Sunday, February 22, 2009

Anthemis

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, rock rose, some grasses; forsythia buds greening; first hyacinth bulbs poking through, new Mexican hat and black-eyed Susan leaves. Smell of burning was in the air Saturday morning.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Domestic flock of some dark fowl with small heads and large bodies feeding near the village yesterday; wild birds still making noise in the morning from the river.
Weather: Mornings still cold, afternoons warmer, little water left to frost my windshield. I gave up on local stores and finally ordered a copy of the only almanac that provides useful daylight information, The Old Farmers Almanac, published in Dublin, New Hampshire; there are 11:16 hours of sun today.
Weekly update: I have the luxury of growing plants for strictly aesthetic reasons. When I lived in Michigan, my anthemis Kelway went to seed. I have no idea if I ever saw the same plant two years in a row, but knew I could always expect a great mass of wide yellow flowers in summer. It mattered nought they were "so little stationary" they were a problem for 18th century English plant hunters who depended on them for a living.
When I planted the old world native here two years ago, I hoped the self-fertilizing flowers would reprise their northern wetland behavior and spread a more matte, paler yellow amongst the similarly migrating Mexican hats and coreopsis, blanket and chocolate flowers. Last summer they bloomed for the first time. This winter their flat junipery leaves stayed green under piles of snow dumped from the roof in December, but turned red a few weeks ago when the cold cover disappeared.
Assyrians living under Ashurbanipal between 626 and 608 bc had no such economic freedom. When they saw the yellow composites, they saw a potential dye. This may seem obvious to us today when craftsmen can buy books on local dye plants, but the discovery that fabrics could be colored came long after the invention of textiles, and required someone somewhere to notice that treating yarn with a metal salt changed the fiber so it could accept a water-soluble pigment that wouldn’t wash off or fade.
No one knows where that discovery was made. We have some Chinese written references to dyes in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–711 bc) that suggest gardenia was used for yellow; a scrap of untested red fabric and a water-tight brick floor from Mohenjo Daro (2600-1900 bc) in the Indus valley; some safflower from Tell Hamman et Turkmen (2500 bc) in northern Syria and great deal of connecting open steppe inhabited by tribes that left no written records.
The yellow pigment from safflower was used on mummy wrappings found in the non-royal Tomb of the Two Brothers from the 12th Dynasty of Egypt (1985-1773 bc), but the dye was so heavily applied researchers believed the tinting was done just before the burial when there was no requirement fot it to survive light or water. Even though the madder used for Tutankhamun, who died some centuries later in 1343 bc, had been treated with aluminum and calcium salts, it still wasn’t boil proof.
Once dyers fully realized the importance of mordants, they would have begun experimenting and discovered different techniques and different metals produced different results with the same plant. The knowledge became the family inheritance, protected by secrecy from outsiders, and thus vulnerable to loss when synthetic dyes were substituted in the late 19th century.
A few years ago, a Turkish team interested in reintroducing natural dyes tested crop-grown Anthemis tinctoria with eight mordants and found wool treated before the dye bath turned some shade of solid, deep yellow, while that treated after varied from light yellow to cream and beige. When the mordant was included with the dye, the wool absorbed greenish hues. It’s the brown tones that were used in Azerbaijani rugs; in Turkey the finished yarns were dipped in an alkaline ash solution for a gloss that would have further altered the colors.
Anthemis never became a popular dye: weld was cheaper and more versatile, saffron carried more prestige. When field workers asked people the dyes they remembered, the plant was mentioned only once in the Latium region of Italy, but in Ezurum in eastern Anatolia people knew the colors that came from treating wool with alum, iron sulfate and chrome.
The only other place dyer’s chamomile has been mentioned is Latvia. There at the northern end of that open space traversed by the Indo-Europeans and all the other peoples, goods, and ideas that moved beyond the ken of the classic writers, it was used for the woven sashes used as signifiers of status and luxury.
Notes:
For information on rug dyes, see commercial sites like Seeing Is Dreaming and Azerbaijan Rugs.
Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles, 1992, discusses the quality of the evidence from India and the Tomb of the Two Brothers.Campbell Thompson, R. The Assyrian Herbal, 1924, cited by Lise Manniche, An Ancient Egyptian Herbal, 1989.Guarrera, Paolo Maria. "Household Dyeing Plants and Traditional Uses in Some Areas of Italy," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2:9:2006.Kizil, Süleyman, Nuran Kayabsşi, and Neşet Arslan. "Determination of some Agronomical and Dying Properties of Dyer’s Chamomile (Anthemic Tinctoria L.)," Journal of Central European Agriculture 6:403-408:2005.Las Arañas Spinners and Weavers Guild, Inc. Dying with Natural Materials, 2004 edition of Vegetable Dyes of New Mexico, 1970, prepared by Jodie Aves and Janislee Wiese.
Nicholson, Paul T. and Ian Shaw. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, 2000, discusses the quality of the evidence from Syria and Egypt.

Özgökçe, Fevzi and ĪIbrahim Yilmaz. "Dye Plants of East Anatolia Region (Turkey)," Economic Botany 57:454-460:2003.

Pīigozne, Ieva. "Latvian Folk Dress," 2008," available on-line.

Sowerby, James. English Botany, 1790.

Welters, Linda and Īra Kuhn-Bolšaitis. "The Cultural Significance of Belts in Latvian Dress" in Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and Fertility, 1999.

Wu, S. S., and Z. B.Tian. Zhong guo yin ran shi (Chinese History of Dyeing and Weaving), 1986, cited by Yun Ye, Lynn G. Salmon, and Glen R. Cass, "The Ozone Fading of Traditional Chinese Plant Dyes," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 39:245-257:2000.

Photograph: Red and green anthemis leaves protected by dead cherry leaves, taken from above, 21 February 2009.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Winter Color

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, iris, rock rose, sea pink, only the most well-protected hollyhock, red hot poker and mum leaves; some grasses. Someone cut high branches on trees along the main road, probably to maintain clearance for transporting house trailers and delivery vans.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through the cottonwood.
Weather: Tuesday’s snow was gone by end of day; only ice left is on the north side of the house where if fell from the roof in December; morning temperatures in high 20's.
Weekly update: The snow is all but gone, but not the thirsty air which, no longer satisfied with drying mud, sucks water from every living thing. And some that have passed beyond.
Color intensifies in dead leaves and seed heads, when only dried pigments remain. Bare branches of globe willows and the weeping one down the road are more yellow, while chamisa and snakeweed stems are bright green. Arborvitae leaves have turned chartreuse or dark brown. More roses and beardstongues have red parts, while purple aster leaves collect morning frosts. The greys remain grey, but dead Russian thistles blacken.
These are the killing times when the days grow longer and warmer, but the mornings still fall into the twenties. The additional energy from the sun stimulates chloroplasts, the parts of plant cells that synthesize carbon dioxide (C02) from the air into glucose (C6H12O6), at the very time there’s less water (H20) available to support the necessary chemical reactions. Unused energy provokes crises.
Conifers respond by slowing their photosynthesis. As the blue and red light-absorbing chlorophyl disappears, the yellow pigments that coexist in the chloroplast to absorb other parts of the light spectrum become obvious. Even willow and aspen barks, which maintain some level of photosynthesis during the winter for deciduous trees, reduce their metabolism.
Some non-herbaceous perennials have been producing red anthocyanin pigments (C21H20O11) at the very time their chloroplasts are too stressed to effectively produce glucose from the same components. However, the cyanidin-3-O-glucoside flavonoid traps the mid-range of light, the greens and hotter yellows between 500 and 600nm. When Kevin Gould compared red and green leaves of saxifrage shrubs from New Zealand, he found the pigments located in the upper epidermal layer and in the mesophyll, the soft center with the chloroplasts, reduced productivity pressures by absorbing 23% of the inhaled carbon dioxide.
In optimal times, chloroplasts return the excess oxygen atoms extracted from raw materials back into the environment. The chain of chemical reactions that goes by the name photosynthesis includes many oxygen-rich intermediate stages and oxygen electron transfers that can damage cells if the process is altered slightly by poor environmental conditions. This led Hideo Yamasaki to test the possibility that anthocyanin compounds found in hibiscus flowers protect plants by acting as antioxidants.
Since, Velissarios-Phaedon Kytridis and Yiannis Manetas have looked specifically at red and green leaves from two shrubs that store the pigment near the chloroplast in the central layer and two that keep anthocyanin in the epidermis. They found the former were better able to handle laboratory-induced oxygen stress, probably because the pigment’s proximity to the chloroplast allowed it to more effectively intercept wayward oxy-radicals.
Unfortunately, his epidermal shrubs included roses. A few weeks ago several of my hybrid teas still had green leaves, and two in back had red ones. Now all that remain are green stems. Few roots have ever made it through February and March, and none with enough vigor to thrive the following summer. They may be red, but they’re not as cleverly armored against New Mexico’s late winters as the native asters and beardtongues.
Notes:Foote, Knowlton C. and Michail Schaedle. "Diurnal and Seasonal Patterns of Photosynthesis and Respiration by Stems of Populus tremuloides Michx.," Plant Physiology 58:651-655:1976.Gould, Kevin S., Thomas C. Vogelmann, Tao Han, and Michael J. Clearwater. "Profiles of Photosynthesis Within Red and Green Leaves of Quintinia serrata," Physiologia Plantarum 116:127-133:2002.Kytridis, Velissarios-Phaedon and Yiannis Manetas. "Mesophyll versus Epidermal Anthocyanins as Potential in Vivo Antioxidants: Evidence Linking the Putative Antioxidant Role to the Proximity of Oxy-radical Source," Journal of Experimental Botany 57:2203-2210:2006;their mesophyll test plants were Cistus creticus and Photinia x fraseri; the epidermal ones were Rosa sp. and Ricinus communis.Yamasaki, H, H. Uefuji, and Y. Sakihama. "Bleaching of the Red Anthocyanin Induced by Superoxide Radical," Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 332:183-186:1996.
Photograph: Weeping willow with yellowing bark and conifers down the road, 14 February 2009.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Red Hot Poker

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.

What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Except for dogs, animals are staying out of sight when commuters are about.

Weather: Some snow remains on the north side of the house. Morning temperatures still drop to the 20's, afternoons are still warm, and frost still forms from moisture pulled from the ground and plants. Last rain, 1/24/09.

Weekly update: My red hot pokers have always been a step behind my neighbors.

When I moved here, people’s Kniphofia bloomed in early to mid May with grape hyacinth-types spikes on stems at least 3' high, with bright orange flowers above and older, yellow ones below. When I ordered some Pfitzer Hybrids in 1999 from Weiss Brothers they came into flower a month later, a foot shorter and with more subdued colors. One plant, at the west end of the bed, never blooms until late summer.

Sometime each May I clear dead leaves from the bank where they grow with Dutch iris. The tan iris leaves pull away, but not the pokers’. They have to be cut or left another year before the plant is willing to let go. I never see piles of debris around my neighbors’ clumps.

Some leaves stay green well into winter, under protection of the upper ones that die with the cold. In the past week or so, many of those leaves have turned red, as photosynthesis has slowed, probably because the air is still sucking water from the soil and plant tissue.

Common torch lilies, as they’re also called, are usually defined as variants of the uvaria species. When the aloe family members were first introduced into gardens after the Boers and British moved into the interior of South Africa in the early nineteenth century, they bloomed in fall and needed protection in winter, usually from ashes. As late as 1920, the Encyclopedia Americana suggested the rhizomes be planted in the shrubbery to bloom between mid-summer and frost.

Walter Pfitzer introduced his hybrids in 1893 in Stuttgart. In 1907, The Journal of Horticulture told its readers the basal clumps of sword-like green leaves bloomed in August and September. A few years later, Liberty Hyde Bailey believed they were the same as the 5' tall grandis variety then in the trade.

Somewhere something changed. Max Leichtlin, a bulb breeder in Baden-Baden, may have introduced the more refined perennials in 1881. Bailey described his carnosa variety as less than 2' tall with apricot-colored flowers. At some point my plants’ ancestors may have mixed with praecox or some other spring blooming species.

The hardiness was probably indigenous to the genus, which grows along eastern Africa from Yemen to the Cape of Good Hope. Syd Ramdhani identified four centers of diversification in South Africa and one in Madagascar, and found most species thrive in high, mountainous grasslands like the Española valley. Chloé Galley’s team believes the Drakensburg mountains were the first center for the genus.

As for the red pigments, they fade from individual flowers as they loose their ability to interest birds as pollinators, leaving the basic yellow, but apparently persist in leaves when the chlorophyl disappears this time of year.

Gradations in time are apparently endemic to the species, and not just the result of seed grown plants and the vagaries of commercial nurseries. The ability to stay in tune with changes in environment was what Ramdhani believed made it possible for the genus to survive climate changes that followed the tectonic plate movements that first precipitated the diversification, and, on a much smaller scale, allow my hybrids to survive rio arriba winters when they might fail in the north.

Being out of step with one’s neighbors is sometimes the only way to survive when the times themselves are out of joint.

Notes:
Encyclopedia Americana. "Tritoma," 1920.

Galley, Chloé Galley, Benny Bytebier, Dirk U Bellstedt, and H Peter Linder. "The Cape Element in the Afrotemperate Flora: from Cape to Cairo?," Royal Society, Biological Sciences section Proceedings 22:535–543:2007.

Journal of Horticulture and Home Farmer, The. "Hardy Plant Notes" for 15 June 1907 discuss Pfitzer and tritoma.

Miller, Wilhelm and Liberty Hyde Bailey. "Kniphofia" in Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1914.

Ramdhani, S. Evolutionary and Biogeographic Studies in the Genus Kniphofia Moench (Asphodelaceae), 2007.

Photograph: Red hot poker stem and leaves laid low by the snow, with seed ready to drop through openings, 31 January 2009.

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Yucca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses; Russian thistles gathering at fences.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitaes are either dark brown or chartreuse.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in cottonwood and catalpa early mornings.
Weather: Morning temperatures were ten degrees warmer earlier in the week; snow receding from the front of the house has uncovered spots of green. Last rain, 1/24/09.
Weekly update: There are times when I’m driving across New Mexico when I feel I’ve slipped into another dimension. It’s been miles since the last settlement and there’s been only grass and barbed wire fronting a road still sloping from the Great Plains to the Rockies. Then the rocks change.
Going southwest along route 152 towards Lordsburg, the ridges start to close in on fields, and suddenly there are great soaptree yuccas, the elatas that resemble palm trees with angry porcupine heads of long, green leaves. Going southeast along 84 to Clovis, just as I’m mesmerized by the passing sameness, the caprock of the staked plains begins, and so do the yuccas. This time they’re shorter, but stalks with the remains of previous seasons’ flowers still stand in huddles.
Last summer I wandered down the ranch road south of my house where the ground swells before dropping to the sandy bed of an arroyo. The road itself falls so steeply, ten-foot high walls rise above my head. I looked up, and there on my left were three yucca sentinels silhouetted against the horizon.
The inward-folding leaves are shorter than other yuccas, less than two feet high, and much, much narrower, no more than a quarter inch wide. Yesterday, they were a dark yellow-tinged green, with fibers escaping the white leaf margins near the bases of the rosettes. Only a few had old flower stalks, and they were ones with few leaves that looked like they were dying. Surrounding them were shorter plants, probably new sprouts from the rhizomatous roots. Maybe sixty clumps grew on both sides of the cut.
In the early twentieth century, the Santa Clara used the saponin-rich roots of Yucca baccata for soap to wash clothing and their hair, a practice that passed to the Spanish who called it amole. The p’a fruits were gathered in fall for food. The dark, relatively wide, inward-sweeping leaves were boiled, then chewed to free the fibers for cordage.
When I moved here several people had Yucca glauca plants with grey leaves several feet high, some with blades that flexed outwards. While my near neighbor has them behind his house, most planted them near the roadside fence where they bloomed this past year in May. Leonora Curtin was told by people to the north that some in the village used palmilla to curdle milk, and heard rumors the sharp-tipped leaves were used as scourges by Los Penitentes.
Generally, yuccas are scarce away from houses here, either because they’ve been cleared for wheat, sheep and cattle, or because they were always selective about their environments at our 6000' altitude. Yesterday, I saw only one wild plant outside the prairie, but ten people had three or four-foot plants with green, straight leaves, and three had ones with reflexed gray ones.
I suspect the ones on the prairie may be the narrow-leaved angustissima, found elsewhere in the county, that grew from black seed brought by the heavy equipment that dug the road. There’s no other explanation for two colonies facing each other across a deep divide. The wind could have blown seed or an animal run up and down the canyon walls, but first there had to be seed and then a direct wind or an animal too dumb to use the road to escape a predator.
Although some glaucas can fertilize themselves when the six creamy-white petals close upon the anthers, most species are pollinated by a yucca moth that perpetuates itself by laying eggs in the fruit. If conditions are wrong, the insects don’t hatch when the plants are in flower. After a bad winter, they may not emerge at all.
Any plant that relies on a single type of moth that can lie dormant for thirty years lives in a different sphere. In that world, those prairie plants are but a few seconds old, and my neighbors’ nurtured specimens mere visitors from the realm of the mundane.
Notes:Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dodd, Rhea Jean and Yan B. Linhart. "Reproductive Consequences of Interactions between Yucca glauca (Agavaceae) and Tegeticula yuccasella (Lepidoptera) in Colorado," American Journal of Botany 81:815-825:1994.Powell, J. A. "Longest Insect Dormancy: Yucca Moth Larvae (Lepidoptera: Prodoxidae) Metamorphose after 20, 25, and 30 Years in Diapause," Annals of the Entomological Society of America 94:677-680:2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. New Mexico county distribution maps for angustissima,baccata, elata, and glauca.
Photograph: Narrow-leaf yucca with needle grass along the ranch road, 25 January 2009.