Sunday, May 17, 2009

Scarlet Globemallow

What’s blooming in the area: Austrian copper and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, skunkbush, yucca, peony, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, nits-and-lice, hoary cress, tumble mustard, stickseed, wooly and common loco, scarlet beeblossom, oxalis, blue gilia, alfilerillo, perky Sue, goatsbeard, native and common dandelion; needle, rice, June and three awn grass; some cheat grass turning brown.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Black locust, Lady Banks rose, German iris, golden-spur columbine, first chocolate flower; buds on Moonshine yarrow; grape leafing; cherries, sand cherries, and Siberian pea pods forming.
Looking east: Snowball, Persian yellow rose, winecup, mossy phlox, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, last year’s snapdragons, rock rose, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on hollyhock and sea pink.
Looking south: Beauty bush, rugosa rose, spirea peaked; zinnias germinating.
Looking west: Vinca, flax; leadplant up.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum.
Inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Long red snake, rabbit, humming bird, other birds heard but not seen, gecko, bumble bee on locust, ladybug on goatsbeard, miller type moth, large black harvester and small red ants.
Weather: Spring winds, summer heat; yesterday’s winds and clouds left little water; last useful rain 5/03/09; 15:11 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Delicate is not the first thing I associate with the mallow family. Maybe smores by the camp fire or hollyhocks behind a fence, but not translucent etherealness.
Scarlet globemallow is a useless name for the flowers blooming in my yard: they’re the same color as the copper globemallows that will appear later this summer. I distinguish them by their habits. The current plants stay short with silvery, divided leaves and dense racemes, while the later ones get tall with widely spaced flowers on woody stems and leathery, serrated leaves.
The one remains a perpetual youth, the other becomes the wizened crone who spent too long in the sun. Sphaeralcea coccinea blooms in May, with occasional flowers in August and September; angustifolia comes into bloom in late July and stays around until late September. The one reopens each morning, the other seems forever available.
Neither are scarlet or copper, but tangerine. The five petals of the late summer cups have the uniformity of paint, while the early flowers are luminescent with white bases beneath the characteristic, protruding stamen columns. A few on the prairie are darker, while one that appeared in my yard in the middle 1990's was white. It survived until a bad storm in 2000 sent sheets of water down the drive that broke away the soil surrounding soil the basal leaves.
The currently blooming perennials have adapted to the short-grass prairies west of the Mississippi, ranging from Chihuahua to the grasslands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while the other is native to the desert scrub of the southwest from Colorado through central México.
Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley reported the first, which they still called Malvastrum coccineum in 1915, grew in the "open hills and plains, in the Upper Sonoran zone" throughout the state, while the other, which they identified as Sphaeralcea lobata, was found on the "open hills and in river valleys, in the Lower and Upper Sonoran zones" and was a nuisance in the irrigated fields of the lower Rio Grande.
In my yard the hard brown seeds of the more exquisite one have germinated in the needle grass where there’s a bit more water. Along the road to the north, they stay back from the shoulder. One group has spread through its rhizomatous roots along the tracks left by off road vehicles. In the prairie, away from the arroyo and ranch road, a few have emerged from deep taproots next to bunches of grass where wind currents dropped the seeds.
The elusive globemallow may be the atypical graceling among the mallows, but it still has the family chemistry. Most Malvaceae contain mucilage that forms a protective film over inflamed tissue. The Lakota chewed roots of the prairie plant to create a lotion to protect their hands from fire and scalding during ceremonies, while the Santa Clara used powdered roots of the arid species to treat snake bites and "sores in which considerable pus appears."
The Tewa speakers also used the mucilage from powdered root skins to make face paint and associated it with the medicines used for broken arms and legs. William Dunmire and Gail Tierney report Picuris used the roots of the early summer plant to make castes for broken bones, while Santo Domingo used an unidentified species as the bonding agent in calcimine house paints and Taos mixed the mucilage with mud to harden their floors.
Local people may have treated the two plants interchangeably and botanists may have taken a while seeing through variations that didn’t connote species, but there does remain a difference between the piqués of an ephemeral flower that comes back year and year, despite the hazards of southwestern life, and its plodding cousin.
Notes: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 Dilwyn J Rogers, Lakota Names and Traditional Uses of Native Plants by Sicangu (Brule) People in the Rosebud Area, South Dakota, 1980; Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919, and Shelly Katheren Kraft, Recent Changes in the Ethnobotany of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, 1990.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.
Photograph: Scarlet globemallow, 9 May 2009.

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