Scarlet Flax

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, silver lace vine, Japanese honeysuckle, morning glories, sweet pea, alfalfa, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, zinnia; Maximilian sunflower leaves turning yellow.

Outside the fences: Apache plume, yellow evening primrose, datura, white sweet clover, chamisa, horseweed, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, spiny lettuce, dandelion, Tahokia daisy, purple, heath and golden hairy asters; cottonwood leaves starting to turn yellow.

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

Looking east: Hollyhock, winecup, large-leaf soapwort, scarlet flax, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppy.

Looking south: Blaze, floribunda and miniature roses, Cypress vine.

Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, lady bells, calamintha, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; butterfly milkweed’s pod split to release its seeds.

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

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

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

Weather: Frost on windshield Monday and Friday mornings; last rain 10/08/10; 11:19 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Plants, like the people with whom they associate, sometimes develop quite undeserved reputations.

Scarlet flax is included in many wildflower mixtures sold in this country, implying, if it’s not a native, then at least, in the words of Wildseed Farms, it has "naturalized throughout the United States."

The USDA maps show the annual in one or two counties in nine, widely scattered states. In Texas, home of Wildseed, the plant has only been reported in the area of Austin, some 70 miles east of the company’s headquarters. The other company from whom I buy seeds, Lake Valley, is located in Boulder, another university town and the only area in that state where the plant has colonized.

It’s not even clear the plant is widespread in its native Algeria. René Louiche Desfontaines found Linum grandiflorum growing in the clayey fields outside Mascara, the provincial capital of an Ottoman bey, in the 1780's. Presumably the five-petaled flowers were blooming in the 300 square mile Ghriss plain, a collapsed basin that had held an ancient lake and one of the most fertile areas in the country.

After France had wrested the area from the Turks, Giles Munby moved to the new provincial capital, Oran, in 1844. He told the editors of Curtis Botanical Magazine he had seen the rose colored flowers near there.

The reason a plant from such a specialized background acquired reknown as a wildflower may arise from its similarity to the blue flax, Linum perenne, which is native to the plains of this country. While one’s an annual with 16 chromosomes, larger leaves and bigger flowers that’s blooming now and the other’s a perennial with 9 chromosomes that bloomed in early summer, the petals of both have a satiny sheen that reflects light.

Genetically, both are members of the blue-flowered Linum clade within the flax family, but within that class they are members of two distinct subgroups separated by their stigmas and sepals. However, each species produces two types of sexual organs which require members with both types to exist in a stand before it can reproduce itself. Since the flowers of each only live one day, those types need to be in bloom simultaneously.

Wikipedia says that when scarlet flax does succeed in establishing itself, it rarely persists more than a season. All in all, the morphology makes it more likely a perennial would survive as a wildflower, than one that must produce two types of flowers year after year to perpetuate itself in areas quite removed from its native habitat.

If scarlet flax isn’t an American wildflower, some think, at least, it’s an heirloom that’s been around for generations. Several small companies that specialize in such varieties offer the oily, black seeds on the web, usually repeating the same kind of information provided by Wildseed.

The French had apparently taken up the species, and probably selected for color and size. In 1850, Joseph Paxton introduced a brilliant crimson form as a border plant to English readers at the same time he was building the Crystal Palace, whose carpet beds filled with bright annuals would destroy a taste for borders among the rising classes.

Rubrum, the variety growing in my yard with a dark red center surrounded by a light band and dark edges, became available in this country in 1875. In 1902, Country Life was recommending the rose-crimson Coccineum to its readers, while the New York Botanical Garden suggested ornamental flax grew "about gardens and in fields, eastern United States" in 1907.

It may indeed have been popular then, at least with the wealthy who read Country Life, but it didn’t appear in other gardening manuals I’ve seen from that period. Denise Adams believes Coccineum was reintroduced in 1925. Today, the USDA map shows New York is the only eastern state where the red flower has escaped cultivation. The New York Flora Atlas project reports it only from Orange County, home of West Point and former grand estates of people like the Harrimans.

For some of us, heritage implies more than longevity: it brings an expectation a flower was widely grown in the past.

If scarlet flax is neither common in cultivation nor in the wild, some seed growers suggest that since it’s from western Algeria, it "can tolerate immense heat and extremely dry conditions" in this country. A website associated with American Meadows goes so far as call it a desert native.

However, Philippe Faucon tells true desert gardeners in Phoenix they should plant seeds in October and expect the branching stalks to "die before the summer heat." Someone from Queen’s Creek, southeast of the city, told Dave Witinger that she planted 1,500 seeds and had "one tall stalk to show for it," along with some stragglers. The next year, she tried again, but still "not alot of them germinated."

The people who report great successes with the plant are from warm, moist places like Oregon, Washington, and South Carolina.

The Plaine de Ghriss is not desert, but lies in the ridges that separate Algeria’s Mediterranean coast from the Sahara. The average summer high temperature is 86 degrees. The average rainfall for the past quarter century has been a little over 14," more that we average in the rio arriba.

Ali Dahmani and Mohamed Meddi note the average precipitation in Mascara was lowered by years of drought and that rainfall probably decreased 3% in the past century. I would guess, the decline has been greater since Desfontaines first wandered the ancient lake bed 230 years ago.

It’s reputation in my garden was set this summer. Each year, I’ve scattered seeds among the early blooming perennials hoping for a splash of late summer color amongst the basal greens. Some years nothing germinates, some years nothing blooms, and some years I’m rewarded with an occasional breathtakingly brilliant flower.

This year, either because of the atypical weather or the fact the perennials have been slow to recover from last winter’s cold, more seeds germinated and grew two to three times as tall as usual. However, I still only have one flower at a time, and so far they’ have only appeared days, if not weeks, a part.

Here in my part of the Española valley scarlet flax can never become a wildflower or an heirloom. It will forever be an indulgence that needs constant seeding for the most ephemeral results.

Notes:
Adams, Denise W. Restoring American gardens, 2004; dates for Rubrum and Coccineum.

Country Life." In The Garden," 15 February 1902.

Curtis' Botanical Magazine. "Linum grandiflorum," plant 4956, 1856.

Dahmani, Ali and Mohamed Meddi. Climate Variability and Its Impact on Water Resources in the Catchment Area of Wadi Fekan Wilaya of Mascara (West Algeria)," European Journal of Scientific Research 36:458-472:2009; also called the Eghris and Gharis plain.

Desfontaines, René Louiche. Flora Atlantica, volume 1, 1880; he described the habitat in Latin as "arvis argillosis prope Msacar."

Faucon, Philippe. "Red Flax, Scarlet Flax," Desert Tropicals website.

Lindley, John and Joseph Paxton. Paxton's Flower Garden, volume 1, 1850-1851.

McDill, Joshua, Miriam Repplinger, Beryl B. Simpson, and Joachim W. Kadereit. "The Phylogeny of Linum and Linaceae Subfamily Linoideae, with Implications for Their Systemics, Biogeography, and Evolution of Heterostyly," Systemic Botany 34:386-405:2009.

Munby, Giles. Catalogus Plantarum in Algeria Sponte Nascentium, 1866.

New York Botanical Garden. North American Flora, volume 25, 1907.

New York Flora Association. New York Flora Atlas, available on-line.

United States Department of Agriculture. Natural Resources Conservation Service. Plant profile for Linum grandiflorum, available on-line.

Wikipedia. "Linum grandiflorum," available on-line.

Wildflower Information Organization. "Scarlet Flax;" website recommends American Meadows seeds.

Wildseed Farms. Wildflower Reference Guide and Seed Catalog, 2010; also source for quote on tolerance for poor conditions.

Whitinger, Dave. "Scarlet Flax, Red Flax, Flowering Flax," Dave’s Garden website; quotes from stephanotis.

Photograph: Scarlet flax, about 11:30 on 10 October 2010, with winecups in the background.