Autumn Joy Sedum

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet and white prairie clovers, 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, pigweed, Russian thistle, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Hopi tea, horseweed, wild lettuce, purple, heath, strap-leaf and hairy golden aster, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, pampas grass; tiny apricots and apples coming down; red peppers and ripe watermelon.

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

Looking east: Hosta, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Maltese Cross, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower.

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

Looking west: Caryopteris, butterfly bush, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, flax, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; peaches falling.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum.

Inside: South African aptenia.

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

Weather: Rain in area all week, but all I got was late afternoon clouds; last night not enough water fell to dampen the surface; last real rain 8/30/09; 13:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: My Autumn Joy sedum is now at the stage where the rose red, five-petaled flowers attract bees.

The three plants formed new basal rosettes of pale, scalloped leaves in early March. The single, stout stems emerged in early July. The fattening buds, held in flat clusters like yarrow, showed streaks of white when the protective sepals were forced apart later in the month. Two weeks ago the florets started to open a pale pink, and now the tips are darkening.

The perennial’s not only one of the more colorful fall flowers, but also a sign of nature's ability to survive the worst that the climate or man can contrive.

In 1863, the ambitious son of a silk worker, Friedrich Bayer, and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott opened a factory in Barmen to produce synthetic dyes from coal tars. Eight years after Bayer died, Georg Arends opened a nursery in Ronsdorf on the same Rhine tributary in 1888.

Chemists were then improving upon nature by taking known, discrete elements and mixing them to see what would result. Ten years before Bayer changed from selling dyes to manufacturing them, Charles Frederic Gerhardt combined acetyl chloride with a sodium salt of salicylic acid to produce a synthetic form of the white willow bark then used to treat fever and inflammation. In 1897, a Bayer chemist, Felix Hoffmann, found a way to produce acetylsalicylic acid in a stable form that could be mass produced as aspirin.

Breeders were applying the same methods to nature. In the early 1900's, Arends began introducing new varieties of astilbe that crossed at least four species. In the 1920's, he was experimenting with sempervivums, another succulent in Autumn Joy's Crassula family. And in 1939, the same year Hitler invaded Poland, he introduced a new hybrid heath, Silberschmelze.

In the same years, Bayer was assimilated into I.G. Farbenindustrie, and the towns of Barmen, Ronsdorf and Elberfeld, where Bayer had moved its operations, were merged into Wuppertal, a major rail and heavy industrial complex spread along the banks of the narrow Wupper river valley. Beginning the night of May 29, 1943, the British sent 719 planes to drop 1,900 tons of bombs on the area. 2,450 civilians died, Bayer was out of production for nearly two months, and Arends' nursery was destroyed.

Julia Brittain says Arends, then nearly 80, never fully recovered. Paul Temple landed with the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, and remembered helping the crippled nursery smuggle seedlings to Harold Hillier in England.

After the war, Arends' two sons kept the operation running. In 1950, the old man began working with a dwarf azalea seedling. Then in 1955, three years after he died, Herbsfreude was released as a hybrid between Sedum spectabile, a pink-flowered ornamental from the lowlands of northeastern China and Korea, and Sedum telephium maximum, a highly variable European native.

In the middle sixteenth century, Hieronymus Bock had reported extracts of telephium were used in the Rhine valley to treat internal injuries like ulcers of the lungs. A century later, Nicholas Culpeper said a bruised leaf or the sap from orpine was used in England to treat external wounds. However by the time, Georg Arends was active, the old herbal remedies, like the dye plants, had been displaced by chemists.

Now, medical researchers are isolating the active ingredients from those traditional medicine plants and testing their efficacy. In the early 1990's, researchers in Munich identified two polysaccharides in telephium that were anti-inflammatory. A few years later, Italian scientists observed the ways the polysaccharides and flavonols operated on cells during wound healing. Last year, another Italian group described the biochemical processes involved in abating inflamation.

Bayer may have reemerged from Allied control in 1951 a much smaller company, but it has since reconglomerated, and now even makes the lawn pesticide sold in the local hardware that uses synthetic pyrethrum. Arends' granddaughter, Anja Maubach, still has the nursery in Ronsdorf. Herbsfreude is sold as Autumn Joy, and botanists have decided that spectabile and telephium aren’t really sedums after all, but members of a related genus they call Hylotelephium.

Notes:Altavilla, Domenica, Francesca Polito, Alessandra Bitto, Letteria Minutoli, Elisabetta Miraldi, Tiziana Fiumara, Marco Biagi, Herbert Marini, Daniela Giachetti, Mario Vaccaro, Francesco Squadrito. "Anti-Inflammatory Effects of the Methanol Extract of Sedum telephium ssp. maximum in Lipopolysaccharide-Stimulated Rat Peritoneal Macrophages," Pharmacology 82:250-256:2008.

Bock, Hieronymus. Kräuterbuch, 1539, cited by Culpepper.

Brittain, Julia. The Plant Lover’s Companion, 2006.

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.

Obituary for Paul Temple, The Telegraph, 24 February 2007.

Raimondi, L., G. Banchelli, D. Dalmazzi, N. Mulinacci, A. Romani, F. F. Vincieri, and R. Pirisino. "Sedum telephium L. Polysaccharide Content Affects MRC5 Cell Adhesion to Laminin and Fibronectin," Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 52:585-591:2000.

Sendl, A, N. Mulinacci, F. F. Vincieri, and R. Wagner. "Anti-inflammatory and Immunologically Active Polysaccharides of Sedum telephium," Phytochemistry 34:1357-62:1993.

Photograph: Autumn Joy sedum, 7 September 2009.