Sunday, August 30, 2009

Ragweed

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, sweet pea, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, pale trumpet, stickleaf, clammy weed, spurge, purslane, pigweed, Russian thistle, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap-leaf and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, black grama grass; buds of heath and purple asters; new áñil del muerto plants.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Maltese Cross, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaved soapwort, scarlet flax, sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, Crimson Rambler and reseeded morning glories, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; some peaches survived the spring frosts.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

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

Weather: Continued hot afternoon winds and late clouds rather than usual monsoons; last rain 8/24/2009; 13:41 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Somehow, from bits of urban legends, facts half remembered from grade school, and trivia passed on at summer camp or, later, by friends at work, we cobble together a collection of facts about the natural world we absolutely believe to be true.

Everyone knows cockroaches are older than dinosaurs and ginko trees are the oldest living fossils. I had my own idea that plants like ragweed with male and female green flowers so inconspicuous they could only be pollinated by the wind were nearly as old as the ginko.

We cede these survivors of the cataclysm that destroyed the dinosaurs great powers of adaptation.

And sometimes we’re at least partly right. Cary Easterday found a nearly complete fossil of a giant cockroach from the 300 million-year-old Carboniferous layers of an eastern Ohio coal mine in 1999 that predates the dinosaurs. However, it’s closer to the insects found today in the tropics than to our domestic insect which comes from the Cretaceous that followed the extinction of the giant reptiles. It’s the genus that’s ancient, not the species.

Ragweed, like cockroaches inhabiting city apartments, will not be killed. Increase the carbon dioxide in the air and it still germinates. Throw salt on the road in winter and ecotypes germinate before the salt’s disappeared from the soil. Mow it down and it comes back in two weeks with flowering stalks below the level of a blade.

Spray it with herbicides, it develops strains resistant to Round-up and ALS inhibitors. Give it a hard spring that won’t encourage growth, the seeds resume dormancy and can wait 20 years to germinate. Let the surrounding vegetation get too luxurious, it produces short, female-only plants that go to seed.

Well, plasticity’s the only part about ragweed that fits the naturalist’s equivalent of an old wive’s tale. Ambrosia artemisiifolia, in fact, is a member of the composites, one of the more recent plant families, dating to sometime in the Cretaceous, the era before our modern continents formed when bees were just emerging Ginko fossils go back to the Permian, that geologic time between the Carboniferous of the giant cockroach and the Triassic of the dinosaurs.

Ragweed was one of the first plants I could distinguish as a child by its determined geometricalness. The divided, grey-green leaves spread parallel to the ground and at ninety degrees to each other. Later in the season the leaves changed shape and location, but by then I recognized the tapering flower spikes that looked like the square weave on a lanyard with openings between each layer where green caps repeated the pattern of the lower leaves.

Because I could identify the plant from a distance, I never bothered to look at it closely. This year’s unusual mix of rain, heat, and cold may have encouraged the flowers to expand more than usual to interrupt the expected color pattern. Last Sunday was the first time I ever saw a reason to pick a spike.

Under the green heads of five sepals, that cover the flower clusters before they’re ready to bloom and give the upper spikes their green appearance, is a round yellow bud, surrounded by a single ring of similar buds. There looked to be six or seven outer buds near the base of the spike, but maybe four toward the top. Along the spike, only a few of the male flowers had three anthers pointing down to release the hay fever causing pollen.

I was somewhat gratified to discover scientists can be as fooled by their early assumptions as lay people like me. Although they know the pollen can blow for miles, botanists have always assumed the grains dropped directly down to the female flowers placed where the leaves join the stem. Then, Jannice Friedman and Spencer Barrett watched some ragweed flowers and found most of the female flowers aborted if they detected pollen from their own plant and plants grown in isolation produced far fewer hard seeds than those au naturel.

But even then they realized the common ragweed would adapt. Deprive them of the pollen they need, and they’ll overcome their self-incompatibility to make do with what appears. No one yet has proven the green weed won’t survive Armageddon.

Notes:
360-286m - Carboniferous - hot - oldest cockroach - evergreens
286-248m - Permian - glaciers in southern hemisphere - more insects - deciduous trees - ginko
248-213m - Triassic - hot and dry - Gondwana breaks away - dinosaurs - ferns
213-144m - Jurassic - seas advance - dinosaurs - earliest birds and flowers
144-65m - Cretaceous - swamps - dinosaurs extinct - bees - modern cockroach - composites
65m-2m - Tertiary - drier - modern continents form - sea animals - grasses
2m- - Quarternary - glaciers come and go - modern animals and plants

Bazzaz, Fakhri A. "Ecophysiology of Ambrosia artemisiifolia: A Successional Dominant," Ecology 55:112-119:1974.

_____. Plants in Changing Environments, 1996.

Friedman, Jannice and Spencer C. H. Barrett. "High Outcrossing in the Annual Colonizing Species Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Asteraceae)," Annals of Botany 101:1303-1309:2008.

Lee, Chad, Karen Renner and Jim Kells. "ALS- Resistant Common Ragweed in Michigan," Michigan State University Field Crop Advisory Team Alert for 23 March 2000.

Lundholm, J. T. and L. W. Aarssen. "Neighbour Effects on Gender Variation in Ambrosia artemisiifolia," Canadian Journal of Botany 72:794–800:1994.

Ohio State University. "Largest Fossil Cockroach Found; Site Preserves Incredible Detail," news release, 7 November 2001.

Pollard, Justin Michael. "Identification and Characterization of Gylphosate-Resistant Common Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.), University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.

Antonio DiTommaso. "Germination Behavior of Common Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) Populations across a Range of Salinities," Weed Science 52:1002-1009:2004

Photograph: Ragweed growing along the road by my house, 23 August 2009; most are buds, but it looks like the anthers are extended on one flower to the left of the stem above the long leaf.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Caryopteris 'Longwood Blue'

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, snakeweed, native sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy; trees loaded with apples; some Virginia creeper turning red.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaved soapwort, garlic chive, cut-leaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflower; buds on sedum.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos.

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

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, hummingbird, bees, monarch type butterfly, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Cool mornings, hot afternoons; last rain 8/14; 13:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Santa Fe Style, with a capital S, prefers flat roofs, stuccoed walls, and blue painted window frames and door jambs to ward off the evil eye.

The theory is that since belief in the ability of someone to induce illness or sudden death in a young child by staring was widespread in the Mediterranean and blue was used by Arabs as protection from evil, the local migrants from Spain would not only have brought those customs with them, but perpetuated them unchanged for 300 years.

In fact, Cleofas Jaramillo remembered around Arroyo Hondo they sometimes protected babies with a bead of jet or coral, while Nasario García recalls a coral necklace. John Campiglio believes people in Mexico still use necklaces or bracelets made from the coral tree.

Most reports of el mal ojo in New Mexico focus on cures that involve eggs, water and religious incantation. Protection takes the form of invoking God when a child is admired or touching the child’s head, perhaps with a wetted finger. Alicia Re Cruz found the same combination of traditions used in Denton, Texas, in 2005 to save a young girl who had recently moved there from the same Zacatecas region that sent so many settlers north to our area before and after the reconquest.

Santa Fe Style has always been about being auténtico not objetivo. Once faded blue trim was de rigueur, then blue or purple flowering plants were necessary compliments, especially if they evoked Zane Grey’s purple sage. And so Russian sage is now blooming everywhere, relieved by an occasional caryopteris shrub.

I admit I have both growing on the west side of the house. As much as I remember, I planted them because the area flat enough there to hold water was so narrow, I thought shrubs might give an illusion of depth. I had already decided everything on that side would come from the blue end of the spectrum. Once the parameters were set, there really was little choice.

Caryopteris has the more complex flower. From a distance, the surface of the greyish shrub is covered with upright clusters of blue-grey flowers. Up close, the balls of color are composed of up to 45 round blue buds that open into four small blue-and-white petals and one taller fringed one. Four darker anthers rise above like so many crisscrossing antennae.

Botanists have more or less agreed Caryopteris is a member of the mint family, not the verbena as they once had thought. They’re still arguing how many species exist in the genus and if they in fact represent one genus with shared DNA or several.

Scientists hope to discover the same kinds of continuities that led some to expect traditions in Santa Fe to remain static remnants of the past. Instead, both nature and folklore are dynamic. Aurelio Espinosa heard they used an egg white in 1910 to detect the presence of the evil eye, while one person told García said it was the yoke in Cañon in the early twentieth century and another said they watched how the egg separated.

In the early 1930's, Arthur Simmonds discovered a new hybrid caryopteris growing in his garden in West Clandon, Surrey, that geneticists have now determined was a natural cross between a mongholica from western China and an incana from eastern Asia. The resulting clandonenisis was fertile, and continues to produce variant seedlings. Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania,.chose one in 1981 to nurture that became the parent of the shrub I bought in 1997.

If people in Santa Fe, who grow Longwood Blue, expect it to remain the neat rounded form shown in the pictures of the Du Pont’s allée, they will need to do more work than I’m willing to do. Farther north it dies back like an herbaceous perennial, but not here.

Each year, when I see the narrow, slightly toothed leaves sheath the empty grey framework of branches, I think about pruning it back. Then the leaves fill the center and new growth reaches up, now four and half feet. This year it’s spread seven feet with some suckers covering areas where other plants have died.

Whenever I walk near where its bee-covered branches intrude into the path, I have to remind myself, plants, like species and cultural traditions, do not have a predetermined final form.

Notes:Campiglio, John P. "Natural Medicine Tradition," 2005 revision available on-line.

Cruz, Alicia Re. "Taquerías, Laundromats and Protestant Churches: Landmarks of Hispanic Barrios in Denton, Texas," Urban Anthropology 34:281-303:2005.

Espinosa, Aurelio M. and J. Manuel Espinosa. The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest: Traditional Spanish Folk, 1990.

García, Nasario. Brujerías: Stories of Witchcraft and the Super-natural in the American Southwest and Beyond, 2007.

Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912.

Jaramillo, Cleofas M. Shadows of the Past, 1941.

Miller, Diana. "Caryopteris," December 2007, Royal Horticultural Society website.

Photograph: Longwood Blue caryopteris with bee, 22 August 2009.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Silver Lace Vine

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, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, Queen Anne’s lace, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, few cultivated and native sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, goatsbeard, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, barnyard grass.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

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

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos.

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

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

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

Weather: Heat continues even though early mornings cooler; high winds several evenings before heavy rain Thursday night; 14:10 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Agatha Christie’s Nemesis begins with an highly contrived house and garden tour as a way to get Jane Marple to the location of an unsolved murder. When the spinster detective noted some of the people on the tour who professed great interest in gardens had displayed appalling ignorance, I couldn’t identify the clues she’d dropped. However, as soon as Miss Marple mentioned the Polygonum baldschuanicum, I knew here the body was buried.

Her Polygonum is what we call silver lace vine, a woody climber that can grow ten to thirty feet a year. I had one in Michigan that abandoned its trellis for the garage eaves, then sent its twining branches into the crevices between the wall and roof, before dying in the winter. In Nemesis the narrow leaves cover the remains of a collapsed greenhouse.

The popularity of the vine is very much a product of what is now called the Great Game between Britain and Russia in central Asia in the late nineteenth century. In 1868, Russia annexed the Emirate of Bukhara, southeast of Lake Aral, then marched east. In 1871, it used a Moslem uprising as the pretext for taking Kulja from China, and a few years later sent Albert von Regel there as district physician.

Albert was the son of the head of the Russian Imperial Botanical Garden in St. Petersburg. He used his time to explore the vegetation of the area, describing the Turfan oasis in 1880. A year later, Kulja was returned to China, and Regel began exploring Turkestan. He sent Polygonum seeds from Bukhara back to his father in 1882. Eduard August, in turn, sent the trophies to the competing national gardens of Europe. Bukhara fleeceflower was released in France in 1894 and promoted by Victor Limone in 1896, the same year it finally bloomed at Kew Gardens.

Meantime, missionaries were playing their own hand in Asia. In 1899, Georges Aubert sent the shiny, black seeds of another Polygonum back to France from Tibet, where it was released the following year. A few years later, Louis Henry regretted the baldschuanicum was already so popular, gardeners might not notice the newer aubertii.

Botanists have now determined the two are the same plant and have reclassified them as Fallopia baldschuanica. The reported differences in flower color and size were probably the consequence of Darwinian isolation in separated high, dry environments. No doubt, gardeners and nurserymen confused them long ago, and aubertii was probably accepted in the trade as a convenience.

If it didn’t cover walls and fences so completely, I’m not sure the buckwheat family member would be grown. The greenish-white flowers resemble tiny flat pods spaced out on a necklace, that only take form from a distance. Rosalie Doolittle complains in Albuquerque, where winters are warmer than here, gardeners constantly have to trim it back and pull out suckers.

Someone down the road planted it along the property line on a stout farm fence. It started spreading along the neighbor’s section while the house was for sale. Another person, who has several growing along a stuccoed road wall, cut them back last fall. Their white halos are now topping the wall. A third lets it clamor over a wire fence because, even when the leaves drop, the dense grey-brown stems provide some privacy from the road.

Christie’s been dead for years and our government has assumed the Great Game. We don’t grow the silver lace vine in tribute to either, but because it happens to come from some environment like ours and so thrives on the outposts of our properties where morning light transfigures and forgives its crimes.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. Nemesis, 1971.

Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, revised 1967.

Henry, Louis."Polygonum aubertii," Revue Horticole 79:82-83:16 February 1907.

Päster, F. A. "Polygonum baldschuanicum Regel," Möllers Deutsche Gärtner-Zeitung 12:432:1897.

Photograph: Silver lace vine growing on farm fence down the road, 9 August 2009.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Woolly Paper Flower

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, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, Queen Anne’s lace, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, cultivated and native sunflower, Hopi tea, gumweed, goatsbeard, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, barnyard grass.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s yarrow almost gone.

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

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos; hips forming on rugosa roses.

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

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, large red snake, geckos, hummingbird, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Typical monsoon weather, cool mornings, warm days, bits of late afternoon rain; last useful rain 8/05/09; 14:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This past week the red snake I think lives in my neighbor’s yard crept onto my front porch railing. People tell me it’s harmless and most likely a western coachwhip, sometimes called a red racer, or a bullsnake.

The only dangerous snakes in New Mexico are the seven varieties of rattlers and the coral snake. Zuñi healers used to mix the taproots of woolly paper flowers with the roots of other plants to form a dressing they applied to rattlesnake bites after they had protected themselves by chewing another plant root and sucked out the poison.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson also found Zuñi men collected ha’tsoliko blossoms for their wives to grind. The man who directed the dancers impersonating the gods mixed the meal with yellow ochre and urine to produce body and mask paints. Although the Keres speakers of Acoma and Laguna and the White Mountain Apache of Arizona also used the yellow composite as a dye, it’s unclear if the ocher was an insufficient yellow for the Zuñi, or if they were adding magical properties.

To the west, the Hopi at Shipaulovi on the Second Mesa in Arizona sought to control the snakes by bringing them into their ceremonial chambers in rituals that showed great knowledge of the ways of the venomous animals. When Elsie Clews Parson was allowed to observe a snake-antelope ceremony in 1892, they casually let the rattlesnakes fall into her lap. She was too distracted to identify the pollen they sprinkled on the reptiles’ heads.

Harold Colton found a different species of paper flower there, Psilostrophe sparsiflora, and that people used it like the Zuñi to strengthen medicine. They also used it in their snake dance ceremonials.

When Stevenson visited San Ildefonso in 1912 she heard two villages propitiated the rattlesnakes by killing sacrificial victims with datura and then letting the animals feast on the bodies. She had heard rumors of such rituals in the past in other pueblos, but such knowledge was kept so secret within the small group of participants that she learned little more.

When William Robbins and his team visited the same area a few years later, no one mentioned the woolly paper flower, even though today a few domes of Psilostrophe tagetina are growing down hill from the road that crosses the village arroyo. The earliest, notched ray flowers have dried tan, but new three and four petaled flowers are opening, held high by their flattened receptacles.

Whenever I find such discrepancies in the reports of wild plants, I wonder how much to attribute to reticence by the Tewa speakers and how much to natural conditions at the time. The butter-yellow perennial grows in Colorado and Nebraska and south through Chihuahua and Coahuila. The current center of diversification in western Texas.

Several research teams have reported it appears with black grama grass on the Jornado plain north of Las Cruces. However, William Dick-Peddie found few of the forbs, that grow on desert grasslands in the southern part of the state, survived in our area where sheep grazed so long.

One can’t know if William Robbins’ team didn’t mention the paper flower because it had died out in the area or if the association of the woolly paper flower with rattlesnakes and rituals hadn’t spread or survived here with the snakes, or it the local people simply professed ignorance. I don’t even know if the plants I see are natives or were introduced when the road was cut through the ridge to the highway that comes up from Arroyo Seco were some plants are blooming on the eastern shoulder.

Notes:
Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Gibbens, Robert P. and Reldon F. Beck. "Changes in Grass Basal Area and Forb Densities over a 64-Year Period on Grassland Types of the Jornada Experimental Range," Journal of Range Management 41:186-192:1988.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932; Albert B..Reagan, "Plants Used by the White Mountain Apache Indians of Arizona," Wisconsin Archeologist 8:143-61:1929 and Harold S. Colton, Hopi History and Ethnobotany, 1974.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion, 1939, reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuñi Indians, 1915.

_____. "Strange Rites of the Tewa Indians," Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous Collections 63:73-80:1913.

Photograph: Woolly paper flower growing near the village arroyo, 2 August 2009, with both yellow and papery dried ray petals.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Fern-leaf Yarrow

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, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, Queen Anne’s lace, pigweed, cultivated and native sunflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, plains paper flower tahokia daisy, blue and side oats grama grasses; buds on goldenrod; apples redder.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s 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, cut-leaf coneflower; buds on garlic chives 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, Mönch aster; buds on leadplant.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, gecko, bees, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Storms that can break a heat wave moved through and left water; 14:53 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Whenever you get interested in herbal medicine, the first plant you discover is yarrow. Achillea millefolium leads or terminates any list.

It’s also one of the easiest to find, at least in the Midwest where it blooms in abandoned fields and along the roads in mid-summer. It comes with the nicest stories about Achilles and his troops carrying it with them to staunch bleeding when they were wounded attacking the walls of Troy. Claire Haughton says it spread north with Roman soldiers and east with their Gothic conquerors. Colonists brought it to this country as a band-aid, but it had preceded them across Beringia during the Pleistocene.

Unfortunately, the airy, flat-topped wildflower won’t grow here, and the ornamental varieties sold by nurseries are no substitute. They aren’t white and have little medicinal value.

The flowers of my Achillea filipendulina are more densely packed in clusters composed of clusters of florets topping clusters of stems, branching from more clusters that together form what looks like a round, flat head. The ray flowers are few, appearing at the base of each receptacle and disappearing quickly; the outer disc florets are shorter than the inner ones.

The numerous round disc flowers appear to be empty tubes with only a few, at any time, holding up vital forking organs to relieve the monotony. Everything would be the same, dark gold if individual florets didn’t turn tan as soon as they’d bloom, leaving every honeycombed corymb spotted brown, until nothing is left but moss colored heads.

They’re best seen from a distance, say near the garage or back fence, where large blobs of undifferentiated color are welcome. The Caucasian natives aren’t particularly adapted to gardens. While the green stems are strong enough to hold the heavy heads, they tend to lean, then sag from the weight.

Sweetmagnoliame complained to Gardenweb readers that hers had become such a nuisance she was ready to send them to a neighbor. She had tried plant velcro, then peony supports, but nothing could both stop them from falling in Utah. One of her readers said he’d tried tomato cages, until he just removed the plants.

I have an aversion to getting near mine, either to cut off the darkening heads or counteract the lunging habit because the stems turn rough and irritate my skin. Alan Armitage says when he was testing members of the genus for their potential as open-field cut flowers, his nose ran, his eyes watered, and he sneezed.

You have to wonder, why bother?

Botanists find the genus exciting because many members, especially the common yarrow, have evolved into so many ecotypes they challenge the very concept of species. Breeders have exploited the composites’ ability to interbreed by introducing hybrids like Moonshine derived from clypeolata and taygeata and Coronation Gold descended from filipendulina and clypeolata, although neither combination could thrive in my north facing bed.

A number of new varieties appeared in 1990's, including my Parker’s Variety, when plantsmen were looking for perennials they could produce cheaply from seed. Jelitto tells growers they can have sellable plants 16 weeks after they plant the flattened achenes, and they can be planted anytime. The fern-leaf yarrows look their best soon after the dissected leaves have risen from the rhizomatous crowns, before the stems emerge.

Researchers supporting the cut flower trade have been experimenting with generating plants from small pieces in special mediums to produce disease free plants quickly and cheaply. Filipendulina are particularly interesting because they not only survive for several weeks after they’re cut, but the flowers can even withstand periods without water. Israelis increased their production from 150,000 stems a year to about 1,300,000 with clean stock produced by micropropagation.

Scientific frontiers are exciting to hear about, but they do belong on the frontier of my yard, not in my garden. I’m not going to remove my plants: they justify their armor by blooming reliably, but they won’t be replaced if they ever die. They’ve been there since the year 2000 and show no signs of decline.

Notes:
Armitage, Alan M. "Yarrows: Aromatic Perennials for Beauty and Variety," in Fine Gardening, Perennials, 1993.

Evenor, Dalia and Moshe Reuveni. "Micropropagation of Achillea filipendulina cv. ‘Parker’," Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture 79:91-93:2004.

Haughton, Claire Shaver. Green Immigrants, 1978.

Jelitto Staudensamen GmbH. "Parker’s Variety," on company website.

Ramsey, Justin. "Rapid Adaptive Divergence in New World Achillea, an Autopolyploid Complex of Ecological Races," Evolution 62:639-653:2008.

Sweetmagnoliame. "Yarrow Gone Amuck," Gardenweb website, 17 June 2007, with response by Digit, 17 June 2007.

Photograph: Parker’s Variety fern-leaf yarrow, rising from Mexican hat leaves, 26 July 2009.