Gypsum Phacelia

What’s happening: Purple aster blooming; exposed hollyhock leaves dying, leaving new green ones in core; winterfat, chamisa, and broom senecio releasing seeds; next spring’s twig buds visible on apples and cherries; new buds developing on cottonwood and lilac; most trees now bare, just in time for their leaves to protect whatever’s beneath from the cold.

What’s still green: Arborvitae, juniper and other evergreens, Lady Banks, hybrid tea and floribunda roses, prickly pear, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, red hot poker, grape hyacinth, west-facing iris, bouncing Bess, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, sea pink, snapdragon, catmint center, white sweet clover, sweet pea, hollyhock, oriental poppy, blue flax, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, vinca, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia, tumble mustard, snakeweed, dandelion, anthemis, coreopsis, perky Sue, Shasta daisy, black-eyed Susan, strap leaf aster leaves; June, pampas, brome, cheat and base of needle grasses; young chamisa branches.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, buddleia, pinks, snow-in-summer, loco weed, yellow alyssum, stick leaf, western stickseed, winterfat, Silver King artemisia, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red: Purple-leafed plum, privet, barberry, cholla, small-leaved soapwort, beards tongues, hartweig and pink evening primroses, coral bells leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Apache plume, golden spur columbine leaves; globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Something has tunneled into the roots of the cholla.

Weather: Winds during week, coldest morning so far yesterday; last rain 10/21/10; 10:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: It’s much easier to learn things as a child. You simply absorb impressions, year after year. By the time, you want to consciously understand or explain something, you already have a great reserve of information. No research is needed.

As an adult, you’re painfully conscious of your ignorance when you encounter an unfamiliar flower, and terribly aware it will take years of observation to know it the way you do a dandelion.

As a child, time doesn’t exist, life is perennial. You know you’ll know when you want to know. As an adult, you come to think of yourself as an annual. Any new knowledge is gained in a race against the seasons.

I may have seen a gypsum phacelia on my land in 1995. I never saw it again, and my collection of books on southwestern plants was small, the internet unavailable. The closest species in Peterson’s Southwestern and Texas Wildflowers was a salt heliotrope which is characterized by "tiny flowers in long, curved sprays."

Last May I saw something lavender blooming in a rounded cluster under a chamisa in the arroyo with five petals and darker purple stamens that extended so far they resembled whiskers. I decided it must be a type of phacelia, not because I had any idea what a phacelia was, but because it looked a little like the picture of a Phacelia tanacetifolia in the Wildseed catalog.

A month later I saw them again. The stems were longer, and the leaves dirtier. On some, the flowering stalks had branched with brown receptacles packed along one side of reddish veins rather like fuzzy, caterpillar segments. Single flowers, like antennae, were open at the tops where the stems were still uncoiling; the lower leaves yellow or brown. A small bee was mining one.

I went back to the bookshelf. This time I decided it was a Phacelia integrifolia, based on Geyata. Ajilvsgi’s guide to Texas wildflowers. She said it grew on rocky or sandy soils, especially limestone ones, in northern and western parts of the state. Others emphasize its proclivity for gypsum hills.

I wasn’t sure, of course. Her photograph showed narrow, furled leaves and darker colored flowers. The leaves in the arroyo were brighter green, undulating with scalloped edges as if they were made of humped segments joined along the sides, much like the five petals of the flowers were welded into a tube.

But it was a name, enough to label photographs. Before there was a name, there was either the meaningless "Blue E" or allusive comments like "the florets resemble the faded, artificial flower corsages I was given to wear at Easter." Many who know the name still resort to metaphors to call it scorpion tail.

The next week the plants were turning brown. No flowers were left by mid-July. I saw nothing more until late September when I spotted something that looked like a basal rosette. But again, I wasn’t sure.

This year I knew more. I knew where to look. They’d been growing in the shade between the Russian olive and some chamisa on the slightly elevated second bottom stabilized by the shrubs where the waters from the arroyo don’t usually flow.

I saw a single plant the first of March growing in the open between cracks in the sand. Again it was a bit dirty. Ajilvsgi said the leaves have glandular hairs, which make them sticky.

A child wouldn’t have needed to read that. However, when I saw the trapped grains of sand, my childhood memories warned me it could be unpleasant to touch. My accumulated knowledge inhibited direct learning, predisposed me to accept the word of others that they have a tap root; dark, uncorrugated seeds, and smell bad.

A month later there were a number of plants, some growing in the gravel that washed out from the sides of the arroyo, some among the debris under the chamisa. The thick, velvety leaves were beginning to point upward.

The first week of May stems were forming with alternating leaves. I could see some bud clusters, still green as the stalks. The first flowers were visible the next weekend, recessed into their cups like borages.

It would seem I’d returned to the point I entered the life cycle last summer, only I’d forgotten almost everything I’d seen. On return trips, I watched with amazement as the stems extended into ropes with purple eyes on their tips, then saw the candelabra turn brown and nearly disappear by the first of July.

Not all was repetition. The first of July I also saw new growth around the remains of dead plants. I began to see new, green leafed branches on plants dominated by browning, still blooming stems. The first of August, there were new plants ready to bloom.

I saw no more. I hurt my foot and couldn’t walk out to the arroyo while it healed.

Two weeks ago I saw a new seedling, much as I had last year. I suddenly realized, these plants must be annuals, and what I’d noticed this August wasn’t the revived growth of a heat-shy perennial, but another generation that had emerged later in the season than the first.

Now I needed to know more. Were integrifolia annuals, or were these lavender flowers some other plant altogether?

I doubted, became uneasy. The plant isn’t even mentioned in the standard reference on New Mexico flowers. Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley list Phacelia corrugata as the species found in Española in the early twentieth century. Researchers with the Smithsonian mentioned the same plant on Santa Clara land in the same years, only they described it as "a fern species."

Duane Atwood says confidently that corrugata has deep blue flowers with yellow anthers, and only grows in the four corners region. However, it is the one member of the waterleaf family he explicitly mentions as a winter annual that produces a small rosette in the fall that "continues to grow during the warm periods of the winter months." Integrifolia is simply described as an annual that blooms from March to mid-September, but is shown following the Rio Grande into México.

He adds that there has been "considerable confusion" over the identity of integrifolia, caused in part by herbarium specimens that change as they dry, and in part by authoritative writers who amplify the mistakes of their eminent predecessors. He suggests more fieldwork is needed.

Fieldwork’s a professional euphemism for reverting to childhood habits of watching. A team from the University of New Mexico spent nine years looking at plants in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in Socorro County before noting integrifolia is primarily an early spring flower whose growth is limited by winter moisture. Another, smaller generation blooms in summer that depends on summer moisture and has a more compressed life cycle.

In southwestern Colorado in 2007, Al Schneider suggested some years produce more plants than others. He noted, "In good spring flowering years, such as 2003 and 2005, thousands of plants color rocky/sandy flats and slopes in lavender-blue."

I can’t be sure the plant growing in the arroyo is an integrifolia, but it looks like Schneider’s pictures.

I won’t know for a while if the little phacelia can only grow in that one shady, protected place in the arroyo, or if chance dropped seeds there and they will spread with the seasons. It could be what I saw this summer was the fluorescence of a good year, or it may simply have been the next year in the expansion of a colony. I won’t know until we, the plants and I, have coexisted longer.

Learning never stops. Life becomes constant fieldwork.

Notes:
Ajilvsgi, Geyata. Wildflowers of Texas, 1984.

Atwood, N. Duane. "A Revision of the Phacelia Crenulatae Group (Hydrophyllaceae) for North America," The Great Basin Naturalist 35:127-190:1975.

Peterson Field Guide. Southwestern and Texas Wildflowers, by Theodore F. Niehaus with illustrations by Charles L. Ripper and Virginia Savage.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Schneider, Al. Southwest Colorado Wildflowers, Ferns and Trees website pages for "Hydrophyllaceae" and "Phacelia integrifolia," 2007; he has the best pictures.

Wildseed Farms. Wildflower Reference Guide and Seed Catalog, 2010.

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

Xia, Yang, Douglas I. Moore, Scott L. Collins, and Esteban H. Muldavin. "Aboveground Production and Species Richness of Annuals in Chihuahuan Desert Grassland and Shrubland Communities," Journal of Arid Environments 24:378-385:2010.

Photograph: Young gypsum phacelias, already sticky, growing in the litter near a Russian olive, 26 November 2010.