree trunks, where they clamor from branch to branch and drop seeds from taupe pods in late fall.

The orange, two to three-inch long flowers are handsome funnels filled with nectar that attract hummingbirds and ants. The waxy outer side is often brighter than the matte interior, and shades from a yellowish base held by a deep coral calyx cup. Nested against glossy dark green branchlets of five or six pairs of leaves, they evoked tropical glamour to the men who took them back to Europe in 1640.

When I first lived with trumpet creeper in Oakland County, Michigan, the woody vine ran loose in my neighbor’s yard and crept into my garden. After he built a privacy fence, I tied the runners to hooks and discovered they developed two rows of teeth below the leaf nodes that attached themselves to wood like velcro. When that man sold the house, the new owner found the aërial roots had done so much damage to the mortar, the bricks needed to be repointed.

Currently some ten people have vines blooming around the village, almost everyone at the front property line behind, but not weighing down a wire fence. Two have done little more than let their plants sprawl along the ground like pumpkin vines. The others must have given their stems short poles, because they’ve climbed four or six feet, and now put out horizontal branches each spring that bear terminal flower clusters.

In only one place has the vine discovered a tree to revert to its natural form, and that was a traditional property that had been abandoned before it was converted to commercial use. In addition to the vine in the Siberian elms and on the nearby back fence, there are shorter mounds in front nearer the irrigation ditch.

The lure of beauty accompanied by the loss of folk wisdom can be dangerous. Only three people are growing trumpet creeper between the village and my house. I don’t know if that’s because others can’t get them to grow on our drier land or they don’t like the outsized liana. I suspect the woman with the deciduous perennial near her chain-link fence and the one letting it go on a mesh fence near a ditch have roots in the community and its common store of knowledge, while the family who has it climbing the corner of a double-wide is probably new.

As for the house managed by my boss’s company in Santa Fe, I have no idea if our foreman was right. The man who did the repairs only said there was a leak somewhere in the wall, but he couldn’t do any more than replace the tile. A man from Montana raised to expect normal housing saw nothing, while a man raised in northern New Mexico saw non-existent disasters he’d heard about as a child. Neither noticed the nearest tree was more that six feet away, and that, in a lush neighborhood of old family compounds, the nearest trumpet creeper was a block away.

Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1967 revision.

McGinley, Mark, editor. "Mississippi Lowland Forests," 2007, in World Wildlife Fund, Encyclopedia of Earth, available on-line.

Photograph: Trumpet creeper with flowers and a pod growing with Virginia creeper on a wire fence and Siberian elm near town, 7/27/08.