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.