What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, buddleia, winterfat, daylily, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, sweet pea, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, goats head, silver-leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, zinnia, cosmos, wild lettuce, horseweed, dandelion, goats beard, Hopi tea, chicory, spiny and hairy golden aster, farmers and garden sunflowers, corn; toothed spurge, añil del muerto, and summer grasses coming up.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, nasturtium, squash, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, perky Sue, chrysanthemum.
Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pinks, coral bells, ipomopsis, tomatillo, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, pink salvia, pink speedwell, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed; buds on sedum, garlic chives, and cutleaf coneflower.
Looking south: Blaze and rugosa rose, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower.
Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian and Rumanian sage, catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, purple coneflower; buds on David phlox, leadplant, and Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Ground squirrel, gecko, hummingbirds, green bird on blanket flower seed head, hummingbird and nondescript moths, bees, ants, grasshoppers, earthworms after rain.
Weather: Finally more rain than the forces of the desert can steal in a day; 15:08 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: Of all the plants in my garden, ladybells are the most consistently disappointing. Every spring new leaves emerge promising a grand array of large bells strung along tall, single stalks, shimmering blue bangles for a parade of mummers. Then every July the dark triangular leaves disappear and only a few cinnamon stems rise to produce seed that renews the cycle.
This year’s weather has been a compendium of the worst climatic events of the past few years - no rain after the end of March, winds that didn’t begin until the first of April but haven’t stopped, temperatures that skipped from the chill of early spring to the high heat of early summer, and now a hurricane season that’s a month early.
Few plants have done more that endure. Almost no apricots or lilacs this past spring, dispirited roses in June, morning glories that only now are germinating. But the ladybells are flourishing, finally blooming in a great drift along the west side of the house where morning shade gives way to afternoon sun before the clouds roll through.
What on earth’s happening?
When I first bought a seedling in August of 1997, Santa Fe Greenhouses suggested Adenophora latifolia was good for dry semi-shade. It must need more because that’s exactly what it gets. Whenever I try to find what that might be, all I discover is the perennial’s from Siberia, a particularly useless piece of information since that term covers all the land east of the Urals drained by rivers flowing north, from desert to tundra.
It may have been introduced to the trade after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 when nurserymen hoped to find new treasures and waned when it found no market. The Santa Fe nursery only promoted it between 1994 and 2003, and almost no one offers seeds or plants on-line today. Ladybells are members of the Campanula family and differ from the more common bluebells in such minor ways they appear no different in the garden than the already familiar, moisture-loving flowers.
The initial discovery of Adenophora species by the west in the nineteenth century probably came from similar euphoric hopes for the east dashed by similar realities. Peter I first sent men looking for useful plants in his expanding Russian empire. When Aleksey Razumovsky inherited the Gorenki estate from his uncle, paramour to the tsarina, he built gardens even greater than the tsar’s and hired Friedrich von Fischer to manage them. Plant hunters again ventured east and south.
Fischer first recognized Adenophora as a separate genre in 1816 and published a description of ladybells in a Moscow journal in 1823. Harvard received its dried Amur specimen from Carl Maximowicz in 1855 when this country was forcing itself into Japan. Men reported the local peoples ate the thick, fleshy roots. Europe didn’t need another root vegetable to rival the turnip or beet. Men didn’t build their fortunes monopolizing the potato trade; empires were built on tea and opium, cotton and coffee.
It fell back into the obscurity of doppelgängers beyond western Europe’s horizons where it was also known as pereskiifolia and Fedor Bogdanovic Fischer and Karl Ivanovich Maksimovich slipped between Slav and German identities. Only recently have plant hunters been translated again, this time with more detail. Vladimir Komarov reported ladybells from forests, dry meadows, and stony slopes. Oleg Kosterin saw them growing in a forest of larch and silver birch near the headwaters of the Amur in 1997.
Forest lands and river basins fit neither the common image of frigid Siberia nor the xeric characteristics advertised in Santa Fe. I went out to look again at these mysterious flowers from a fairy tale land where Cossack shepherd boys like Razumovsky’s uncle attracted princesses and finally realized the reason they’re doing well: I have a leaky hose creating a stream bank.
Notes:
Fischer, Friedrich Ernst Ludwig von. Société Imperiale de Naturalistes, Moscou, Mémoires 6:168:1823.
Harvard University Herbaria. Index of Botanical Specimens, database available on-line.
Komarov, Vladimir Leontyevich . Flora SSSR, editor, 1934-1960, cited by Ken Fern, “Adenophora latifolia,” Plants for a Future project, available on-line.
Kosterin, Oleg. Wildlife Photography, available on-line.
Uphof, Johannes Cornelis Theodorus. Dictionary of Economic Plants, 1968 edition.
Photograph: Ladybells with Silver King artemisia, 20 July 08.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, hedgehog cactus, yucca, buddleia, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, alfalfa, oxalis, milkwort, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, scarlet beeblossom, stickleaf, goat head, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, buffalo gourd, zinnia, cosmos, purple coneflower, wild lettuce, horseweed, local dandelion, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, plains paper flower; farmers, garden, and plains sunflowers; catalpa pods lengthening; corn beginning to form.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat; buds on perky Sue.
Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, coral bells, ipomopsis, tomatillo, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, pink savlia, pink speedwell, rock rose, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard; buds on cutleaf coneflower, sedum, and garlic chives.
Looking south: Blaze, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, daylily; rugosa rose hips forming.
Looking west: Catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, Shasta daisy; buds on caryopteris and Monch aster.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, swallowtail butterfly, dragonfly, squash bug, grasshoppers, ants, bees.
Weather: Afternoon clouds, with their high winds, actually dumped rain several nights; morning temperatures still fell to 60; 15:30 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Hummingbirds are a bit like cats. They seem to know the people who don’t want them and elect to torment them.
This past weekend, their number increased dramatically around the house, perhaps because the young were beginning to feed. Usually five weeks pass after a mother lays two eggs before the fledglings begin foraging. I first saw a pair of small birds about six weeks earlier on May 20th.
Once the young can fend for themselves, the females may mate again. In the past week at least one pair has been darting about, often diving within a few feet of where I’m standing, unseen but sensed by their sound and changing air currents.
Many of my neighbors keep red plastic feeders. When they ask me if I feed the birds I say no, but with my fingers crossed behind my back. The birds have sown their own food and, because coral beardtongues are attractive, I let them be.
I first planted Penstemon barbatus in 1995 with no luck. I tried them again in 1996 in a different location where they held on, but didn’t increase. I added more the next two years, but didn’t see any evidence they had settled until 1999. Around 2002 they appeared on the north side of the house among the tiles and since have colonized that scree environment.
Andrea Wolfe and her confreres used DNA to confirm Penstemons evolved in the Rocky Mountains, and spread from there to the southwest, probably adapting to conditions created when the glaciers retreated in the Pleistocene. Scarlet Bugler grows west of the New Mexico continental divide, and along the Rio Grand north from Albuquerque and to the northeast. The 6000' Española valley is at the low end of its preferred range between 6000 and 9600 feet.
Despite their origin in commercial production, my plants have maintained their alpine habits. Not only can the grayish stalks withstand severe winds without bending or breaking, without becoming stunted or dessicated, the perennials retain their leaves in winter. The basal rosettes turn purplish-red when photosynthesis slows and the bluish-green fades.
Penstemons, as a group within the snapdragon family, have been particularly sensitive to the needs of their pollinators, converting from bees to hummingbirds at least ten times. Coral beardtongues have lengthened and narrowed their flower funnels, and reconfigured their lower lips so they don’t provide landing platforms for insects.
The flowers stay in bloom for months, even if the color fades a little: last year they persisted until mid-September, the year before the end of August. Unlike many flowers which immediately convert to seed production, these refill their nectaries and replenish the pollen so hummingbirds can continue feeding and pollinating. However, they keep the food levels low so the animals must dart from stalk to stalk.
I assume this is less a sensitivity to the needs of birds than a reproductive strategy by a plant that can’t fertilize itself. What seed it produces in its hard, sharp cases can be erratic: it not only needs cold winters, but Scott Abella found exposure to ponderosa smoke helps. Before my plants naturalized there was the Cerro Grande fire of 2000 followed by a snowy winter and forest fires in Arizona the following summer which I could smell for a week.
Coral beardtongues are native plants that can grow in gardens in many parts of the country, but there they are maintained by cuttings. It was only when nature, abetted by the birds and man-made fires, could reproduce ancestral conditions that my plants went from choice specimens to genuine wildflowers that could sustain themselves and hummingbirds unaided.
Notes: I suspect the birds are black-chinned hummingbirds. However, the ones I see have the limited coloring of females and juveniles that make it difficult to be sure of species.
Abella Scott R. “Effects of Smoke and Fire-related Cues on Penstemon barbatus Seeds," The American Midland Naturalist 155:404-410:2006.
Lange, Ronald S., Summer A. Scobell, and Peter E. Scott. “Hummingbird-Syndrome Traits, Breeding System, and Pollinator Effectiveness in Two Syntopic Penstemon Species,” International Journal of Plant Sciences 161:253-263:2000.
Newfield, Nancy L. and Barbara Nielsen. “Black-Chinned Hummingbird” in Hummingbird Gardens: Attracting Nature's Jewels, 1996.
Wolfe, Andrea D., Christopher P. Randle, Shannon L. Datwyler, Jeffery J. Morawetz, Nidia Arguedas, and Jose Diaz. “Phylogeny, Taxonomic Affinities, and Biogeography of Penstemon (Plantaginaceae) Based on ITS and cpDNA Sequence Data,” American Journal of Botany 2006;93:1699-1713.
Photograph: If anyone ever doubted nature’s perverse joy in refusing to replicate scientific findings, yesterday a swallowtail was feeding on my coral beardtongues while the hummingbirds swooned through.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, tall yucca, cholla, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, white sweet clover, oxalis, wild licorice, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bindweed, milkweed, buffalo gourd, purple coneflower, wild lettuce, local dandelion, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, zinnia, garden sunflower; more smooth brome hay cut.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat.
Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, tomatillo, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, rock rose, pink evening primrose; buds on sedum.
Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, tamarix, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, daylily.
Looking west: Lilies, catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender, Shasta daisy; buds on caryopteris.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, pepper, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, dragonfly, monarch butterfly, grasshoppers, ants, bees on white sweet clover down the road.
Weather: Rain Monday night penetrated 1/4" in overgrazed land; Tuesday rain seeped 1/2"; Wednesday more rain and ground was damp 1 5/8" down; high winds followed by more rain Friday night; Saturday morning ground was only wet to 3/8" and back to sand by late afternoon. 15:41 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: I confess I never paid much attention to milkweed flowers. As a child I saw the opened seed pods and touched the large, lance-like, grey-green leaves with their fuzzy bellies and embossed webs of ribs.
When some sprouted in my drive in Oakland County, Michigan, I finally noticed the dingy pink flower heads, and promptly forgot them. I get reminded each year when I see Asclepias syriaca flowers on the familiar leafy stalks along the road near the village.
When I got my first nursery catalogs in Michigan in 1986, they were advertising butterfly weed for its bright orange color. They didn’t explicitly call it a milkweed, and I’m not sure I recognized it from its name, Asclepias tuberosa. I tried some, but don’t remember having any great results.
I bought more when I got here because the perennials were described as drought tolerant. Actually, they like water, some shade and slightly acid soil. The taproots were so difficult to establish that when two finally survived, one where I planted it and one in a ditch where another had either migrated or gone to seed, I no longer paid them much attention. The combs were simply blotches of orange in an impressionist bed of yellows.
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I actually looked at a flower. I was stopped by the road when I noticed something white at my feet. I broke off a stalk, took a picture, completed my errand, and got back to the safety of my car.
Later I took down my Peterson and counted what looked like pointed upright petals. They were tiny but arranged much like those models of molecules teachers use to teach children physics: a central ball surrounded by five satellites held together by thick bars. In fact what I was looking at was not the flower, but an elaborate anther structure composed of five sets of outer and inner flaps (horns and hoods) and the central stabile of sexual organs.
The usual flower, the petals and sepals, began a bit below a hairy waist and pointed downward. On the milkweed I found by the roadside the top corona was more obvious than the petals. On the plants in my garden, light orange petals peel down from darker upright outer husks of the corona that camouflage the insignificant center.
Neither have leaves I associate with milkweed, even if both point up. The garden plant has dark-green lancets with lighter yellowish veins. The roadside one had leaves as thin as pine needs in groups of three and so sparsely spaced then stalks could be taken for tumble mustard.
Monarch butterflies prefer other species, but will lay their eggs on almost any member of the milkweed family because their caterpillars live on the proteins and carbohydrates in the leaves while absorbing toxic cardenolides that deter their predators into adulthood. The same chemicals concentrated in tuberosa’s root explain why its commonly called pleurisy root.
Last week I finally went to look for a common milkweed growing in a running ditch in the village. The five petals were opened flat into a star, making a lattice of the ball’s surface, but there was nothing special about the centers. The flowers still weren’t noticeable, not even to monarchs who get their nectar elsewhere.
Notes:
Peterson Field Guide. Southwestern and Texas Wildflowers, 1984, by Theodore F. Niehaus with illustrations by Charles L. Ripper and Virginia Savage.
Photograph: Butterfly weed with erect corona and downswept petals, 06 July 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, cholla, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, fern-leaf and bigleaf globemallows, alfalfa, white and yellow sweet clover, oxalis, wild licorice, stickleaf, tumble mustard, velvetweed, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, scarlet gaura, bindweed, milkweed, buffalo gourd, bachelor buttons, purple coneflower, goat’s beard, hawkweed, wild lettuce, local dandelion, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, native sunflower, blue grama grass.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Dr. Huey rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, yellow flax, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat; catalpa pods forming.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, coral bells, ipomopsis, California poppy, pink veronica, pink salvia, tomatillo, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, rock rose, pink evening primrose; buds on sedum.
Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea, daylily; more raspberries ripening.
Looking west: Lilies, purple beardtongue, Rumanian sage, catmint, ladybells, perennial four o’clock, flax, speedwell, purple ice plant, white spurge, sea lavender; buds on Shasta daisy.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Quail with young, woodpecker on utility pole, green hummingbird on coral beardtongue, cricket in the house, bees on catmint, aphids, ants and grasshoppers.
Weather: Finally some rain Thursday, but the unwatered land is 2" of dry sand over bone dry dirt; 15:49 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Some moisture moved through and the more xeric weeds have already responded. Now comes the buzz of small motors, soon to be followed by the smell of rotting vegetation.
One neighbor who’s half acre is covered by the previous owner’s pigweed periodically levels it to a lumpy carpet. Never mind pigweed, ragweed and Russian thistle all put out growth shorter than the weed whacker’s spool that quietly goes to seed for next year.
Another neighbor thinks a chain saw’s the answer to the Siberian elm and Russian olive that got past him. Every year or so he goes out, leaves a pile of brush for the rodents, and complains when the suckers come back.
Farther down the road, someone’s been trying to kill a buffalo gourd for years. All that’s happened is the vine moved from the center of the barbed-wire fence to a space between the corner post and a concrete block support. The white taproots can reach six feet and survive temperatures below -10 to come back when temperatures range between 68 and 86.
The upturned grey leaves crown his bank like meringue and cascade down the side like tiers of upswept roofs on an east Asian temple. When anything’s so conspicuous and so hard to kill, people ask what good is it.
Certainly not to eat. The gourd’s yellow-flesh may resemble squash, but the body rejects its bitter chemicals. In the early twentieth century, some Santa Clara told Smithsonian researchers they mixed finely ground pogoje root in cold water for a laxative. When Michael Moore tested traditional lore, he found only two people who’d ever tried it and both gave him such piteous looks he warns against its use. Perhaps that’s why the Paiute and Shoshoni restrict it to venereal diseases.
If it’s a member of the gourd family and can’t be eaten, the next guess of many is that it’s a rattle. A Tesuque woman told Gail Tierney and William Dunmire it can’t be used for dances: the skin’s too thin and doesn’t dry right. They tried and found she was right. The person who told L. S. M. Curtin the Navajo made special efforts to take gourds back from Peña Blanca may have been deliberately maligning a traditional enemy.
The plant’s so foul, people have reasoned it should be useful as an insecticide. A Cochiti elder crushed the gourd in water and used the liquid to repel squash bugs, while Albuquerque master gardeners have heard it’s enough to drape a vine over the fence. Unfortunately, it whets the appetites of cucumber beetles.
The vegetation also contains the saponins traditionally used for soap. Curtin found local Spanish-speaking women rubbed calabazilla gourds on wooden floors to remove grease while Dunmire and Tierney report Cochiti women used chunks to scrub pots and Sandia used them for clothes.
Carolyn Niethammer has obviously tried this because she warns the nearly invisible hairs on the striped green gourds become thorny when they dry and suggests her readers may need to put their clothes through several rinses. Perhaps that’s why the Kiowa and Mahuna mention it for hides and buckskins.
Still, people continue to look for uses for this habitue of fence rows and railroad tracks; it offends our sense of harmony with nature to think it’s only a geegaw of the gods. William Bemis spent years trying to raise Cucurbita foetidissima for animal feed because the seeds are 30-65% protein and their oil contains linoleic and oleic acids. The more intensely he grew them, the fewer seeds they produced.
Barry Goldstein tried promoting the starchy roots as an ethanol crop for eastern New Mexico, while several have patented insect traps that use the bitter cucurbitacins to lure insects to a more deadly poison. Since some of those terpenoid compounds found in other plants have shown they might fight cancer, researchers are analyzing the buffalo gourd chemicals to see if any might be useful. So far none report encouraging results, but the search continues.
I suspect all my neighbor wants are suggestions on how to remove it from his yard. It may repel squash bugs and tempt cucumber beetles, but it doesn’t do anything for pigweed. And, it stinks.
Notes:
Albuquerque Master Gardeners. "How Can I Get Rid of Squash Bugs?", available on-line.Bemis, William P. Discussed by Anson E. Thompson, "Arid-land Industrial Crops" in J. Janick and J.E. Simon, Advances in New Crops, 1990, available on-line.Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with notes by Michael Moore.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995, includes Cochiti, Sandia, and Tesuque.Goldstein, Barry. "Technical and Economical Feasibility of Buffalo Gourd as a Novel Energy Crop," 1988.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Edith Van Allen Murphey, Indian Uses of Native Plants, 1959 (Shoshoni); John Bruno Romero, The Botanical Lore of the California Indians, 1954 (Mahuna); Percy Train, James R. Henrichs and W. Andrew Archer, Medicinal Uses of Plants by Indian Tribes of Nevada, 1941 (Paiute, Shoshoni); and Paul A. Vestal and Richard Evans Schultes, The Economic Botany of the Kiowa Indians, 1939.Niethammer, Carolyn. American Indian Cooking: Recipes from the South West, 1999.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Buffalo gourd down the road, 28 June 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, Apache plume, rose of Sharon, buddleia, winterfat, daylily, datura, bindweed, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, bigleaf globemallow, sweet pea, white sweet clover, alfalfa, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, goats head, silver-leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, zinnia, cosmos, wild lettuce, horseweed, dandelion, goats beard, Hopi tea, chicory, spiny and hairy golden aster, farmers and garden sunflowers, corn; toothed spurge, añil del muerto, and summer grasses coming up.
