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.