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.