Chamisa

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, datura, gladiola, white sweet clover, chamisa, broom senecio, purple asters; cottonwood and milkweed turning yellow, cherries deep red, most Virginia creeper and grape leaves dead.
What’s blooming in my garden: Russian sage, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, Sensation cosmos; leadplant leaves red.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, protected French marigold and gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Green bellied sparrow-like birds in Maximilian seed heads.
Weather: Temperatures were near freezing Monday morning before rains came through on Tuesday, followed by heavy fog on Wednesday and frost everywhere Friday morning. 10:35 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Chamisa is an iconic shrub for Santa Fe’s southwestern romantics. In the late 1940's, Leonora Curtin said it "recalls instantly the all-pervading sense of beauty that one attaches to New Mexico in the early autumn" and that "nothing so characterizes the landscape."
Oddly, while I see it along the road as I drive down the thousand feet from the city, the only place it grows in a dense stand here is the waste land where the Santa Cruz, running from Chimayó and Truches, drains into the Rio Grande. I don’t see it disrupting the prairie grasslands or scrub, nor do I glimpse it amongst the distant juniper.
Like many totemic plants the woody composite is more a keepsake of man’s life on the land than a relic of untouched wilderness. Chrysothamnus is native to the west from northern Mexico to the plains of southern Canada. Sparse nauseosus specimens have lived in such isolation from one another, the species has developed at least 26 recognized varieties that themselves vary so much from location to location that men trying to grow it for its vulcanizable latex during the world wars couldn’t find a single population that was reliable enough from season to season to cultivate.
Our graveolens subspecies thrives along arroyos and alkaline flats in open, sunny areas where its deep taproots can burrow until it locates water. Down the road, a few rabbitbrushes grow some twenty feet above a deep arroyo carved by an acequia that spills water much of the summer.
Another colony is settling the arroyo a half mile south where seed from the self-fertile tubular yellow disc flowers was blown or washed. The shrubs stay in the wet, sandy bottomland where they are creating islands in soil the transitory flowing waters can’t wash away. The contours were especially sharp last Sunday before the afternoon winds had a chance to erase the new erosion from night’s rains.
Ranchers found little use for the narrow-leaved shrub because the latex makes it unpalatable. A decrease in chemicals and an increase in protein make the herbage more edible when temperatures drop in fall and winter and other food becomes unavailable, but not enough for them to encourage it on their lands the other side of the river. The fact rabbits nibble it is no recommendation.
Spanish-speaking settlers gave the fuzz-covered shrub the same name as saltbush and sagebrush, chamizo, a word for brushwood or charred wood, with pejorative connotations of cheapness and poverty. If it ever grew in the area, it’s long been cleared and kept cleared. Not everyone likes the flowers’ strong aroma and protein-rich pollen. The only plants in the village are widely spaced clumps edging a fallow field far from the chapel.
The pueblos didn’t find many more uses for nauseosus . The Zuni used the bigelovii subspecies for baskets, no doubt exploiting the rubber compounds in hakoha luptsine’s twigs. However, the Hopi called our graveolens hanoshivápi because the Tewa-speaking Hano, who abandoned this area after the reconquest, used it for firewood.
The high resin content makes the woody base and annual growth flammable. It not only burns easily in a wildfire but it’s one of the first plants to revive, either from recently buried seed or root buds. While there’s little competition, chamisa can dominate a disturbed area for thirty to fifty years, before it gives way to bunch grasses or conifers.
This past week, as I drove in and out of rain showers, I saw the aging flowers by the roadside and once again pondered the microclimates that control what can grow here, and the people in the pueblos, settlements and enclaves along the highway who decide what will be allowed to survive. Santa Fe sí, Española nada.
Notes: Chamisa does not appear in many on-line Spanish dictionaries. The one appearing under the Oxford imprint defines chamizo as a colloquial term for brushwood or charred log. SpanishDict associates chamizo with a thatched hovel, while Tomasino suggests the related verb, chamuscar, means both to sear and sell cheap.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Chamisa in an arroyo bottom, 12 October 2008, soon after some rain.