Sunday, December 05, 2010

Pyracantha

What’s happening: Sunday’s winds removed most of the black locust leaves; next year’s buds forming on apricots; people are putting out their Christmas lights.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, Lady Banks, hybrid tea and floribunda roses, Apache plume, 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/turning red: Pivet, barberry, cholla, small-leaved soapwort, beards tongues, hartweig and pink evening primroses, coral bell leaves.

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

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: When I was cleaning the irrigation timers I discovered insect webs clogging the screen filters; since no area seemed to suffer from a serious lack of water, I assume this happened late in the season.

Weather: A storm passed through last weekend, leaving snow in the Jemez that lasted as a day and cold morning temperatures for part of the week; last rain 10/21/10; 9:54 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Pyracanthas always look like unhappy migrants from a more southern clime, huddled against walls as they are, pulling their faded cloaks of orange about them. At this time of year, when native plants are shades of brown, they’re the only color in the landscape.

I’m not sure why I associate the exotic shrubs with the south, beyond the fact they’re natives of the Caucasus, Iranian and Turkish plates, and Baltic, Italian and Iberian peninsulas that aren’t reliably hardy beyond zone 6 without protection, especially from the wind. The evergreen leaves turn bronze, then drop in this area.

But, for some reason, they’re part of this northerner’s view of the domestic landscape from Charleston to Dallas, even though green thorn first entered England in the early 1600's as a hedge plant. The idea of a thorny barrier to protect property is so obvious it’s been invented many times, most recently with razor wire.

In the first century before Christ, Varro recommended Roman land owners plant hedges of thorn because they couldn’t be destroyed by malicious torchers. A century later Columella believed hedges lasted longer than other barriers and recommended planting seeds from plants with the largest thorns.

A few centuries later, Romans introduced thorned hedges into an area where iron age settlers had used ditches to protect their village on the Thames near Oxford. When the Romans left their botanical debris in England, the natives reverted to their usual practices and hedges were forgotten until the early years of the Stuarts, who ascended the throne with James I in 1603, when land owners began claiming common lands as their own. The idea of thorny hedges was introduced as the best means to enforce their claims against displaced tenants. They were soon paired with berms and ditches.

It was in those years, between the time John Gerard published his Herbal in 1597 and John Parkinson described his garden in 1629, that pyracantha was introduced. The first didn’t mention the shrub; the latter praised the fire thorn hedge that led to his orchard.

John Loudon believes those early hedges were mixed lots, grown from whatever was available, until stock nurseries developed. The primary requirements for shrubs were that they grew quickly, lived long, could be made dense, had lots of thorns and were cheap to produce.

The most common plants became hawthorn or white thorn (Crataegus oxyacantha), black thorn (Prunus spinosa) and buck thorn (Rhamnus catharticus). When hedges were introduced into this country, Osage orange and Cherokee rose were used in the south. If one were going to grow a thorn hedge here, one would prune Russian olive and black locust.

Although the Southern Cultivator was recommending pyracantha’s use in 1855, the shrub didn’t appear prominently in the south until George Washington Vanderbilt built his mansion on cutover land near Asheville, North Carolina, between 1889 and 1895. He told Frederick Lee Olmsted he wanted an European estate.

The landscaper interpreted that loosely, but did suggest a traditional walled garden like those associated with monasteries. Vanderbilt ruled out the utilitarian plants grown in such plots, so Olmsted espaliered Roses of Sharon and members of the rose family along the walls, including apples, pears, apricots and pyracanthas.

Biltmore became not simply a northerner’s southern retreat, but the image for many northerners of what southern plantations should be. The nursery that supplied the estate was soon telling other wholesale customers the evergreen thorn belonged "in every collection."

Olmsted’s use of Pyracantha coccinea was aided by the Lalande nursery in Nantes who had released a cultivar in 1874 that produced more berries on longer, more flexible branches that were also hardier in cold weather. They could be used in front of town houses to protect the windows from intruders while providing some aesthetic veneer.

It’s Lalande’s vertical shrubs that are growing near the village today. When people bought them years ago they probably had no particular image of the plants, and did what one does with thorns - put them near the road, far from the house, and left them alone.

The one that’s most visible, growing where a front block wall meets a side chain link fence, has one main stem that’s branched with a couple smaller glossy brown stems rising from the crown. The lower parts are bare, with the leaves concentrated on newer growth that’s splays across the fence where the five-petaled white flowers and orange berries are borne.

If one wanted them to form a barrier, one would need to constantly prune to encourage new growth at the base. Someone is maintaining such a group in the stone well in front of an empty bank by the old post office where the shrubs form deep green columns that reach nearly to the top of the building. However, the mealy fruit is concentrated at the top, because it grows on old wood that tends to be trimmed away and only survives where new growth is safe.

The thorns aren’t obvious when one drives by the drooping branches, but are felt as soon as one touches the ovate leaves. Rather than the prickles found along the stems of roses, pyracantha’s spines are sharpened, inch or longer spurs that grow from the same node as the leaves.

Without some variation in their mass, the single plants simply look dreary - the neglected ones scraggly and berry laden, the tended ones neat and colorless. In such isolated communities they look like the displaced visitors they, in fact, are.

Notes:Alexander, Bill. The Biltmore Nursery: A Botanical Legacy, 2007, reprints their catalog.

Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus. De Re Rustica, anonymously translated in 1745 as L. Junius Moderatus Columella of Husbandry.

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597; Alice M. Coats notes the missing reference in Garden Shrubs and Their Histories, 1964, republished in 1992 with notes by John L. Creech.

Lambrick, George and Mark Robinson. Iron Age and Roman Riverside Settlements at Farmoor, Oxfordshire, 1979.

Loudon, John Claudius. Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, volume 2, 1838.

Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, 1629; described in Anna Parkinson, Nature's Alchemist: John Parkinson, Herbalist to Charles I, 2007.

Southern Cultivator, The. "Crataegus pyracantha, or Evergreen Thorn, for Hedging," 1855, quoted in James R. Cothran, Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South, 2003; pyracantha has had several botanical designations, including as a hawthorn.

Varro, Marcus Terentius. Rerum Rusticarum Libri III, translated by Fairfax Harrison in Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro, 1913.

Photograph: Pyracantha berries growing near the village, 28 November 2010; the spine in the center is probably a spur for future growth; thorns are above the leaves, narrow and pointed, not below, but grow at a similar angle.

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