Sunday, July 26, 2009

Moss Rose

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and bush morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, cultivated, farmer’s and native sunflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, Queen Anne’s lace, tahokia daisy, blue and side oats grama grasses.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, bouncing Bess, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on garlic chives, cut-leaf coneflower and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower; buds on Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, bees, hummingbird moths, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Storms in the area left rain on Tuesday night, and mediated afternoon temperatures and evaporation levels; last moderate rain 7/22/09; 15:21 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Cactus flowers, which were more plentiful this year than usual, resemble Busby Berkeley film musicals. The central attraction is a single pistol, towering above the ensemble like Carmen Miranda in her biggest hat. Surrounding her is a corps of thin stamens, and beyond them a few ladies, the petals, carrying large fans.

Moss roses are so closely related to cacti that they’re thought to be their immediate ancestors. They have the same flower, only everything is a bit more rococo. The single ovary has at least five stigmas which flare and curl. The petals multiply in groups of five. The anthers are sensitive to touch, so when a premier danseur insect moves among them, they bend in its direction. The prima is usually located off center.

Prickly pear flowers in this area are a lemony yellow, much paler than the moss roses blooming in my garden. The magenta of the chollas is a deeper, richer hue than the roses or pinks. All open mid-morning and close before sunset, eschew clouds and water drops.

A friend of William Hooker, probably John Gillies, told him that on the western bank of the Rio Desaguadero, which borders Mendoza province in the rain shadow on the Argentine Andes, there were so many Portulaca grandiflora plants in the late 1820's they "spread a rich purple hue, here and there marked with spots of orange color."

Some twenty years later, in 1851, Joseph Breck offered rose, scarlet, yellow, and white varieties in Boston. He said some white annuals appeared with pink stripes. How the simple color of the natural population could produce the brilliant shades of the cultivated plants, without benefit of any selective breeding, has puzzled botanists ever since.

Before 1921, Seniitiko Ikeno crossed plants he had selected over several generations for pure color. He believed yellow was primary and that the addition of some factor created orange. Further additions spawned red offspring, and even more of some unknown produced the magenta. He also noticed double flowers were dominant over the singles.

Biochemists have now determined both the cactus and portulaca families contain betalain pigments which are created by DOPA (3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine). When betalamic acid interacts with amino acids it becomes the yellow betaxanthin of the local prickly pear; when it mixes with cyclo-DOPA derivatives it becomes the purple betacyanin of the cholla. Orange results from the presence of both; white has little or no betalain.

Ikeno realized that Portulaca grandiflora did not fit the simple genetic matrix described by Mendel. He believed three factors needed to exist to produce the varieties he observed, an hypothesis Giampiero Franco Trezzini and Jean-Pierre Zÿrd confirmed when they found the biochemical patterns of betalain synthesis were consistent with the existence of three controlling genes.

You have to accept Miranda’s colors to grow moss roses. Most seed companies only offer mixed colors, and most growers put several tiny seeds in each pot. They don’t thin them, both to save labor costs and to make the plants look fuller than they are when they’re sold. No matter what color you see when you buy them in the spring, they will be something else in the summer.

When I bought Sundial F1 seedlings this spring, they were all apricot. I planted them in an exposed bed where I hoped they would shelter the zinnia seeds. Now both are blooming in gaudy pinks and yellows with the South American natives kneeling in a corps around the taller Mexican pas de quatres, ensembles within an ensemble.

Notes:
John Gillies was a Scotch physician who lived in Mendoza between 1820 and 1828. Hooker, then at Glasgow University, described many of his discoveries according to John Dunne-Brady’s on-line listing of "Eponyms."

Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden, 1851, reprinted by OPUS Publications, 1988.

Hooker, William Jackson. Curtis's Botanical Magazine 56:2885:1829, quoted by Zÿrd and Christinet.

Ikeno, Seniitiko. "Studies on the Genetics of Flower-Colours in Portalaca grandiflora," College of Agriculture, Imperial University of Tokyo Journal 8:93-133:1921.

Trezzini, Giampiero Franco and Jean-Pierre Zÿrd. "Portulaca grandiflora: a Model System for the Study of the Biochemistry and Genetics of Betalain Synthesis," Acta Horta 280:581-585:1990.

Zÿrd, Jean-Pierre and Laurent Christinet. "Betalains," Annual Plant Reviews 14:185-213:2004.

Photograph: Moss roses, 19 July 2009, center of apricot flower has several thin stigmas reaching up like posts holding a ring stone between four and five o’clock from the darker stamens.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Bush Morning Glory

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bush morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, alfilerillo, cultivated and native sunflower, bachelor button, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, Queen Anne’s lace, muhly ring, blue and side oats grama grasses; buds on tahokia daisy.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker, hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, bouncing Bess, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on cut-leaf coneflower and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, blue veronica, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, dragonfly, hummingbird moth, ladybug, bees, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Monday was the hottest day so far this summer; it was still 80 at ten in the evening with no wind and still 70 when I got up the next morning; last rain 7/05/09; 15:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As a child I absorbed Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper that contrasted the busyness of the one preparing food for the winter with the frivolousness of the other.

When I later heard about the rigid social structure of ants, where sterile females toil for the benefit of the queen, I wondered why the individualistic grasshopper was so disdained. Later still I discovered Aesop is believed to have been a slave in the century before Athens outlawed slavery and began groping towards democracy. Then, society depended on servitude to eat, and men only wished they could let their indolent masters starve.

Now that I have problems with both insects, I wonder if Aesop, or anyone who’s retold his tale, ever had a garden. Certainly grasshoppers are destructive: they will eat everything above ground, so only plants that reproduce early in the season survive for the next year. However, the ant steals seeds so nothing germinates this year.

Unlike me, the bush morning glory blooming in the road cut near the prairie arroyo clearly prefers the ant. The petunia-sized purple flowers stand erect on reddish stems that arch out from mounds resembling young desert willows. A grasshopper can eat a flower, stigma and all, in an hour.

In defense, Ipomoea leptophylla developed glands at the base of its sepals which begin releasing nectar for ants even before the buds mature. Kathleen Keeler says the insects provide protection by nipping the feet of any grasshoppers that land within their range. They’re so successful that plants Keeler watched near the social insects in Nebraska averaged 211 seeds each, while those without ants only produced 45.

It’s easy for man-of-the-earth to prefer ants. Unlike its cousins, the Heavenly Blues and Crimson Ramblers, it’s perennial in this environment and doesn’t depend on producing a crop of hairy, brown seeds each year to survive. Indeed, it may produce no flowers for the first five years of its life, and survives drought by aborting its buds.

The Great Plains native relies on its deep taproot to withstand dry spells, when there may be no water in the top five to seven feet of soil. While some can get to be a foot across, four feet long and weigh 40 pounds, many are half as wide and half as heavy. Some put out lateral branches that can grow 10 to 15 feet, and produce separate crowns. The two plants near the arroyo are close enough to be joined below ground.

The large roots apparently aren’t threatened by insects, but would be dug by humans except, as Edward Sturtevant said, they’re by "no means palatable or nutritious." His 1919 comments were passed from one author to another until Harold Harrington tested them and found only the older roots were bitter. He suggested two-year-old plants could be quite edible.

The problem with following Harrington’s advice is finding young plants. Keeler observed two bush morning glory populations over a decade, and found about 2.6% of the plants died each year. Those that didn’t survive were usually small, and probably younger, the ones Harrington would recommend. She guessed a generation was probably twenty years, and that many bush morning glories lived much longer. Most in any colony are past adolescence.

More important to understanding Sturtevant is discovering the context that was lost in the repetitions. His source was describing the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa in the late 1860's, after grasshoppers had devastated Colorado in 1864 and again between 1867 and 1868.

During the first plague, Dakota women in Minnesota had boiled half-digested grains they’d scavenged from horse manure and the army had attacked a Cheyenne village on Sand Creek, destroying much of the tribal social structure. When the government issued the report Sturtevant read, natives on the Great Plains were eating anything; looking only for young plants would have been as much a luxury as being a grasshopper in the days of Aesop.

Notes:Harrington, Harold David. Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains, 1967.

Keeler, Kathleen H. "The Extrafloral Nectaries of Ipomoea leptophylla (Convolvulaceae)," American Journal of Botany 67:216-222:1980.

_____. "Survivorship and Recruitment in a Long-Lived Prairie Perennial, Ipomoea leptophylla (Convolvulaceae)," American Midland Naturalist 126:44-60:1991.

Roberts, Jeanne. "Minnesota Sesquicentennial Highlights Native American Plight," 20 May 2008, The Panelist website.

United States, Department of Agriculture. Report 407, 1870, cited by Edward Lewis Sturtevant in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1972.

Waldbauer, Gilbert. What Good Are Bugs?, 2003, discusses work of Keeler, including comments not in her articles.

Photograph: Bush morning glory in road cut near prairie arroyo, 18 July, 2009; dark spot just above and to the left of the green cup is an ant.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Tamarix

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall yucca, fern and leather leaved globemallows, bird of paradise, alfalfa, scurf pea, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, cultivated sunflower, bachelor button, purple coneflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, hairy golden and strap-leaf spine asters, Queen Anne’s lace, muhly ring, blue and side oats grama grasses; first corn tasseling; Russian olives forming; áñil del muerto germinating.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, zucchini, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, bouncing Bess, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on cut-leaf coneflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, Saint John’s wort, zinnia, cosmos; buds on rose of Sharon; raspberries still ripening, lanterns forming on tomatillo.

Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, blue veronica, Shasta daisy; buds on caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; first edible tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Hot and sometimes muggy with late afternoon winds; rain last Sunday; 15:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: They moved the post office. No longer do I pass wisteria and roses. Instead, I can cross the north bridge where tamarix is blooming.

Tamarix is one of those trees that was invading riparian environments in the southwest even before it was used to reclaim land left barren by the drought of the 1930's on the Great Plains. In New Mexico, it’s more common in the warmer, southern reaches and lower elevations of the Rio Grande, than here in the north. Those who wanted to restore the Bosque del Apache, in Socorro County, had to use fire, chains, and chemicals to kill mature stands before they could re-introduce native species.

In Española, the shaggy barked trees seem concentrated on the south side of the upper bridge where a gravel operation works the other side. The right bank, between the middle and lower bridges, has middling-aged cottonwoods with some Siberian elms and Russian Olives. The city’s water treatment facility is on the down river left bank of the lower bridge. The local village and prairie arroyos have only scattered specimens.

The difference in modern vegetation is probably due to the activities of the current land owners. Someone is keeping the area under the cottonwoods cleared of burnable underbrush, and leaving the land fallow. Someone else is keeping the area bordered by tamarixes cleared of everything but grasses or cattails and marsh plants. Crops and horses share the general area.

In their native China, members of the tamarix family are valued as ancient ancestors. In 1992, the Turpan Eremophyte Botanic Garden established a special Tamaricaceae collection in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur to study the "formation and evolution of the flora of an arid region" and determine how to best utilize its diversity.

In this country, John Gaskin and Barbara Schaal found one reason the trees became dangerous is that varieties from different parts of China interbred. It’s not clear if, in fact, the tamarixes had actually evolved into different species there or were local variants that could only be differentiated by the shapes of their nectary disks.

The variety common in New Mexico, chinensis, is found along the rivers and shores of the provinces edging the Yellow Sea and between the Hwang Ho and Yangtze rivers. The other species, ramosissima, grows near water in the western states bordering Mongolia and Afghanistan and farther towards Europe.

Chinensis has been grown in southeastern gardens since it was introduced in 1827. Cultivars of ramosissima are more common today in the nursery trade. My Summer Glow is a sport of another selection found in France in the 1930's. Gaskin doesn’t rule out the possibility that ornamental varieties could perpetuate tamarix, but he found they don’t now share much of the DNA with existing wild hybrids.

Such mutability has become the hallmark of the water-table seeking tap roots that support woody stems of trees, but fall in the same subgroup as the carnivorous plants within the order of carnations. The leaves have glands that excrete salt the roots absorb from the soil, much like the glands of their sister leadworts remove chalk and the carnivores produce sticky, trapping substances.

The leaves have the same herringbone tightness of the short, narrow leaflets as cedar, but are deciduous. Like junipers, the flowers initially look like pink tinted continuations of the blue-green stalks. Salt cedar blooms actually begin as dark round buds that open with long stamens and anthers that catch the light and make the dense racemes look like fluffy caterpillars. Yesterday the wild flowers were pale pink and insectless, while the five petals of my ornamental Summer Glow were darker and buzzed with narrow black and yellow bees.

Their honey isn’t particularly flavorful, but the nectar keeps the bees fed until more desirable flowers open, much like the trees retain soils when water and salinity patterns change and native species aren’t nimble enough to adapt.

Notes:
Gaskin, John F. and David J. Kazmer. "Comparison of Ornamental and Wild Saltcedar (Tamarix Spp.) Along Eastern Montana, USA Riverways Using Chloroplast and Nuclear DNA Sequence Markers," Wetlands 26:939-950:2006.

_____ and Barbara A. Schaal. "Hybrid Tamarix Widespread in U.S. Invasion and Undetected in Native Asian Range," National Academy of Science, Proceedings 99:11256-11259:2002.

Jacobson, Arthur Lee. "Plant of the Month: Tamarisk," June 2005, available on his web-site.

Missouri Botanical Garden and Harvard University Herbarium eFloras project. Flora of China
on-line entries for Tamarix chinensis and Tamarix ramosissima.

Pan Borong. "Turpan Eremophyte Botanic Garden, Academia Sinica, China," Botanic Gardens Conservation International BGC News, December, 1996.

Photograph: Wild tamarix near northern Española bridge, 11 July 2009.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Lance-Leaf Coreopsis

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, tall yucca, fern and leather leaved globemallows, tumble mustard, bird of paradise, alfalfa, scurf pea, white sweet and purple clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, nits and lice, datura, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, bachelor button, purple coneflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, hairy golden and strap-leaf spine asters, blue grama grass; corn 2' high.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Red hot poker peaked, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, butterfly weed peaked, zucchini, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums; sand cherries turning dark red; catalpa pods forming.
Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, cheddar pinks, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer peaked, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on cut-leaf coneflower.
Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, Saint John’s wort, zinnia; buds on tomatillo.
Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, lady bells, sea lavender, white beardtongue, white spurge, perennial four o’clock; buds on Shasta daisy.
Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; first green tomato formed.
Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, gecko, different kind of bee on white beardtongue, sulfur butterfly, hummingbird moth, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Hot all week, with howling winds Thursday night and high humidity yesterday; last useful rain 6/20/09; 15:50 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Sometimes a phrase sticks in my mind and I lose my ability to see the world except through its prism. In James Thurber’s short story, Walter Mitty imagines himself called into an emergency room to complete a dangerous operation. When the attending physician updates him on the patient’s condition, he warns "coreopsis is setting in."
Now I can never see that yellow composite without hearing Thurber. The solid, round buds protected by shiny, yellowish-green bracts emerge the end of May - coreopsis is setting in. The erect disk flowers open in June surrounded by ungradated yellow rays - coreopsis is setting in. The bracts reclose on the reproductive parts in a turban with darkened flags of dying petals - coreopsis is setting in.
Lance-leaved coreopsis is a native wildflower that can be found anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies, but which has fairly specific requirements within that range. In the Great Lakes area, Coreopsis lanceolata inhabits glacial remains that get at least 30" of rain a year and are slightly acidic.
In Michigan, the short rhizomes grow in sandy lands along lakes Michigan and Huron, and on the sandy glacial outwashes supporting relic oak barrens of inland Jackson, Livingston and Oakland counties. I grew up on a spit of better land between those areas less affected by the last glacier where Coreopsis lanceolata only grew as a garden plant that could easily escape.
In Illinois, the rough black seeds grow on south-facing hill prairies composed of loess and sand that had once been forested. Students at the Chicago Botanic Garden found the shortest exposure to smoke that could come from nearby a fire increases their ability to germinate.
When Thurber was living in Columbus the notched petals were commonly mentioned by garden writers, but also grew in the counties along route 62 that followed the south side of the watershed between the Great Lakes and Mississippi from the state capital to Canton. In New Mexico in those years, the wild form was found in open fields east of the Santa Fe and Las Vegas mountains. Even today, it’s restricted to San Miguel and Torrance counties.
In my garden coreopsis is transient. I never worry about dividing it every three years. I’m lucky individual plants live so long. Instead, I let the golden-yellow flowers go to seed, and cut off dead stalks in the spring. By then those stems have become inflexible shrub-like appendages connected to woody crowns that can yank out the roots if accidentally levered.
I also buy fresh seed each year to throw out in the spring and late summer, and let the spoon-shaped seedlings wander about the north-facing bed. With the variously aged plants, I don’t have to worry about keeping a single plant blooming all summer. Something is usually open somewhere. From the accumulated variations of repeated sowing, occasional semi-doubles appear or flowers with red spots at the bases of their rays.
The perennial’s accommodating nature makes it a favorite ingredient in commercial wildflower mixes. Someone down the road had several, simultaneous visions of his land. One was the modern suburban house with an immaculate green lawn maintained by flood irrigation. Another was a cottage in a forest opening surrounded by evergreen trees.
Some ten years ago, either the man or his wife thought a wildflower meadow would be nice, until the flax, blanket flowers, and coreopsis started blooming in the middle of their green sward while they had the house for sale. Each year the thoroughly naturalized flowers come back, and each year he or the new owner mows them down.
When I drive by and see the emerging humps of dark green in spring break the level plane of winter-grayed grass, my car turns into a rider mower, my sweat pants into chaps, and my garden hat into a Stetson. I look out over the range and mutter "coreopsis is setting in."
Notes:Forsberg, Britt, Lara V. Jefferson, Kayri Havens, and Marcello Pennacchio. "Prairie Seed Response to Smoke Cues," Chicago Botanic Garden Posters, 2004.Michigan Natural Features Inventory. "Natural Community Abstract for Oak Barrens," 2001, by J. G. Cohen.Robertson, Kenneth R., Mark W. Schwartz, Jeffrey W. Olson, Brian K. Dunphy, and H. David Clarke. "50 Years of Change in Illinois Hill Prairies," Illinois Natural History Survey websiteThurber, James. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," 1939.United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. "Coreopsis lanceolata L.," in Plants Profile database, maintained by John T. Kartesz; includes county distribution maps for Ohio and New Mexico.Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 3, 1996Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.

Photograph: Lance-leaf coreopsis with buds and spent turban, 4 July 2009.