Sunday, September 28, 2008

Scarlet Gilia

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, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallows, mullein, white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, alfilerillo, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, ragweed, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; skunk bush leaves turning yellow, corn stalks mostly brown.

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

Looking east: Hosta, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, scarlet gilia, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink veronica, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, African marigolds, Maximilian and garden sunflowers.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze roses, Sensation cosmos; spirea leaves beginning to turn orange, grapes turning red.

Looking west: Buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia; caryopteris leaves turning color.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Gecko, bees, ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Allergies have been worse this year; after a few cool mornings, plants have begun their preparations for winter; heard rain on the roof a few nights, but saw no evidence on the ground in the mornings; last useful rain 8/31/08; 11:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Nursery catalogs give special prices when one orders at least three plants of the same type. This isn’t simply mass marketing, but an affirmation of recommendations from garden writers like Rosalie Doolittle who suggest "a better effect is obtained more quickly by planting in groups of three, five and seven" than by "stringing out single plants here and there."

The only time a functional reason is offered is with fruiting plants like holly or apples. The first bear flowers with male and female parts on separate plants, and so both types are needed if one expects berries. Apples are hermaphrodites, but the male pollen cannot fertilize the female ovary of the same plant or its clone. One has to plant different varieties that bloom at the same time to harvest more than flowers.

Experience suggests another reason. With short-lived perennials like scarlet gilia it’s cheaper to have plants reseed themselves, than replace them every few years. Ipomopsis aggregata is so ephemeral, it dies after blooming, even though it may remain a basal rosette for years. Few garden guides mention which plants are self-fertile, so buying groups is a defense against one’s own ignorance as well as the caprices of nature.

My first four self-sterile gilia from August of 1995 didn’t open until 1997, then some stayed in bloom from June 23 until September 15. The remaining plants died out after flowering in 1998, and nothing appeared in 1999. When I went shopping the following spring, only one plant was available. I found three more in 2001, and discovered a seedling in the wet area outside the brick edging. Nothing bloomed again until 2005.

By then I’d given up on plants and thought about seeds, only to find no reliable sources. Burpee offered "Ipomopsis Humminbird Mix" in 2005 that came with no species information and didn’t germinate. Wildseed offered a different annual, Ipomopsis rubra, which I tried in 2005 and 2006 with no luck, that is, until two plants opened this July and stayed in bloom for a couple weeks.

I have no idea the origin of this year’s plant. I recognized the gray leaves when I uncovered them the end of March because they remind me of starched doilies waiting for Thanksgiving candles. It was growing amongst some bunch grasses near a hose by a fence 25 feet from the last plants I’d grown and 10 feet east of the Burpee seeds.

The first flower opened near the top of a single green stem July 5. Since, flowers have opened down the stalk, then branches that diverged up from the sites of the earlier flowers have lengthened with new clusters of phlox-shaped flowers that flare open from long, thin tubes. The five reflexed petals and throat are mottled, but the buds and tubes are the pure red one sees from a distance.

I do know I won’t have anything next year, unless there is more long-lived seed buried somewhere waiting for the right conditions to germinate. Both bumblebees and hummingbirds may transfer pollen from the five yellow, club-headed stamens to the three coiled purple stigmas that extend beyond the flower face, but as soon as the plant recognizes the autogamous origin of the pollen, it sends signals to the ovary which degenerates when too little starch accumulates in the surrounding walls of the embryo sac.

Even though scarlet gilia is an intermontane native that grows in forest openings above 3500', I’ve never noticed any in the immediate area. Last weekend I saw the pale blue trumpets of the shorter Ipomopsis longiflorum growing in the sand between stickleafs on pueblo land, but they’re no reproductive help.

Self-incompatible individuals that aren’t available in commerce must fend for themselves if they’re ever to naturalize in my garden, be it in groups or random plants like those cousins near the arroyo. I won’t be fussy about the aesthetics if they aren’t.

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

Sage, Tammy L, Mary V Price and Nickolas M Waser. "Self-sterility in Ipomopsis aggregata (Polemoniaceae) Is Due to Prezygotic Ovule Degeneration,"American Journal of Botany 93:254-262:2006.

Photograph: Scarlet gilia with anthers and stigma, 21 September 2008.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Stickleaf

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, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallows, mullein, sweet pea, yellow and white evening primroses, alfilerillo, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, ragweed, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, goat’s beard, hawkweed, horseweed, African marigold, zinnia áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; roadside mowed.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.
Looking east: Hosta, crimson climber morning glory, large-leaf soapwort, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, garlic chives, squash, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum, Maximilian and garden sunflowers; late raspberries.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze and rugosa roses, Sensation cosmos.
Looking west: Buddleia, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia; white spurge leaves turned yellow.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, tomato, French marigold.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Hummingbird, bees, ants, grasshoppers.
Weather: Usual cool mornings and warm afternoons; a little rain last night, first since 8/31/08; 12:12 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Each year, just when I’m cursing the man who once again has taken a blade to mow the roadside back into a haven for pigweed, ragweed and Russian thistle, nature surprises me.
Two years ago I noticed some pale yellow patches back from the shoulder when I returned home in mid-July. I could never find them in the morning, because the white buds only open mid-afternoon. All that remained when I drove to work were punctured ovaries; the petals I’d glimpsed were invisible litter waiting to blow with the first wind.
Finally I pulled over and discovered one of the most gorgeous flowers I’d ever seen: ten pale lemon petals cupped a tuft of darker stamens like a water-lily floating with its large round pads around the edges of the lake where I went to summer camp. These New Mexico lotuses stood above grey-green fertility cones on terminal stems spread across the surface of whitish-grey stemmed shrubs.
The exotic Mentzelia is the only Laosaceae genus found in this part of the world. Maximilian Weigend thinks the family evolved in the Huancambamba depression of the Peruvian Andes. John Schenk and Larry Hufford believe that divergence began in the late Cretaceous, some 58 to 92 million years ago, when South America was drifting away from Africa, and that most of the Mentzelia developed during the late Tertiary, 3 to 26 million years ago, just before the isthmus of Panama formed to link South America to this continent.
Mentzelia multiflora thrives in the arid west from Chihuahua and Sonora north to Colorado and Wyoming, often in gravel or sand washes and along roadsides below 7500'. The perennials can wrest nitrogen from the cyanobacteria encrusted soils of Arches National Park in southern Utah, and survive on volcanic pumice in the Jemez. Scattered colonies illuminated the monotonous snakeweed and golden hairy asters spread between the fences and road through San Ildefonso and Santa Clara land the other side of the river this past week.
I didn’t notice the late-summer benefaction until a cluster emerged behind the Russian thistles below a new volcanic rock wall a half mile from my house. Some since have migrated across the road, then washed down the shoulder towards an arroyo where, this year, a few have dug their taproots into the sandy bank. More have found their way upwind to the far shoulder leading into the arroyo on the other side of the road where they coexist with sparse grasses.
A much larger stand exists south of my house on Santa Clara lands that slope down to the brink of another, larger arroyo where few other plants can live in soil depleted of all but the heaviest sands. It’s possible the seeds from this arroyo hinterland blew north, but I suspect the masons brought some seeds with their materials.
Most of the time all anyone sees are narrow gray-green leaves, lobed and upturned like children’s hair clips. Since the leaves are rough and the undersides covered with hairs that attach themselves to pant legs, people learn to stay away. New rosettes of similarly rough and grey leaves even now are interspersed with the taller, blooming plants keeping any approach treacherous.
The Spanish called it pegapega, or sticky sticky, and some used the resin as a glue to repair old santos. Tewa and Keres speakers rubbed the leaves of pukae on the skins of young children learning to ride hold them in place. Only the Navajo thought well enough of ili ihi to use it for rituals.
Even though stickleaf exists for only a few hours a day, a few months of the year, the armed beauty is there for those foolish enough to wander about in the late afternoon sun. Even Willa Cather saved one from her visit to New Mexico in 1916.
Notes:
Belnap Jayne and Kimball T. Harper. "Influence of Cryptobiotic Soil Crusts on Elemental Content of Tissue of Two Desert Seed Plants," Arid Soil Research and Rehabilitation 9:107-115:1995.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, includes George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932; Francis H. Elmore, Ethnobotany of the Navajo, 1944; George M. Hocking, "Some Plant Materials Used Medicinally and Otherwise by the Navaho Indians in the Chaco Canyon, New Mexico," El Palacio 56:146-165:1956; Paul A. Vestal, The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952; and Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.
Ortiz y Pino III, Jose. Don Jose: The Last Patron, 1981.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Rosowski, Susan J., Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. "The Issue of Authority in a Scholarly Edition: Editing Cather," in Alexander Pettit, Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists, 2000. Margaret R. Bolick, the University of Nebraska museum botany curator, is the one who showed the authors Cather’s contribution to the herbarium.Schenk, John J. and Larry Hufford. "Age Estimates of Clade Diversification in Loasaceae," Botany Conference, 2003.Sivinski, Robert "Mentzelia springeri", 1999, with comments on Mentzelia multiflora in the Jemez.Weigend, Maximilian. "Additional Observations on the Biogeography of the Amotape-Huancabamba Zone in Northern Peru: Defining the South-Eastern Limits," Revista Peruana de Biología 11:127-134:2004.
Photograph: Stickleaf, 14 September 2008.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Bright Lights Cosmos

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, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallows, blue vervain, mullein, white sweet clover, sweet pea, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, toothed spurge, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod peaked, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, African marigold, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, fleabane native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; Virginia creeper beginning to redden, fruit visible on prickly pear.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, nasturtium, 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 peaked, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink salvia, pink veronica, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, sedum darkening, Maximilian and garden sunflowers, cutleaf coneflower peaked, zinnias.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze rose, tamarix, Sensation cosmos
Looking west: Buddleia, caryopteris, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, perennial four o’clock, David phlox, leadplant, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, Silver King artemisia.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, petunia, tomato, French marigold.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Small moth, bees on sunflowers, ants, some grasshoppers, caterpillar.
Weather: Clouds but no rain, furnace came on yesterday morning; last rain, 8/31/08; 12:40 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Fall has come to finish a year when nothing arrived on time. Spring was cool, but the rains stopped in March. Plants that expected water budded but didn’t flower. Some that have great shows for a week or two, instead bloomed sporadically all season. The coral bells are still opening new florets.
The winds were delayed, but once they began in April, they never stopped. Plants that won’t tolerate strong buffeting went dormant. Annual seeds that came up stopped growing, and some, like the larkspur and bachelor buttons, simply disappeared.
When the rains arrived earlier than usual, the first part of July, the winds undid their ablutions. Sunflowers are only now in full bloom, three weeks later than last year. Black-eyed Susans and Mexican hats that usually are little more than ripening seed cones this time of year are still flowering.
Last week morning temperatures started falling into the 40's, and the African marigolds and tall red zinnias that finally had started to bud, may never bloom. The one cheerful iconoclast in this anachronistic mix of flowers and seed heads is the yellow cosmos that usually opens by the first of August. In the morning sun, some weeks later than usual, brilliant spots of orange lurk among the lower stems of summer natives where I dropped narrow brown seeds the end of May.
I discovered this central American composite when I lived in Michigan, where my first attempt with the Bright Lights cultivar in 1986 succeeded. Here it took several years before I realized the seeds would only germinate where my house provides shade from mid-afternoon and shelter from southern and western winds.
Cosmos sulphureus is native to southern México and Guatemala, but has spread as far north as Durango, as far south as Ecuador. Bernardino de Sahagún reported the Aztec were using xochipalli flowers for dye when the Spanish arrived. It came to this country as an ornamental, where it was reported wild in the pine lands west of Silver Palm in Dade County, Florida in 1916.
In its preferred homeland, yellow cosmos can grow into a seven-foot bush that blooms all year, but becomes seasonal when it moves beyond the tropics. To promote the zone 8 perennial as an annual, growers needed to modify its habits to bloom the first year. When Thompson and Morgan introduced the shorter, three foot Orange Flare in 1955, it still warned seed "should be sown early" to flower before frost. Now it takes about two and a half months for my Bright Lights to bloom.
By the 1980's, breeders were looking for shorter plants that could complement the ubiquitous French marigolds in suburban gardens. Thompson and Morgan promoted Sunny Red, bred by Sahin, Zaden, as "the first truly dwarf and compact form" in 1986. My first Bright Lights towered two feet above my California poppies, their bare branches extending like windmill sails. Here the hairy square stems only reach a foot.
When Bodger introduced Bright Lights, it described the introduction with its ragweed style leaves as "a bright mixture of yellow, gold, orange and red shades." Most of my flowers are pumpkin, a few the yellow of squash blossoms. In Oakland County, Michigan, with its different soils and weather, yellow dominated.
In a year when nothing can be forecast except uncertainty, its surprising and just a bit reassuring to have an annual follow its normal schedule, bloom the usual ten weeks from planting, even when the sowing was delayed by bad weather and winds, when drought and unexpected temperatures slowed its growth. Such constancy is the more endearing when I remember how much the same cultivar differs between southern Michigan and northern New Mexico, and how the species transforms itself when it migrates.

Notes:
Bodger. Catalog, 2008.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Sherff, Earl Edward. Revision of the Genus Cosmos, 1932.

Thompson and Morgan. Catalogs, 1955 and 1986.

Photograph: Bright Lights cosmos blooming with the remains of chocolate flowers, 13 September 2008.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Fleabane

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, winterfat, buddleia, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glories, cardinal climber, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf and fernleaf globemallows, blue vervain, mullein, white and yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, sweet pea, velvetweed, yellow and white evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, alfilerillo, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, goats head, toothed spurge, stickleaf, lamb’s quarter, pigweed, amaranth, ragweed, goldenrod, chamisa, broom senecio, snakewee, wild lettuce, horseweed, goats beard, hawkweed, African marigold, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, gumweed, spiny, hairy golden, sand, heath and purple asters, tahokia daisy, fleabane native sunflowers, sandbur, redtop, black grama, barn and muhly ring grasses; some red apples and still green peppers visible from road.

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, squash, 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..

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, Blaze rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, Sensation cosmos.

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

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

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Cottontail, gecko, bees, flies, mosquitoes, ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Rain last Sunday; cooler since storm blew through Tuesday; morning temperature fell to 44 Friday; afternoons still dry and warm; 13:18 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When I was a child in Michigan, wildflowers were the endangered trillium and May apples my mother nurtured beside the house. When I lived in Chicago, my neighbor’s wildflowers were the ones that bloomed in the desert after the rains outside Phoenix.

In my yard here, wildflowers are far less reliable, much less stunning. Almost every year, something, a single white daisy, a tiny purple cross, perhaps a small tangerine flower with a watermelon center will come up somewhere for an afternoon in the dense, water-repelling shield that protects the prairie from erosion. It rarely appears a second time, and never in the same place.

Usually these ephemerals appear in spring. In 1997, a small white fleabane bloomed on May 22 to the west of the house. Four years later, in 2002, a single white daisy bloomed on the east side for one day, May 13. Last year, two composites bloomed on the west side near a snakeweed on May 26. This year, a small colony bloomed by the garage on June 8.

Now something unprecedented is happening - a single plant bloomed August 3 , and then that colony started blooming again August 23. Each day, by late morning a dozen white clumps tinged with lavender continue to open. Last weekend, they were joined in the muhly ring grass by one tangerine-colored flower that fell off by mid-afternoon and a purple mat.

My little daisy is not glamorous. It has the usual long narrow petals of a fleabane, but sparsely spaced around the golden center, with a ridged holding cup. By the time I find the plant, there are no basal leaves, only narrow leaves clasping the weak stem that branches from the base.

They behave like annuals: they germinate when they get enough water, although they could be quick growing perennials that can’t survive a dry spell. In the past, it must have been some little pocket between the bunch grasses that captured both the seed and moisture. This year, they’re in the spillway for water that seeps from a culvert under my drive that carries the rain from my neighbors’ garage roof to the catalpa.

I have no idea where the seed comes from. Fleabanes are composites that let the winds disburse their achenes far and wide. Some Erigeron varieties are famous for creating huge seed banks that come back after fire or some other disturbance. However, I’ve been here 16 years, a long time for surface sown seeds to remain dormant with merciless drying winds, and this is the first time so many have bloomed. Guessing from the prevailing winds, their parents lived somewhere to the south or west on unsettled pueblo land.

It’s probably impossible to know which fleabane I have. There are some 390 species in the genera, many hard to distinguish. Geyata Ajilvsgi says one likely short dryland species, the plains fleabane, goes through three phases in a season. In early spring, it has single flowers on barren stems rising from basal rosettes. Later in the summer, the original leaves die away to be replaced by narrow stems on stalks than have branched out. Still later, they fall under their weight and sprawl about the ground.

If variation weren’t enough, Guy Nesom says the plant, Erigeron modestus, is an early blooming perennial that behaves like an annual and easily breeds with cousins. The species contains "genes from E. flagellaris, E. tracyi, elements of E divergens, and the Mexican E. pubescens Kunth."

Simplicity and complexity at the same time is easier for nature to produce than for man to comprehend. Wildflowers here are neither tamable like my mother’s trillium nor predictable like my neighbor’s cacti. Instead, they remain elusive signs of a world beyond civilization nature occasionally lets us see, but soon removes, leaving the impassive, unadorned prairie and steppe.

Notes:
Ajilvsgi, Geyata. Wildflowers of Texas, 1984.

Nesom, Guy L. "162. Erigeron modestus A. Gray" in eFloras.org, Flora of North America.

Photograph: Fleabane, 9/6/08.