African Marigold

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, bird of paradise, buddleia peaked, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; alfalfa growing; catalpa leaves turning brown.

Outside the fences: Apache plume, leather-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, yellow evening primroses, datura, bindweed, scarlet creeper, ivy-leaf morning glory, stickleaf, white sweet clover, prostrate knotweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, goats’ head, chamisa, snakeweed, goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, gumweed, broom senecio, Tahokia daisy, purple, heath and golden hairy asters; yellow aspens can be seen in far mountains.

In my yard looking north: Nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum, Crackerjack marigold.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hollyhock, winecup, large-leaf soapwort waning, Shirley poppy, scarlet flax, reseeded and Crimson Glory morning glories, garlic chives, zinnias, Maximilian sunflower, tansy; oriental poppies have new leaves.

Looking south: Blaze and miniature roses, cypress vine.

Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, lady bells, David phlox bedraggled, calamintha, lead wort, purple ice flower, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, gecko, cabbage butterfly, wasps, black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Hard rain Wednesday; 11:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Once you’ve been close to a marigold, you swear you’d know them anywhere.

Every phase is distinctive. The dark tubular seeds with their sharp points are recognizable even when seedsmen remove the long tan fish tails.

The first, long narrow leaves may look like other seedlings, but they quickly put out two sets of opposing leaves with serrated edges. The plants grow into dark green bushes that occasionally turn maroon when temperatures fall.

Buds rise above the mass on tapering stems that feel hollow. The outer green sepals open into fluted urns that hold petals even after they’ve change into seeds. This calyx winters over waiting for someone to crush it and release its holdings to the soil. Even the next spring the remains retain their strong odor.

The composite flowers are most memorable of all. There are the common bedding plants, the dwarf French varieties derived from Tagetes patula, with variations of gold, yellow and red in single and double flowers in flat, rounded and crested forms. For the more daring with large yards, the tall Africans have monolithic heads of orange, gold and yellow.

The greatest number of Tagetes species exist in south central México where, long before the Spanish appeared, local people cultivated double cempoalxocnitl for use in late summer and early fall festivals. An incense burner in the shape of the rain goddess Chalchiuhtlicue from the middle 1400's fourth temple layer of Templo Mayor in old Tenochtitlán is adorned with four African marigold flowers. They may be heavily stylized, but there’s no question they are the modern Tagetes erecta.

Another effigy vessel from roughly the same period from the neighboring Tlatelolco temple dressed the maize goddess Chicomecoatl in a girdle of corn alternating with cempoalxocnitl. The marigold heads are complete, three-dimensional representations, less formalized and even more recognizable.

If African marigolds are so easy to identify, even in heavily abstracted stone, you’d think I’d have known I was growing them this summer. After all, I scattered the annual seeds May 31 and saw the first seedlings June 12.

But then, most people have no trouble growing marigolds and so would entertain no doubts. I saw a long row of French ones edging a truck garden the middle of August, and an orange row behind a fence the next day. A week ago, a patula rose several feet from a wall planter down the road into a large mound of motley bronze. Yesterday, I could see a row of orange and yellow Africans behind a stucco wall near the village.

My seeds, however, rarely germinate. The only year I truly succeeded was 2006. This year, I decided the problem was the thieving harvester ants and I would attack their hills from the time I planted seeds until I saw some plants. I dutifully sprinkled their holes with poison every time I saw activity, even though I knew I was only killing some workers. At least I kept their numbers down.

Unfortunately, I also planted yellow cosmos in the same area I planted my marigolds, and I couldn’t tell the seedlings apart. As the plants grew taller, I thought the bushier ones were marigolds, but I remembered one year my cosmos were also tall and bushy.

Frustrated by my wavering "is it or isn’t it" state, I went out about a month ago and rubbed one of the leaves of the suspected marigold, sure the smell test would be decisive. Nothing. Since many plants don’t produce aromas in this dry environment, I held on to hope I’d finally found the secret to growing marigolds, even though the evidence pointed to cosmos.

Then buds appeared the first week of September, only they were narrow, small teardrops, neither the hardened glistening balls of cosmos nor the long beads of marigolds. Only last Sunday did the first petals, folded on themselves like tortillas, began to expand into round tubes that had the color of lime.

I went out again and looked closely at the leaves. Those of the cosmos are fingers cut from a single piece, while the marigold has discrete stems lined with opposing pairs of narrow, double-edged knives no different than the first true leaves. From above, in mass, however, they still look alike.

More petals have since opened, moving from the outer edge to the center, so the flower looks more like a semi-double yellow marigold about 2' high. It could be the vagaries of the season that produced such a small specimen, or it may be random genetics. Crackerjack marigolds were bred by Bodger Seeds in the 1950's, and marketed by Burpee in 1958. The unpatented seeds were taken up by others, and are available today from a number of companies.

Like any open-pollinated plant, no matter how stable, the occasional seed will revert to the single species form. The Aztec knew this. They told Bernardino de.Sahagún the large ones were female, and the small ones with "just a single flower." were male.

Not that that helped anyone very much. The Spanish are probably the only people in the world who ever saw a marigold and forgot it. When the seeds were taken to the west coast of India, the bright colors were welcomed as a cheaper, fuller substitute for calendula in Hindu public and private rituals. By the time the British arrived, genda phool was "the most highly prized of all Indian flowers."

The Spanish, however, saw nothing. The conquistadores simply sent seeds home and forget them. They probably landed in Seville, the port for the Indies and earlier caliphate capital, and were taken to Tunis, the Islamic center on the southern Mediterranean coast where they naturalized. When Charles V took his grandfather’s wars against the Moors there in 1535, he brought home a new flower, flos africanus.

No one since has forgotten them, though they may have disparaged them. Some sixty years later, John Gerard described plants in England "beset with leaves consisting of many particulars, indented about the edges," with "long cups or husks" that hold the petals of a color not possible to describe, and a "most ranke and unwholesome smell."

You know, sight unseen, that’s a marigold.

Notes:
Anonymous. "Hindoo Plant Lore," The Indian Gardener, 26 May 1885.

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.

Heyden, Doris. "Symbolism of Ceramics" in The Aztec Templo Mayor, proceedings of a 1983 Dumbarton Oaks symposium edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone, includes photographs of the two effigy vessels.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Taylor, Judith M. Taylor. "The Marigold in California: a Supplement," horthistoria website has Burpee’s dates for Crackerjack. Bodger’s websites takes credit for developing Crackerjacks, but give no dates.

Photograph: Crackerjack marigold, 19 September 2010, when the petals are revealed in the calyx but haven’t yet unfurled.

Tomato

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; Virginia creeper beginning to turn red.

Outside the fences: Apache plume, leather-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bindweed, scarlet creeper, ivy-leaf morning glory, stickleaf, white sweet clover, prostrate knotweed, toothed spurge, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, chamisa, snakeweed, goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, broom senecio, Tahokia daisy, purple and heath asters.

In my yard looking north: Nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hosta, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppy, scarlet flax, reseeded and Crimson Glory morning glories, garlic chives, zinnias, Maximilian sunflower; buds on tansy.

Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and miniature roses, sweet pea.

Looking west: Russian sage, caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, lead wort, purple ice flower, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, tomatoes, peppers..

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, small geckos, bumble bee, wasps, black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Morning temperatures in the 40's; last rain 08/30/09; 12:18 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Dedicated gardeners are optimists blessed with conveniently selective memories.

My uphill neighbor put in a vegetable garden two years ago. Last year he didn’t bother because he remembered the quail had pecked, not eaten, but pecked all his tomatoes. This year, he was willing to try onions, but was still cautious, even though the birds had shifted their grounds early last summer. Alas, he remembers the wrong things.

In contrast, my friend in Pojoaque has complained all year about how poorly her tomatoes were doing. When I said at least this year was better than last, she looked at me like I lived in another universe. Last year was great, she said, but this year the nights had never gotten warm and tomatoes are tropical plants that need heat.

I mentioned those weeks in July that were so miserable because the nights never cooled off. I didn’t add I thought tomatoes came from the Andes and needed cool evenings. She replied, it never got above 60 on her porch and she’d checked.

I looked back at my notes. She was remembering May and June when morning temperatures were cooler than last year, in the 40's and low 50's. In fact, neither I nor my neighbors put our plants out until the end of May, at least two weeks later than usual.

However, I remembered the temperature inversions that began the middle of June just before forest fires fed on the heat and dry air in the Jemez. There were mornings in mid-July temperature didn’t fall below 66 on my porch and days that were in the 90's.

As often happens with disagreements between friends, we were both sort of right, and both a bit wrong. The tomato genus, Lycopersicum, did emerge in the Andes about 7 million years ago, and the modern species began to appear there less than a million years ago. One, cerasiforme, began spreading north into central America and México where it was domesticated, probably in modern Puebla or Veracruz. It had already hybridized with other species, contained the large- fruit fw2.2 gene, and developed an ability to fertilize itself when it migrated beyond the range of its pollinators.

Once the Spanish sent the domesticated esculentum descendants back to Europe, breeders there selected seeds to improve taste and increase size. In 1914, Bert Croft noticed a plant in his Florida field that formed a bush with terminal flowers that produced early fruit that ripened at one time. The recessive self-pruning gene has been exploited since to produce determinate plants for commercial harvesting.

Plants advertised as indeterminate continue to grow, bloom along the stem and produce fruit until they’re killed by frost.

Despite all the breeding efforts, most tomatoes still need nighttime temperatures above 55 to bloom and set fruit, like my friend believes. However, like I thought, many also fail to set when daytime temperatures get above 85. In addition, the tender perennials need humidity.

Memories are only tangentially tied to reality. My friend spent much of her life in Mississippi and Arkansas, where everything is warm and moist. Her earliest food memories are probably of determinate varieties that failed to produce if conditions were bad early in the season, but were cultivated anyway by home canners.

I grew up in cooler Michigan where the only tomatoes I ate came from grocers. In the early 1970's I tried growing cherry tomatoes in a pot in northern Ohio and found the skins so thick they were inedible. I remembered and didn’t try again.

Then, in 1995, we were invaded by grasshoppers. Another neighbor said the only things they hadn’t eaten in his yard were the tomatoes. I reasoned, since they were members of the nightshade family, maybe they were a deterrent. I went to the local hardware and bought all the plants they had. The only variety that survived was Patio Prize.

I figured my plants failed because it was late June when I bought them: they had suffered in the store and weren’t ready for the heat. The next year I bought more. I didn’t care if they bore fruit, only that they produced great quantities of smelly leaves. I had a little success with Early Girl and Sweet 100; the rest died.

I didn’t know Early Girl was introduced in 1975 at the insistence of Joe Howland, who wanted a tomato that would grow where he lived in Reno, Nevada, where daily temperatures range more than here. I also didn’t know modern cherry tomatoes got their impetus from two Israelis, Haim Rabinowich and Nachum Kedar, who were trying to find something that would live in their environment in the 1970's, about the time I gave up on them in Ohio.

All I knew or remembered was that Sweet 100 was the most successful in my yard. Unfortunately, I rarely can buy them: growers are forever looking for improvements, and their Supersweet 100, Sweet 1000, and Sweet Million stop growing in July and don’t resume with the monsoons.

I turned to chemical herbicides for the grasshoppers and abandoned the tomato bed to grass. When I tried placing bedding plants in what seemed a better location, they failed.

This year I found Sweet 100's again. I put two in the blue grama, and four in the other location. Only the ones in grass started blooming in August and now bear sun-warmed fruit I eat when I notice one the right shade of red.

My friend is already planning next year’s garden where the tomatoes will only grow in pots. Even though her "cherry tomatoes are doing good and taste good," her Early Girls "haven't done much, few fruit, what turned red was good."

Memories condition what we experience. For me, who never knew a garden tomato, the season lingers into Indian summer. For her, the nights are already too cold to do anything but forget.

Notes:Jenkins, J. A. "The Origin of the Cultivated Tomato," Economic Botany 2:379-392:1948.

Kalman, Matthew. "A Tiny Country’s Big Success with Tech Transfer," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 October 2008. Hebrew University licensed Rabinowich and Kedar’s genetic discoveries to two Israeli companies. One was purchased by Vilmorin, who often is associated with Sweet 100.

Nesbitt, T. Clint and Steven D. Tanksley. "Comparative Sequencing in the Genus Lycopersicon: Implications for the Evolution of Fruit Size in the Domestication of Cultivated Tomatoes," Genetics 162:365-379:2002.

Smith, Andrew F. The Tomato in America, 1994. Croft’s discovery was marketed by C. D. Cooper of Fort Lauderdale as Cooper Special.

Tracy, Dick. "Enduring Girl Short-Season Tomato Has Been Popular Since its '70s Debut," 6 June 1998. Early Girl was developed by Seminsis and licensed to PetoSeed who marketed it through Burpee. Pan American Seed’s owner bought Burpee in 1991 and itself was merged with Seminsis, which then was bought by Monsanto in 2005. Howland was on the boards of both Pan American and PetoSeed.

Photograph: Sweet 100 tomato, growing with blue grama grass, 12 September 2010.

Calamintha

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, pampas grass.

Outside the fences: Apache plume, leather-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bindweed, scarlet creeper, ivy-leaf morning glory, stickleaf, white sweet clover, prostrate knotweed, toothed spurge, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, chamisa, snakeweed, goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, broom senecio, Tahokia daisy, purple and heath asters.

In my yard looking north: Nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hosta, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppy, scarlet flax, reseeded and Crimson Glory morning glories, garlic chives peaked, Autumn Joy sedum, zinnias, Maximilian sunflower; buds on tansy.

Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and miniature roses, sweet pea.

Looking west: Russian sage, caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, lead wort, purple ice flower, purple coneflower fading, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum; edible Sweet 100 tomatoes.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, gecko, wasps, black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: Warm, dry afternoons killing seedlings that emerged in August monsoons; last rain 08/30/09; 12:29 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When I get home, I walk along the western border to my back door. Some would see passing the calamintha as an opportunity to pick a rough leaf and inhale its slight minty smell.

Instead, I see a reminder of the teasing questions asked by freshmen philosophy instructors designed to make students realize there is an objective reality that cameras catch and an abstraction we humans recognize. Only one sees insects crawling on petals.

I planted six Calamintha nepetoides two years ago. I don’t remember why - perhaps because they were the only available white fading to blue flowers I hadn’t tried in an area where little succeeded. I knew nothing about them then, and today only know they survived my dry, alkaline environment.

Nepetoides is one of the species defined by Alexis Jordan in 1846 when he was first criticizing Linnaeus’ perception of nature as too focused on traits that survived in dead specimens and not enough on living populations. He abandoned collecting expeditions that enlarged the knowledge of European flora to determine which species maintained themselves as distinct units through multiple generations in altered environments in his test garden.

Jordan’s work was soon overshadowed by Darwin. His theory of species became increasingly captive to his Catholic distaste for the other’s emphasis on natural selection and evolution. As Jordan became more doctrinaire, he was criticized by supporters of Darwin for fixating on the durability of species and by Darwin’s critics who still believed in the value of dried herbariums as a source of knowledge.

While later botanists have praised his observations as less constrained by philosophical biases than those of Darwin, Linnean conservatives are still trying to obliterate his influence by attacking the observations that gave rise to his abstraction of the universe. They tell us nemetoides is not a separate species, but a synonym for something else. Only, they can’t agree on what. One authority says it’s the same as the nepeta subspecies of the nepeta species of the Calamintha genus. Another says the genus is Clinopodium. These redefiners have different motives than earlier collectors who thought the perennial was a Melissa or a Satureja.

I don’t in fact know as a certainty that the plants I’m growing are the same as the nepetoides described by Jordan. As that needling philosophy instructor would argue, I only know what the supplier advertised in its catalog and what I think my eyes tell me. Bluestone Perennials would only know what its supplier told it, and no one is currently associated on the web with offering the seeds.

My plants are not the hazy mound shown in the catalog, but a series of erect stems with scattered two-lipped tubular flowers on short horizontal stems with toothy calyx cups that remain when the petals fall. I only assume what I’m growing is what the Ohio nursery advertised, and not some variant that crept into the seed supply.

In their first three years my herbs began blooming the second or third week of August, and continued until the weather turned cold in mid-October. Monique and Roger Jacques, who tested nepetoides grown from seed taken from the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, found flowering was initiated when the plants were exposed to several long days of red light, and that far-red light in the daily cycle nullified the effects of stimulating light. My plants begin to bloom about the time my almanac changes it’s formula for calculating day length in Santa Fe, a pattern I only assume reflects a change in the quality of light as days shorten.

In France, Alexandre Acloque says nepetoides grow on dry, stony places in the mountainous Lozère department. Elsewhere in Europe, it prefers the dry, calcerous areas of lower and middle mountains in the Alps, Pyrennes, and central Italy. In this country, John Kartesz reports the nepata subspecies on the Alabama plateau and east of the mountains in Virginia, both places with large limestone deposits.

Gardeners participating in on-line forums that group a number of plant names into single category say nepeta becomes invasive at an altitude above 5000' in Albuquerque and nepetoides self-seeds in gravel in Maryland. Everywhere else, in normal garden soils, whatever people think is nepetoides remains a clump forming perennial that may expand with stolons.

My bloom time and ecological niche are circumstantial evidence my plants may in fact be related to the nepetoides described by Jordan. But as one man said, after he talked with the botanist, it’s all quite logical, but is it true?

Notes:
Acloque, Alexandre. Flores Régionales de la France, 1904.

Clausen, Jens, David D. Keck and William M. Hiesey. "The Concept of Species Based on Experiment," American Journal of Botany 26:103-106:1939, discusses philosophies of Linnaeus, Jordan and Darwin.

Jacques, Monique and Roger Jacques. "Calamintha nepetoides," in Abraham H. Halevy, CRC Handbook of Flowering, volume 6, 1989.

Jordan, Alexis. Observations sur Plusieurs Plantes Nouvelles Rares ou Critiques de la France, volume 4, 1846.

Muller, B. Comments in Calamintha nepeta forum, 28 February 2007, in Dave’s Garden website; includes nepetoides as a synonym.

Parlatore, Filippo. Elogio di Filippo Barker Webb, 1856, quotes letter by Webb who met Alexis Jordan to discuss Calamintha.

Talt, Marge. Comments in Calamintha nepatoides forum, 22 October 1997, on hort-net.com.

Thomas, Robert B. The Old Farmer’s Alamanc, 2010.

Thompson, H. Stuart. Sub-alpine Plants or Flowers of the Swiss Woods and Meadows, 1912.

United States Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. Germplasm Resources Information Network. Defines nepetoides as subspecies of Clinopodium nepeta.

_____. Natural Resources Conservation Service. Plants Profile website maintained by John T. Kartesz, Biota of North America Project, who defines nepetoides as subspecies of Calamintha nepeta.

Photograph: Bluestone’s Calamintha nepetoides with what looks like a black insect, 11 September 2010; Mönch asters in back.

Goat's Head

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; Virginia creeper berries turning purple; yellowing apples visible in only one orchard; baling hay.

Outside the fences: Apache plume, leather-leaf globemallow, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, bindweed, scarlet creeper, ivy-leaf morning glory, stickleaf, white sweet clover, goat’s head, prostrate knotweed, toothed spurge, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistle, chamisa, snakeweed, goat’s beard, paper flower, spiny lettuce, horseweed, golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, Tahokia daisy; red top and black grama grasses; buds on broom senecio, heath and purple asters.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hosta, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaf soapwort, baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppy, scarlet flax, reseeded and Crimson Glory morning glories, garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, cut-leaf coneflower, zinnias, Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, Illinois bundle flower, sweet pea.

Looking west: Russian sage, caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, lead plant, purple ice flower, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird on hollyhocks, goldfinches, gecko, wasp, black harvester and small red ants; Canada geese near village.

Weather: Rained before dawn Monday; hot afternoon temperatures offset the moisture and cool mornings; 12:48 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When I was in sixth grade, we were asked to bring a poem to school. I still remember mine:

Poison ivy, poison oak
Beautiful, but do not stroke

This couplet probably didn’t impress my teacher with my finer aesthetic sensibilities, but I think it did reveal an awareness of the duplicities of nature lacking in my better prepared peers who spent too much time indoors.

It always surprises me when I see people walk on goat’s head as if it were harmlessly sunning on the sidewalk. Bill Davis claims he repairs "thousands of flat tires" in his Boise, Idaho, bicycle shop caused by puncture vine.

George Stuart translates the Chinese name for its tan seed pod, chih-hsiung, to mean "preventing walking." It’s Greek name, caltrop, comes from spiked iron balls planted in front of calvary horses to halt their advance. Wikipedia repeats the tale that murderers in South Africa smear poison on the burs and leave them in the path of their victims. My Spanish-speaking friends simply call them tortitos.

This is not a plant to ignore.

But my neighbors do. Every year since I learned its dangers, I’ve pulled plants whenever I’ve seen them, most from my drive or the garden bed at the downhill end of the drive. Generally the stringy white taproot comes out easily.

My next door neighbor removes them, but only after their spidery stems have radiated a foot from the crown and bloomed a while. My uphill neighbor simply gets on his rider mower whenever the pigweed gets tall. The goat’s head patch growing in the old horse corral gets trimmed at the same time, but the plants send out more ground-hugging stems and continue blooming.

Goat’s head promises much when it emerges with the monsoons that follow the drought of July that leaves me willing to accept anything, so long as it’s green and covers barren soil. When the tiny stems branch from the main fleshy one with five to eight pairs of rounded leaves folded towards each other, newcomers think maybe, if there were enough, they could overlap and blanket the ground. And indeed this year, when more than usual have sprouted, the stems that normally sprawl are reaching up in places in billowing mounds of bright green.

The promise is fulfilled when the tiny yellow flowers emerge at the tips of small stems rising from the leaflet junctions. With their flat five petals that open in the morning and close by noon, they resemble oxalis or purslane.

Then the promise is betrayed. The stem grows to hatch new flowers, while the older petals fall away leaving a five-part ovary. Each detachable section is hardened with two or more sharp spines designed to stick any unwary passerby who might unintentionally plant it.

Three to five long, narrow seeds are nestled inside waiting for a summer like this. The largest germinates first; the others may lie dormant, waiting for better conditions. This summer, the first plants appeared along the road the first of July; then, masses appeared the first of August. If the nutlets bury themselves well, the seeds can survive twenty years.

Tribulus terrestris isn’t native to this continent. People assume it arrived in the late nineteenth century when midwesterners brought animals from Europe to improve their herds. Duncan Porter says it was first noticed in California in 1902. By 1915 it was seen around Deming, Glorietta and the Mesilla valley. It spread everywhere with the automobile, but became most common in this part of the country with its warm, dry monsoon climate.

Shepherds soon learned goat’s head could be fatal to sheep and that animals would seek it out. By 1961, the annual had become such a nuisance the government imported two species of weevils to control it. One feeds on the seeds; the other on the stems. The only side effect scientists have noted is that the attacked plants produce more flowers which produce more pods which attacking weevils use to produce more weevils.

In the old world, herbalists in India, China and the middle east learned the plant contains a number of useful chemicals. Maude Grieve reports burra gookeroo was taken back to England where it was used to treat male impotence, nocturnal emissions, and incontinence. In this country, homeopathists bought ikshugandha from the East Indies for "seminal weakness, ready emissions and impoverished semen" and "partial impotence caused by over indulgence of advancing age."

In 1999, with all the intrigue of a cold war spy, Emeric Delczeg told bodybuilders who read Pump that the Bulgarian government had isolated its active ingredient, protodioscin, and developed a secret supplement for its Olympic teams. The only reason he knew about it was that he had been on the Romanian National Weightlifting team at the time.

Delczeg wasn’t the most disinterested source. He was a partner in a nutritional supplements company that sold Tribestan and was later publicized by investigation into Barry Bonds access to steroids. In 2005, the government outlawed most prohormones. Jim Stoppani immediately told readers of Flex that the active ingredient in Tribulus terrestris was a precursor to testosterone that wasn’t covered by the ban.

Scientists haven’t been able to establish the benefits of goat’s head extracts, but that doesn’t stop men from hoping. After all, Delczeg told them only the Bulgarian products were good because they "add a specific fertilizer to the soil." The website for the product he was selling also mentions an Indonesian study that discovered plants grown on different soils had different levels of the chemical.

A perhaps less biased team in Iran tested the effectiveness of the member of the Zygophylla family against urinary infections and established it was useful against three types of bacteria. They noted earlier studies had shown plants grown in Yemen had no utility, but all parts of the plant grown in Turkey were efficacious. They themselves found the fruit, stem and leaves collected near Arak were better than the root, but only the pod and leaf were active in India.

If you want to protect your feet or bicycle it’s enough to learn the shape of goat’s head on the road; if that’s too much trouble, the shop in Boise will sell you something to repair your tire in the field. If you want to enhance your masculinity, you either have to find a supplier who understands plants or spend more time sweating in the gym.

A child’s rhyme and a downward cast eye are only the beginning of the initiation into the mysteries of nature.

Notes:Adimoelja, Arif. "Phytochemicals and the Breakthrough of Traditional Herbs in the Management of Sexual Dysfunction," International Journal of Andrology 23:82-84:2000. He did tests in Indonesia using Tribestan and cites the unavailable Sidik, "Etnopharmacognosy and Phytochemical Aphrodisiac," Seminar on ‘Botanical Aphrodisiac,’ University of Jakarta, 1999, for his information on the variable effects of soil.

Boericke, William. Materia Medica, 1901; augmented 1927 edition kept in print by B. Jahn Publishers of New Dehli.

Davis, Bill. Quoted by Rachel Abrahamson, "The Trouble with Tribulus terrestris L.," Boise Weekly, 25 July 2007.

Delczeg, Emeric. "Tribestan," Pump, January/February, 1999.

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal, 1931, edited by Hilda Leyel.

Kianbakht, Saied and Fereshteh Jahaniani. "Evaluation of Antibacterial Activity of Tribulus terrestris L. Growing in Iran," Iranian Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics 2:22-24:2003.

McDonough, Sean P., Amy H. Woodbury, F. D. Galey, Dennis W. Wilson, Nancy East, and Elizabeth Bracken. "Hepatogenus Photosensitization of Sheep in California Associated with Ingestion of Tribulus terrestris (Puncture Vine)," Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation 6:392-395:1994.

Porter, Duncan M. Entries for Zygophyllaceae, Tribulus and T. terrestris L. in The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California, 1993; James C. Hickman’s revision of Willis Linn Jepson, Manual of the Flowering Plants of California, 1925.

Stoppani, Jim. "Beat the Ban: Eight Testosterone-Boosting Supplements to Replace Recently Banned Prohormones," Flex, May, 2005.

Stuart, George Arthur. Chinese Materia Medica, 1911, reprinted by Gordon Press, 1977.

University of California, Riverside. "Puncturevine," Biological-Integrated Pest Control and Insect Identification website; seed feeding weevil is Microlarinus lareynii, stem and crown mining weevil is Microlarinus lypriformis.

Wikipedia. "Tribulus terrestris" which cites "Tribulus terrestris" in the Botanical Dermatology Database as its source for the South African anecdote. The database in turn cites John Mitchell Watt and Maria Gerdin Breyer-Brandwijk, The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern and Eastern Africa, 1962 edition, which is not easily available.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Goat’s head growing in a dense patch beside the main road, 29 August 2010.