Chokecherry

What’s blooming in the area: Pink and white flowering trees, chokecherry, Bradford pear, tulips, mossy phlox, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustard, stickseed, purple mat flower, golden smoke, oxalis, and dandelion; cottonwood leaves forming; stickleaf, mullein, tumble mustard and pigweed coming up; local ditches running.
What’s blooming in my yard: Cherry, sand cherry, forsythia, daffodils, puschkinia, hyacinth, vinca, and yellow alyssum; buds on lilac and grape hyacinth; sea lavender and ladybells up; catalpa pods splitting, dropping seeds.
Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.
Animal sightings: Rabbit, ants; rooster crowing somewhere in area; Herefords and geese near village; both bees and flies on cherries yesterday.
Weather: Winds continue with temperatures still falling below freezing, rain Friday; 13:53 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Now’s the time for pink and white flowering trees. When I drove through Indiana in the 1980's and saw them growing wild in wood lots under taller trees that hadn’t yet leafed out, I romantically thought they were redbud and dogwood.
Here the pink flowers are probably crab apples bought at a garden center or ordered from a catalog. The white racemes are probably some kind of cherry brought in from elsewhere. While some could be sweet Prunus avium, sour cerasus, or the mahaleb rootstock, a number most likely are the chokecherries that Leonora Curtin says were made into wine and preprandial tea by Spanish-speaking people in northern New Mexico in the 1940's.
In one farm area once dominated by a French territorial house, someone planted rows of white flowering trees that extend beside two drives on one side of the road and along the edge of a flood-irrigated field on the other. Elsewhere, scattered trees have sprouted on the outer edges of property, often near water, where seeds could have been dropped by birds.
The trees are relatively short. It’s possible many were cut, and these are suckers with thin trunks that ramble towards the light. The wood itself didn’t need to be straight to be used for bows by San Ildefonso and other Rio Grande and western pueblos: it did need to be straight-grained and flexible.
Elsewhere in the country chokecherries can grow to 30'. The local species can survive 13" of precipitation a year, but William Dunmire and Gail Tierney say it much prefers the water courses in Frijoles canyon while William Dick-Peddie classifies it as a semi-riparian component of New Mexico scrub land. The Tesuque went to the Rio en Medio valley, northeast of Santa Fe, to find fall berries, while the Laguna harvested Mount Taylor.
In the far distant past, Prunus virginiana probably grew in most parts of North America. As the climate changed, three subspecies evolved: the red-fruited virginiana east of the Mississippi; the darker, red-berried demissa in the far west and along the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, and the still darker melanocarpa found in the drylands between.
It’s difficult to know the pre-Oñate range in northern New Mexico, because wild burros decimated the shrubs in Capulin canyon, while ranchers and sheepman may have cleared trees for firewood because the leaves contain prussic acid that can be dangerous when leaves are damaged. The hydrocyanic acid disappears in the fall and when the fruit is dried or cooked, but can still induce what one USDA group calls a "false sense of well-being."
One can only assume they were in the general area in the past. John Peabody Harrington notes the Tewa word for the shrub, abè, is one of the plant names that did not fit the naming conventions of the early twentieth century. He also notes that Tewa speakers used the word bè as a generic term for other rose family fruits like apples and peaches introduced by the Spanish.
While people everywhere have eaten the fruit fresh or cooked or dried and many have used it for gastrointestinal problems including diarrhea, it’s only the nomadic plains tribes who pounded the dried berries and seeds into small, circular cakes. The Navajo, Blackfoot, Dakota, Lakota, and others along the Missouri are the only ones who incorporated the tree and its fruit into their ceremonial life, in ways they chose not to discuss with Melvin Gilmore.
At one time, the Apache brought abebuwa cakes to San Ildefonso at Christmas. Harrington thinks Tewa speakers may once have made the buwa themselves, since there are records of someone named Abenbua in Pojoaque in 1715. If they had, and if the cakes had any spiritual effects, they may have been suppressed by the Franciscans after the reconquest and survived in the seemingly innocent form of yule offerings and the now anonymous hedgerows down the road.
Notes:
Crowder, Wayne, Wayne A. Geyer, and Patrick J. Broyles. "Chokecherry," USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service plant guide, 2008.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998 and on-line database summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Chokecherries growing beside ditch near territorial farm house, 18 April 2009.