Chocolate Flower

What’s blooming: Chrysanthemums in town next to wall, purple aster next to cedar fence, fern-leaf yarrow may have bud; vegetable gardens have been cleared, and some have been burning dead weeds.
What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae, roses, forsythia, privet, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, daylily, red hot poker, baptista, sweet pea, vinca, golden spur columbine, rock rose, hartweig, yellow evening primrose now darker, yellow flax, sea pink, hollyhock, winecup, catmint, calmintha, oriental poppy, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, beardtongues, globemallow, Jupiter’s beard, snakeweed, senecio, yarrow, Mount Atlas daisy, coreopsis, perky Sue, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, dandelion, needle, June, and other grasses, alfalfa.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, California poppy, yellow alyssum, chamisa, Silver King artemisia; Russian olive leaves dead on trees.
What’s red or orange: Tamarix, prairie rose, spirea, raspberry, sand cherry, cholla, barberry, leadplant dropping leaves, coral bells, white beardtongue, pink evening primrose, tansy turning red, purple coneflower.
What’s turning yellow: Siberian elm, cottonwood, willow, globe willow, apples, apricot, Apache plume, iris, phlox, blue flax, purple ice plant, Saint John’s wort.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea has recovered from first cold nights.
Animal sightings: None.
Weather: Morning temperatures in mid-20's; last rain, 10/14/2008; 9:41 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: As anyone who has coexisted with a cat knows, domestication is, at best, a negotiated condition. There was Dusty who insisted on snuggling into armpits and weaving underfoot, and Maui who would plop into any warm lap. Then there was my childhood pet, who spent most of his time roaming the neighborhood and only came home to heal his wounds, and yet on those rare days when he remembered where we lived, insisted on sleeping on my bed.
Chocolate flowers are a lot like Tom. They don’t stay where they’re planted but reseed randomly, then spend their summers sprawling about the garden, covering some three feet with gray-leaved stems tipped by opulent yellow daisies. However, as soon as the weather turns bad, they huddle against the house begging to be brought inside the stockade. In return for reflected heat, they were one of the last flowers to open before morning temperatures plunged into the middle 20's this week.
Berlandiera lyrata is native to the western highland limestone shortgrass prairies running from Kansas down to México where Theodor Hartweg collected one on the way to Zacatecas for the Horticultural Society of London in 1837. The only people who seemed to have cared were botanists interested in defining the relationships between various species in the composite family.
Few even noticed the yellow ray flowers which often drop by noon. Many called it green-eye because the surviving lime green calyx maintains a dark center, divided into sections like a grapefruit. Then, it fossilizes into a tan shell with narrow dark seeds and a whitish center.
It still had no common name in 1930 when Liberty Hyde Bailey noted Berlandiera are tamable and "sometimes transferred to grounds." Still, the first edition of Sunset’s Western Garden Book ignored them in 1950 and the Denver Water Board overlooked them in 1996.
No one considered the tap-rooted perennial a serious garden flower until people began moving into the intermountain west where moisture was scarce and eastern favorites couldn’t survive the altitude, water and temperature extremes no matter how carefully they were tended. Even then, seed catalogs were careful to use words like "meadow" and "wildflower garden" in their descriptions. Only one actually described its selection as an erect dwarf.
Then someone, perhaps the German Jelitto seed company, called it schokoladenblume, and suddenly everyone noticed it has a pleasant fragrance, even here in arid New Mexico where nothing can be detected from a distance. It’s not clear if the name chocolate flower came from the maroon color of the center disk, or from the aroma. I’ve found no one who has identified the plant’s essential oils, but one perfume company, Cacharel, began to include it in one of its blends in 2006.

Chocolate flowers have been growing in my yard since I bought my first plants in Santa Fe in 1997, and they dictated the growing conditions. Fortunately, the areas they stake out are not places other plants want, and so for more than ten years they've been a semidomesticated part of the garden, elbowing the Mexican hats, black-eyed Susans and blanketflowers for lebensraum, coming into bloom by mid-May and staying as long as civilized conditions remain.

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

Bentham, George. Plantae Hartwegianae, 1839, edited by David Winger, 1996.

Sunset. Western Garden Book, 1954, edited by Walter L. Doty and Paul C. Johnson.

Photograph: Chocolate flower next to stucco wall, 1 November 2008; dark shadow is the green calyx.