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.