Sunday, July 31, 2011

Large Leaf Soapwort


What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, few Sensation cosmos, squash, alfalfa.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Russian thistle, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto; buds on snakeweed.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells peaked, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; buds on hosta.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Some rain last night; 14:58 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Clusters of a pink-flowered soapwort have been filling the space between the taller sidalceas and invading hollyhocks since the first of July. At first, the five-petaled trumpets were near the front of the bed, but those are now tinker-toy spheres formed from shuttered bulbous pipes. The current flowers are hidden at the back. With luck, new ones will continue to open until mid October.

When I bought the woody rooted perennials in 2004, the label simply said they were “hybrid giant flowered soapwort” and “saponaria x lempergii.” The 3" pots were next to the more popular rock soapworts, and marketing placement was intended to suggest uses for the plant without actually committing the nursery to any definitive opinion.

The absence of facts, or even romantic narratives, seems the fate of this plant that’s outlived the era that called it into being. The historical context is gone. Fritz Lemperg, for whom it’s named, has become a Cheshire cat surviving as a shadow of himself on a few branches of the internet.

The red stemmed plant is a cross between Saponaria cypria and Saponaria haussknechtii. The first is found only in the Troodos mountains on Cyprus. The endangered perennial was first reported by Pierre Edmond Boissier, whose maternal grandfather was a Swiss physician and naturalist who took him hiking in the Alps as a child. He trained with Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in Geneva, then went searching for plants in Spain. In the 1840's he explored Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt where he accumulated the best collection then existing of plants from that region.

Gudrun Simmler, a Swiss botanist who published a monograph on soapworts in 1910, defined the second pink-flowered perennial as a separate species that grows in Albania, southern Yugoslavia, and northern Greece. Others believe it to be a subspecies of Saponaria sicula found in Sicily.

The nineteenth century development of botany as an academic field that valued the analysis of existing plants over the discovery of new ones favored men like Simmler over those like Boissier and relegated plant hunting to a hobby for the wealthy. Lemperg may have been an heir to this tradition, for he explored Albania in the 1930's and distributed plants and seeds he brought back to national botanical gardens.

There’s no indication whether Dr. Limperg actually tried crossing different plants or some patient, employee or colleague named the plant after him. All we know is he developed a large alpine collection at the sanatorium he opened in 1924 outside the capital of Styria in southeastern Austria, and by 1931, when Magnus Johnson went there to train as a gardener, it had some magnificent clematis.

The interest in plant hunting often followed from the more pragmatic training of doctors before the emergence of pharmaceutical conglomerates. Then, physicians were expected to know the healing characteristics of plants and natural history was part of their education. Many developed private botanical gardens as symbols of both their medical and social positions.

Some of the most intrepid searchers in this part of the world were German emigres who preferred the wilderness to medicine. Frederick Adolphus Wislizenus left his practice with Georg Englemann in Saint Louis to explore northern México where he found coral bells. Englemann, who developed the botanical garden in Saint Louis, would send the specimens he received from travelers to Asa Gray at Harvard, who then identified them using current scientific theories.

Sanatoriums themselves devolved from this utilitarian view of the natural world. In the 1850's, Hermann Brehmer abandoned the study of botany for medicine. After completing his degree in Berlin, he converted his sister-in-law’s spa in the Silesian mountains into a facility to test his theory that tuberculosis could be cured with fresh air, good diet and exercise.

There’s an oft repeated tale that Brehmer himself suffered from TB, and went to the Himalayas to study plants and treat himself. Peter Warren found no evidence for the veracity of the story that didn’t appear until a generation later and believes it part of the romantic aura associated with the alpine sensibility.

By the time Lemperg opened his institution, the idea of the sanatorium had expanded to include any facility in a suburban area that used fresh air and nutrition as part of the treatment. They often became places where people went to recuperate from stress or illnesses, differentiated from the neighboring spas by having a medical staff.

Sanatoriums disappeared after streptomycin was proven effective against the bacteria that causes tuberculosis in 1944. Perhaps equally important to limiting the spread of the infectious disease was the parallel transition to electric heat generated by power sent from remote utility plants that cleared the atmosphere of one factor that had weakened lungs, the dust and fumes of coal burning in every basement.

Nineteenth century medical training in natural science instilled the view that physicians were members of a scientific community dependent on one another’s experience. Much like plant collectors were expected to send their choicest finds to botanical gardens, students were told they should send descriptions of their most unusual cases to society journals.

F. Lemperg was continuing this tradition in the 1920's when he sent notes on knee and ear surgeries, along with descriptions of x-ray and anaesthesia techniques, to publications in Leipzig.

I don’t know if he’s the same Lemperg. German language medical journals from that era that would include the location or affiliation of an author aren’t yet available on the internet. All that survives from the time before malpractice rules limited what doctors learned or said and before drug companies alone provided continuing education for physicians are contemporary bibliographic entries from the publications that sought to keep their readers informed by giving them abstracts of current research.

In the nineteenth century, plant hunting, with its necessary hiking in remote areas, and the removal of the ill to country estates were entwined with the Romantic view of nature as a force for spiritual healing. In the twentieth century, that idea led to the rise of fresh air camps for the urban poor and exclusive summer camps for the upper classes.

Camps like the one I attended as a child failed to survive the 1970's when those run by middle class organizations were forced, by new charity rules, to open themselves to children unprepared for life outdoors. The ensuing clashes of cultures drove those interested in camping into private activities, while stranding the poor in remote cabins without electricity or running water. Many would have sympathized with Kate Gosselin who said, after spending a day with Sara Palin in the wilderness, “Why would anyone pretend to be homeless?”

The thing that most destroyed summer camps and the romantic view of nature, however, wasn’t the proliferation of celebrity lifestyles, but Adolph Hitler. Even today, many, especially those like Glenn Beck who didn’t go to summer camp as children, see any communal rural retreat as a Nazi program to brainwash the young.

Lemperg may, in fact, have been a Nazi supporter. Thomas Ster says that his political commitments lead to the decline of his business after the fall of Hitler’s Germany, and that the sanatorium closed after his death. It was taken over by Styria for the state’s agricultural and forestry school, which cut down the arboretum. Their reasons, like Lemperg’s politics, are obscured by postwar amnesia.

The hybrid soapwort, itself, is dependent on the continuity of human culture for its survival. The hairy ovaries are barren. When people no longer want their smooth green leaves, nurseries will no longer produce them. Then, when gardeners no longer make their own cuttings, the member of the carnation family will become extinct, less retrievable than information about Fritz Limperg on the web.

Notes:
Beck, Glenn. On his 25 July 2011 radio program he said the Norwegian camp targeted by Anders Behring Breivik "sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics?" The connection he made is commonly held by people with very liberal views who are more knowledgabe about the rise of Hitler than they are general nineteen century German culture.

Boissier, Pierre Edmond. Flora Orientalis Sive Enumeratio Plantarum in Oriente a Graecia et Aegypto ad Indiae, supplement 83, 1888.

Gosselin, Kate. On the episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska that first aired 12 December 2010. A girl at the camp I talked to made it clear she’d rather be at a resort with a swimming pool and hired help.

Johnson, Magnus. Interview with John Howells reproduced as “John Howells Talks to Magnus Johnson,” available on-line.

Lemperg, F. “Duplicate Roentgenogram with One Exposure,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 56:1933:1929.

_____. “Gangrenous Dissecting Cystitis,” Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, Leipzig 50:1203:1926.

_____. “Induced Ankylosis of Knee,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 48:486:1921.

_____. “Rectal Anaesthesia with Ether Oil,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 56:43:1929.

Lemperg, F. “Northern Albania,” New Flora and Silva 7:79-83:1934, cited by Peter Barnes and Petrit Hoda, “Plant Exploration in Albania,” Curtis's Botanical Magazine 18:170-179:2001.

Simmler, Gudrun. “Monographie der Gattung Saponaria,” Denkschrift der Akademie der Wissenschaft, Vienna 85: 433-509:1910.

Ster, Thomas. “Der Alpengarten Rannach,” Joannea Botanik 5:9-21:2006, says “sein politisches Engagement riss ihn mit dem Untergang Hitler-Deutschlands in den Abgrund.”

Warren, Peter. “The Evolution of the Sanatorium: The First Half-Century, 1854-1904,” The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 23:457-476:2006.

Photograph: Large-leaved hybrid soapwort, 30 July 2011.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Silver-Leaf Nightshade


What’s blooming in the area: Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, corn.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Santa Fe thistle; toothed spurge germinating.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories, sweet alyssum from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster; buds on David phlox.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Despite a bit of rain Tuesday night, it’s still so hot and dry I’m watering twice as much and not staying even; last slight rain 7/19/11; 15:34 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The origins of cheese are shrouded in Neolithic mists when people in the near east were first domesticating plants and animals.

Once they learned to milk their cattle, sheep and goats, they needed methods to preserve the harvest. Milk was churned, boiled and fermented. Historians believe cheese was discovered when they stored milk in animal pockets, specifically the fourth stomachs of young calves which contain an enzyme, chymosin, that reacts with casein in milk to precipitate solid curds and leave liquid whey.

No one knows where the discoveries were made: evidence points to central Asia. The knowledge of rennet spread west when groups moved across the Danube. There’s some possibility people living in the area of modern Switzerland were raising cattle for milk and using baskets and wooden tools to process it in middle Neolithic times. Otto Tschumi thinks it possible a form of goose grass, Galium palustre, was used as a curdling agent.

The subsequent development of copper tools created a need for ores that moved the emerging Bell Beaker cultural complex into the Iberian peninsula around 2500bc. Animal remains suggest there were more female than male animals in Beaker settlements and those animals were older when they died. That, in turn, implies dairy practices accompanied the mines. Perforated bowls have been found at many sites which archaeologists believe were used to strain cheese.

No one knows when the technology of cheese moved through the south. The first pictorial record comes more than a thousand years later from a painting in the tomb of Ipy, sculptor to Rameses II. The first written record is from The Odyssey in which Homer described Cyclops milking ewes and kids to make cheese that he strained through wicker.

The Phoenicians, then the Romans conquered Spain and the north to consolidate and centralize trade. In the decades after Christ’s death, Pliny the Elder listed cheeses coming to Rome from as far away as the Alps, Nîmes, and Bithynia.

Within the Empire, Columella, who had family in southeastern Spain, said Romans commonly used lamb and kid’s rennet, although thistle flowers, false saffron seeds and fig tree twigs could be substituted. The cardoon thistle is still used on the steppes of Estramdura with merino milk to make the semi-hard, whitish Torta de la Serena.

Centuries later, when the conquistadores left Estramadura for México, they took cheese and the idea it could be made with vegetable rennets with them. Someone, or somebodies, experimented with local plants to discover the pea-sized fruit of silver-leaved nightshade would work in place of the European Cynara cardunculus.

Trompillo is still used to make the semi-hard, white asadero cheese in Chihuahua where it’s used in any food that requires melted cheese. Javier Cabral says his mother’s foster sister in Zacatecas still makes it daily from the “extra-fatty” leche de apoyo the cow reserves for her calf. He says his Aunt Marta “adds rennet” while the milk’s still in buckets, then lets it set. When the curds have formed, “she wraps them in cloth, places them in a hollowed-out log with a drainage hole drilled in it, then sets heavy stones on top to press out some of the whey.” Later she adds salt.

The knowledge of vegetable enzymes, if not cheese making, moved north both with the Spanish and through native communications networks. When Matilda Coxe Stevenson visited the relatively isolated Zuñi in the late nineteenth century, they were using ha’watapa berries with goat’s milk. Instead of waiting for the curds to congeal, they used the first stage as “a delicious beverage.”

To the west, the Pima, who had even less contact with Europeans until the Gadsden Purchase, combined the Spanish use of Solanum elaeagnifolium with European methods by mixing powdered berries in milk with “a piece of rabbit or cow stomach” to produce a drink.

To the east, where Spanish influences were stronger, the Cochiti used ashika to curdle milk like the local Spanish speakers, who called the blue-flowered plant tomatillo del campo. The more nomadic Navajo used dried or fresh berries with goat’s milk, while the Davis Apache in Texas used berries to thicken the goat’s milk they carried with them when they traveled. The tiny tomatoes survive on dead stems into the next blooming season.

Silver-leaf nightshade has a wide range, from northern México to Colorado and Nebraska east, but hasn’t been utilized outside the southwest settled by the Spanish where it may have proliferated on lands disturbed by the settlers. Many of the areas to the east were settled by Germans who had such a strong cheese making tradition based on cattle rennet that it would have been hard for them to imagine a vegetable substitute.

Today, when cheese can be bought at the grocers, the one to two-foot high members of the nightshade family have been abandoned to bloom along the road. If the webbed flowers, with their five petals pulled back and yellow stamens pushed forward, are considered at all, it’s as a pest. Not only do the fruits produce 60 to 120 seeds that can live ten years in the soil, but the herbaceous perennial can reproduce from root fragments that crowd out crops like cotton.

However, if you go into an Española grocery, to the side of the packets of highly processed American and Swiss cheeses and bags of shredded Monterrey Jack, cheddar and mozzarella, you’ll see packages of sliced asadero from California made from pasteurize grade A and skim milk, sea salt and enzymes along with sodium citrate and soy lichen.

If you look a bit more, you’ll find some piles of octagonal white cheeses in square vacuum-sealed packages that have come from México through Anthony, Texas. They only say they’re made from pasteurized milk, salt and rennet.

Notes:
Cabral, Javier. “Mexico Feeds Me: Exploring Mexico's Culinary Heritage,” Saveur website, 2 May 2011.

Castetter, Edward F. “Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest I. Uncultivated Native Plants Used as Sources of Food,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 4:1-44:1935, on uses by Cochiti and Spanish-speakers.

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

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. By the Prophet of the Earth, 1949, on Pima.

_____. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore, on Davis Mountain Apache.

Garrido-Pena, Rafael. “Bell Beakers in the Southern Meseta of the Iberian Peninsula: Socioeconomic Context and New Data,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16:187-209:1997.

Homer. The Odyssey, eighth century bc.

Ipy. Photograph of wall painting depicting cheese making available at the Sabor Artesano website page, “A Brief History of Cheese.” Rameses II reigned 1279-1213bc.

Jacob, Mandy, Doris Jaros and Harald Rohm. “Recent Advances in Milk Clotting Enzymes,” International Journal of Dairy Technology 64:14-33:2011, on la Serena cheese.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Morris Steggerda, “Navajo Foods and Their Preparation,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 17:217-25:1941.

Organisation Européenne et Méditerranéenne pour la Protection des Plantes. “Solanum elaeagnifolium,” Bulletin OEPP 37:236-245:2007.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, book 11, section 92, translated by Harris Rackham, 1940.

Rodríguez-Torres, K., J. A. López-Díaz and N. R. Martínez-Ruiz. “Physicochemical Characteristics and Sensory Properties of Asadero Cheese Manufactured with Vegetable Rennet from Solanum elaeagnifolium,” 2008 Food Science and Food Biotechnology Congress.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915.

Tschumi, Otto. Urgeschichte der Schweiz, vol 1, 1949, cited by Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory: A Survey, 2002.

Photograph: Silver-leaved nightshade growing in Virginia creeper near an alfalfa field, 17 July 2011.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Asiatic Lily


What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa; corn tasseling, tomatoes visible; bleached leaves on catalpas having problems.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, amaranth, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, dandelion, Santa Fe thistle.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories.

Looking west: Caryopteris, lilies, ladybells, Goodness Grows speedwell, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, snapdragon, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, cricket, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: A few minutes of rain last Sunday was not enough; afternoon humidity low since; it gets harder every evening to replace the water that’s been lost in the day; 15:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The plants we value most tend to be those that made the great leap from species to domestication so long ago their ancestors can only be guessed.

Despite their many symbolic uses, lilies have only been hybridized since new varieties were imported from Asia some 170 years ago. For the first time we can see how botanical innovation occurs and how quickly, when conditions are right.

The Japanese began experimenting with closely related forms of Lilium maculatum in the middle 1600's. The descendants of their highly selected cultivars were among the plants Philip von Siebold began sending to Holland in 1830.

They arrived at a time when Europeans were already experimenting with crosses between newly introduced species and their familiar ones. Henry Groom, whose observations on geraniums were read by Charles Darwin, began breeding the new maculatum varieties with the European bulbiferum to produce what were called Lilium hollandicum hybrids.

The next generation of nurserymen continued working with hollandicum lilies to produce Sappho, a soft orange, slightly shorter lily, and Alice Wilson, a lemon yellow dwarf. According to Brain Porter, both appeared in 1877. While each remained popular for years, the commercial stock became infected.

Following the recognition of Gregor Mendel’s work, experimentation became more deliberate as academic professionals began work. Isabella Preston was crossing maculatum with a subspecies of davidii in the 1920's. A few years later, George Slater was experimenting with Alice Wilson, while Foreman McLean was mixing tigrinum with maculatum and the maculatum-bulbiferum hybrids.

Soon their discoveries and techniques moved back to the shops of commercial growers. Jan de Graaff, heir to a family of bulb traders, moved to Oregon from Leyden in 1934 where he began taking bulbs from other breeders and making his own crosses, especially between the child of a tigrinum-Sappho cross called Umtig 8 and Alice Wilson. In 1941 he released the coral orange Enchantment, with upward facing flowers on plants that were disease free and vigorous enough to survive the American climate.

Others continued his experiments with lily cultivars and closely related species to produce two distinct groups of bulbs, Asiatic lilies that followed from Enchantment and Oriental lilies. More recently, botanists have been using new techniques to try to cross the natural barriers each group developed against exogamy.

Once the Asiatics were introduced into the Netherlands in 1960, they were seen as potential cut flowers because they weren’t susceptible to the ethylene that escapes ripening produce and the upward thrust of the flower clusters fit the cellophane sleeves used by sellers. They also were relatively inexpensive to grow, had no fragrance to pervade crowded rooms, and some released no pollen to soil table cloths.

What’s important to me isn’t that I can buy a few stems of Asiatic lilies in the local grocery store, but that I can grow them in my yard. Most of the forebears of Asiatic lilies tolerate a wide range of soils and that trait has been retained.

In the fall of 1998, I bought several lily varieties. The Asiatic white Avalanche have bloomed every year, usually with clusters atop stems that get about two feet high. I can’t tell if they’ve actually expanded underground, but they do produce more stems and have lived longer than the ten years Schulte’s Greenhouse suggests I could have expected “under ideal conditions.”

This summer another plant failed to appear and I thought I would add more Avalanche bulbs, rather than experiment. Alas, Van Engelen stopped carrying them in 2000, and doesn’t even carry any reasonably tall white alternatives. Indeed, they are offering fewer varieties now than they did in 1998.

I don’t know if that’s a consequence of changing tastes, market saturation, or bankers who are less willing to lend money to breeders and importers. The first two are prods that can influence the direction of new experiments, but the last can sap the entrepreneurial spirit and kill the spark of innovation that only appears sporadically.

Notes: Maculatum is now known as Lilium pennsylvanicum; it’s also been called dauricum, elegans and wilsonii. Tigrinum is now called Lilium lancifolium.

Anderson, Susan Heller. “Jan de Graaff, Tamer of the Wild Lily, Dies at 86,” The New York Times, 9 August 1989.

Benschop, Maarten, Rina Kamenetsky, Marcel Le Nard, Hiroshi Okubo and August De Hertogh. “The Global Flower Bulb Industry: Production, Utilization, Research,” Horticultural Reviews 36:1-115 :2010.

Darwin, Charles. Letter to Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 14 Sept 1844, on something Groom wrote in the previous issue.

McRae, Edward A. Lilies: A Guide for Growers and Collectors, 1998; McRae apprenticed with Graaff.

Porter, Brian. “A look at Asiatic lilies of the Past 3 Centuries. Are They Still Here?,” on his Old Lily Hybrids and Species website.

Schulte’s Greenhouse and Nursey. “Avalanche Lily,” on-line catalog.

Photograph: Cluster of Avalanche Asiatic lilies, 10 July 2011.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

White Mullein


What’s blooming in the area: Trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall and red yuccas, daylily, Russian sage, buddleia, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, larkspur, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, brome grass; pods on sweet peas.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native and common dandelions; buds on old man cactus and Santa Fe thistle; berries formed on Russian olive, beginning to emerge on junipers.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess peaked, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort; buds on Shirley poppies; oriental poppy leaves turning brown.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla; raspberries dried up before they were fully ripe.

Looking west: Lilies, Rocky mountain beardtongue, ladybells, Goodness Grows speedwell, blue flax, catmints, first calamintha florets, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein; buds on Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana, tomato; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, small bees, hornets, grasshopper, cricket, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants. Someone’s black cat has taken to coming into the yard at night to hunt whatever burrowed under the cholla and hide from the surrounding dogs and coyotes.

Weather: Heat and fire continue to take more out of the ground than I can replace; short gentle rain Friday night; 15:46 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: My white mullein sat out last year. When it didn’t appear, I assumed it had finally died in the cold winter.

I bought it in the fall of 1997 when I was trying white flowering plants along the garage that were tall enough to see from the house. The nursery said its spike could reach 36" and the base spread to 24.

Album is a horticultural selection of Verbascum chaixii, a species with light yellow flowers on towering stalks that rise from nests of fuzzy grey leaves. Once the plants become established, the stalks branch.

My spikes never got more than a foot high, and were always hidden by the surrounding phlox. There’s only ever been one stalk, and some years not even that. Indeed, there have been years when the leaves didn’t emerge.

The native range of nettle-leaved mullein reaches across central Europe from Italy to Poland. On its southern boundary, from Spain to Yugoslavia, it evolved into the subspecies, chaixii. From the Balkans north it’s identified as austriacum, a plant used in the Giulia region of Italy’s Friuli-Venezia to treat hemorrhoids, clean eye problems and for a "spring cure." To the northeast, from Romania into Russia, it morphed into orientale.

In southern Poland, Wohciech Baba found austriacum was a migratory plant in semi-arid limestone grasslands. He observed 100 plots in the upland Ojców National Park each June for five years. Mullein was one that persisted in some, disappeared from others only to reappear another year, disappeared completely or appeared in new locations.

Some of the movement could easily be attributed to the fact the species easily self-seeds. With his annual visits, he couldn’t judge if the reappearing plants were new seedlings or ones like mine that had gone dormant for a year.

This year I discovered the paddle-shaped grey leaves the first of June when I was planting seeds in the area. Two weeks later a flower stalk shot up. It began blooming June 22 and has been opening florets if different locations up, down and around the spike since.

I must confess I not only stopped looking for the perennial member of the figwort family in spring, but didn’t pay it much notice when it did bloom. I saw the florets flushed with deep pink as I walked by, but never stopped to look.

Then, two weeks ago, I sat on the ground to look for the beard of the Husker White penstemon and noticed the flowers for the first time. In the center of the five white petals was a yellow-green ring that threw out a long, nearly translucent tongue to catch pollen from passing insects. On each petal, a thin arch of purple supported by three pillars bordered the ring.

More extraordinary than the style were the five purple filaments that resembled a spider’s hairy legs. Each ended in a bright orange shoe.

My mind flashed back to someone I hadn’t thought about in 30 years, a woman in Chicago who edited a science fiction fanzine called Purple and Orange. Young and outrageous as we were in those days before punk was even a word, ready to redefine ourselves every day, Joy would sometimes come to work with her hair dyed orange, sometimes purple.

She wasn’t particularly interested in plants. She published, and sometimes wrote, fiction based on characters from Battlestar Galactica. However, she did tell me about the recently released cult film, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

My white mullein belongs in such a film. It has the necessary europamittel ancestors.

Notes:
Baba, Wohciech. “The Small-Scale Species Mobility in Calcareous Grasslands - Example from Southern Poland,” Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae 74:53-64:2005.

Lokar, Laura Coassini and Livio Poldini. “Herbal Remedies in the Traditional Medicine of the Venezia Giulia Region (North East Italy),” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 22:231-279:1988.

Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Notes on Verbascum chaixii distribution on Flora Europaea website.

Photograph: White mullein, 4 July 2011.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

Summer and Smoke


What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall and red yuccas, daylily, Russian sage, buddleia, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, larkspur, Shasta daisy, squash, alfalfa, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native and common dandelions; buds on horseweed, prickly pear and old man cacti.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bells, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort, reseeded morning glory.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla.

Looking west: Lilies, Rocky mountain beardtongue, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein; buds on Mönch aster and purple coneflower.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan; buds on chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, house finches, other small birds, gecko, bumble bee, smaller bees, hornets, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Afternoon temperatures in 90's; high winds Sunday and Thursday day spread fire in the western mountains and broke off small branches from cottonwood trees; a storm passed over yesterday that left us without power but with 1/8“ of water in dry ground; 15:52 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Last Sunday morning I walked north beyond the narrow arroyo to see if the prickly pear cacti were blooming yet. As near as I could see none were or had been. Many had had a tough winter and the drought continues.

As I was standing in the field of needle grass, I realized that land must once have been flooded through the break in the hills to the east. The arroyo comes from somewhere back there and marks the southern edge of the small plateau.

It was in that opening that I watched smoke from the Pacheco fire near Tesuque rise through the rows of foothills like a quiet volcano.

I returned to the house for a few minutes, then walked out to the main arroyo to the south. As usual, I was wearing thick wool socks to protect my feet from seeds armed with harpoons, static electricity and velcro.

The ground was so dry the clay was no longer detectable; the land was reduced to a shallow beach hot enough to send heat through my shoes. When I reached down to see if it was the sand or my socks, it was the land.

Few things were blooming. Everything that’s come into bloom has rushed to maturity, producing seeds as quickly as possible. Almost nothing on the prairie has stayed in flower for more than a week. Trees and shrubs in town have leaves that are losing color. The lack of water is felt everywhere after the hot solstice.

The winds started tossing the black locust around 1:00. An hour later I took a nap. When I woke about 4:00, I noticed the light coming in the east window of my bedroom had changed. The sere needle grass was silvery white. I couldn’t see it as well from my back porch. When I started round the building I noticed why the light had changed: a huge plume of smoke was rising from the area of Los Alamos.

The Las Conchas fire had erupted while I was sleeping.

Smoke dominated the view during the day. At night, I could see a line of orange. The next morning the smoke shut down visibility. There were charred pine needles in the drive.

The fire settled into a routine marked by changes in smoke patterns until Thursday when ferocious winds returned and the fire spread north across P’opii Khanu, the headwaters of Santa Clara creek. After dark, I could see another line of orange, this one backlighting bare tree trunks about twelve miles from my porch.

People, forced from their homes in Los Alamos by potential winds capable of driving such rapid variations in fire behavior, have been fretting that someone might sneak past the guards and loot their homes.

The Santa Clara tribal governor Walter Dasheno reported two-third of their forest had been destroyed and added the burned out land “is the source of our Santa Clara Creek that we rely upon for irrigation” It was their source for “wildlife, clean water, culturally-significant trees and medicinal plants.”

Fortunately, almost everyone can now buy most of their food, because the destruction of the acequias is yet to come. When it finally does rain, and this drought can’t last forever, the waters will rush over the charred land, strip off the fragile top soil, and send the silt and dead wood down towards the river.

Native plants will eventually recover. Most adapted to fire long ago. Unlike humans, they haven’t yet forgotten.

For now, their reactions can be read in chromatic changes. I’ve learned many plants alter their chemistry during the heat of the day, moving from absorbing the sun’s light in the morning to rejecting it by noon. The reflection of light by their chemicals creates the sensations I perceive as color.

Friday when I was driving home from Santa Fe, the grasses in the fields beside the road were silvery when the sky was grey.

As I approached Pojoaque at the base of the canyon that leads up to Los Alamos, the sky turned brown. The grasses retreated back into a bleached neutrality that blends into the soil, while the limestone layers in the rocks became more prominent. They too are alive, organic compounds of calcium carbonate that will burn when heated enough.

Later that evening, as the light faded, the grasses turned golden brown and the grey-green native salt bushes were bright green. Only the non-native Siberian elms were unaffected, still green to view.

Notes:
Dasheno, Walter. Quoted by Joe Baca, “Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.

Photograph: The fires, 1 July 2011. The smoke coming from behind the mesa is from the Los Alamos area. The smoke rising from the ridges at the right is from Santa Clara land. The dark green of the Siberian elms and lilacs is relatively normal for 7:15 at night. The four-winged saltbushes are a much brighter green and the grasses more golden than in normal light. The white square marks the border of a patch of Santa Clara land on the east side of the river.