Sunday, September 26, 2010

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.

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