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.