Golden Smoke

What’s blooming in the area: Apple, chokecherry, Bradford pear, other white and pink flowering trees, first lilacs, tulips, yellow iris, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustard, stickseed, purple mat flower, oxalis, native and common dandelion, cheat grass; heath asters up. Seeds and bare root roses picked over at local hardware stores, especially the cheaper ones; only bedding plants available are vegetables.
What’s blooming in my yard: Sour cherry, green and purple-leaved sand cherries, few peach flowers, forsythia, Siberian pea, daffodils, grape hyacinth, hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, mossy phlox, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on spirea, lilac, cheddar pink, coral bell, Jupiter’s beard; caryopteris and weigela leafing; buddleia, hartweig, Maximilian sunflower, Mönch aster up; perky Sue greening; sand cherries fragrant.
Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Birds, small gecko, moth, bees, ants; turkeys near orchard.
Weather: It finally stayed above freezing all week; afternoons were in the 70's when I got home; still windy. A friend in Lamy complained his radishes and lettuce didn’t germinate because it was too cold, and now it’s so warm the lettuce will bolt. Last rain, 4/17/09; 14:12 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: It happens. I’m driving along and some flash of color catches my attention. I wonder what I missed when a truck looms in my rearview mirror. I resume speed, but promise myself a better look next time.
Last Saturday was different. I was driving my old Los Alamos commuting route through Santa Clara lands to see if any cherries were blooming on that side of the river when I saw something short and yellow that didn’t scream dandelion. This time, I drove back on the shoulder until I found the flowers, some golden smoke growing in a cut made through the rock, clay and sand thrown up by the rift.
American botanists place Corydalis aurea in the bleeding heart family, while Europeans consider it and all the Fumariaceae as part of the poppy family. Try as I might, turning books in all directions, I don’t see the connection with either. The flower looks very much like a fancy pea with two long, light yellow petals in a narrow tube that touch at the opening surrounded by two darker petals that curve open at the mouth. Bees push through the inner shell to get to the sac of nectar at the tip of the uppermost layer.
The flowers are embedded in short spikes like mints or snapdragons, that behave more like a mustard when they mature. Narrow pods replace the lower florets while the stems lengthen to hold more blossoms. When the shiny black seeds are ripe, the pods split. Ants, some nine species in Colorado, take the ejected grains to their nests where the larvae eat the lipid-filled elaiosome sacs attached to the exterior coatings. When the nutrients are gone, the ants bury the still viable remains in their trash heaps where they are more likely to germinate than if ants hadn’t intervened.
The winter annual is one of those wildflowers that’s widely distributed, from Alaska to the northern states of México, without being particularly common. It doesn’t seem to care much about altitude or soil, accepting sand and gravel, lava and limestone, from glacier-flattened northern Michigan to subalpine Colorado, but it needs something more than water, bees and ants. Some speculate ants scarify seeds or create particularly fertile environments, but Marion Blois Lobstein and Larry Rockwood weren’t been able to document the relationship.
Instead, John Zasoda’s team saw them come back the first season after white spruce had been cleared in Alaska, but they died out by the fifth. In Ottawa, another group noticed golden corydalis was one of the plants that appeared within the first hundred days after a woodland was burned, while Rebecca Shankland noticed they were particularly prolific in White Rock Canyon in 2003 when bark beetles were destroying something like 80% of the mature piñon in Los Alamos County.
I suspect the embryos for the ferny blue-green leaves I saw last weekend landed along the highway when some heavy truck picked up speed out of Española. I would guess one of the loosely covered gravel haulers from the other side of town, if only because my load of washed base coarse deposited several new species and a bunch of red ants in my drive.
As for my original quest, I saw no chokecherries. Instead, one white tree was blooming in a yard that could have been anything, cherry, plum or pear, and two cherries were growing wild in an unsettled area where someone driving through had probably thrown out seeds or bad fruit.
The littering was deliberate while the gear transition that shook off debris when a truck jolted was the consequence of physics. Both happen when a road is built. The environment changes ever so slightly. New species appear, but not everything that sprouts is a weed.
Notes:
Catling, P. M., A. Sinclair, A., and D. Cuddy. "Plant Community Composition and Relationships of Disturbed and Undisturbed Alvar Woodland," Canadian Field-Naturalist 116:571-579:2002.Hanzawa, Frances M., Andrew J. Beattie, and David C. Culver. "The Directed Dispersal: Demographic Analysis of an Ant-Seed Mutualism," American Naturalist, 131:1-13:1988.Lobstein, Marion Blois and Larry L. Rockwood, "Influence of Elaiosome Removal on Germination in Five Ant-Dispersed Plant Species," Virginia Journal of Science 44:59-72:1993.Shankland, Rebecca. "An Armchair Tour of White Rock Canyon on Earth Day," Los Alamos Monitor 23 April 2003, republished by Pajarito Environmental Education Center website.Stern, Kingsley R. "Revision of Dicentra (Fumariaceae)," Brittonia 13:1-57:1961.Zasada, John C., M. Joan Foote, Frederick J. Deneke, and R.H. Parkerson. "Case History of an Excellent, White Spruce Cone and Seed Crop in Interior Alaska: Cone and Seed Production, Germination, and Seedling Survival," USDA report, 1978.Photograph: Golden smoke, along road between Española and Los Alamos, 18 April 2009.