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.