Bractless Cryptantha

What’s blooming in the area: Iris, tansy, tumble and purple mustards, hoary cress, alyssum simplex, Gordon’s bladderpod, western stickseed, cryptantha, mossy phlox, golden smoke, fern-leaf globemallow, oxalis, blue flax, alfilerillo, dandelion, goat’s beard; June, rice, three-awn and cheat grass.

What’s blooming in my yard: Lilac, tulip, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, yellow alyssum; buds on snowball, spirea and peony.

What’s coming out: Weigela, skunkbush, hybrid lily, baptista, Maximilian sunflower, Shasta daisy.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, quail beyond range of neighbor’s dog, geese down the road, cows in village, small red and large black ants in the drive.

Weather: Freezing temperatures early in week; high winds yesterday; plants beginning to suffer from lack of water; last attempted rain 05/02/09; 13:55 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant recalled the first time he crept up on a pair of wolves with trepidation, only to realize they were making a great deal of noise to scare any approachers into thinking they were a pack.

There’s a tiny flower coming into bloom now, a Cryptantha crassisepala, that looks so fierce I’ve never gotten near it. It hunkers to the ground in a dense cluster of thick leaves whose resemblance to a succulent is emphasized by ubiquitous white hairs that reflect light.

It has the most dangerous friends. Bees pollinate the tiny white flowers below ankle height. Biting harvester ants and Ord’s kangaroo rats live on the seeds. With its cousin, the well-named western stickseed, the slender taproots cover large areas of sandy, barren land this time of year.

It’s not clear it even likes itself. Robert Sivinski says that when the flower goes to seed, the annual prefers one of the nutlets, letting it grow larger and attach more firmly to the plant. The other three are allowed to atrophy.

Keres speakers consider it a "bad, poisonous weed."

This past year’s unusual weather has encouraged the first plants to expand more than usual, and it’s possible to see that they really are just members of the borage family. The alternating, narrow leaves, folded along the primary veins, are longer than usual and resemble real leaves spaced out along elongating stems.

The forget-me-not flowers, which usually appear one at a time, are in clusters that could extend into recognizable racemes.

The plant adapted to the drylands of New Mexico and surrounding states, including northern Chihuahua. The Zuni, Hopi, and Kayenta Navaho, who live in those hostile areas west of the Continental Divide, have had to overcome its defenses to test its utility.

The first, who live in McKinley and Cibola counties of northwestern New Mexico, grind the plant and soak the powder in water, then apply the infusion to tired feet and legs. The second, who live in northeastern Arizona, use it for boils or swellings, while the third, now settled in northeastern Navajo County, Arizona, make a lotion for itching.

The appearance from above is deceiving. It may resemble a normal flower at ground level and may have some uses, but until it invades my garden from the driveway margin, I’m willing to take the word of Robert Kaul that it’s "painful to touch."

Notes:Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 1885-1886, quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "There Are Always More of Them Before They Are Counted," The Atlantic website, 15 April 2010.

Kaul, Robert B. "Boraginacese Juss, the Borage Family," in Great Plains Flora Association, Flora of the Great Plains, 1986.

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; Alfred E. Whiting, Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939, and Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.

Sivinski, Robert C. "The Genus Cryptantha in New Mexico," The New Mexico Botanist, 23 April 1998.

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

Photograph: Cryptantha crassisepala, in a halo of white hairs, growing on the prairie, 25 April 2010.