Sunday, November 27, 2011

Juniper


Weather: Except for Thanksgiving, morning temperatures warmer than last week until this morning, which is the coldest so far; rain Friday; 10:06 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Pansy next to a fence, under snapdragons and low to the ground.

Seed catalogs, that used to come between Christmas and New Years, started arriving before Thanksgiving.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, roses, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, coral beard tongue, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, large leaved soapwort, ladybells, winecup, cheese, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, anthemis, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses, gray mushrooms.

With cold, leaf stems on hollyhocks have broken, but the leaves are still green. Friday’s rain took down most of the leaves still on my trees.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on raspberry, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, pinks, small leaved soapwort, Husker’s and purple beard tongue, coral bells, pink evening primrose, alfilerillo.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, winterfat, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Apache plume, rugosa rose, sea pink, snakeweed.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Something that looked like a chipmunk dove for its hole by the near arroyo, then look back out. Was small, with brown fur and not much of a tail.

Weekly update: One-seeded juniper may be the indicative plant for this region, but you won’t find it just anywhere. Few grow in the nearby prairie. Instead, you see the dark green forms climbing distant hills.

I’ve often wondered why.

Hart Merriam, who first identified the piñon-juniper zone, thought temperature was the determining factor in the southwest, that it decreased with elevation while precipitation increased. His brother-in-law, Vernon Bailey, suggested the major factor separating areas within the piñon-juniper province in New Mexico was humidity. A LANL team headed by Kevin Reid theorized it was soil moisture on the Pajarito Plateau.


I finally got a clue a couple weeks ago when I climbed to the top of a small hill that was grassy at the bottom and brown on top. I discovered the reason is the base was simple alluvial soil and the top was covered with layers of thin conglomerate. At the very top, in the middle of the biggest rocks, where water was most likely to run away quickly, juniper was growing.


Rocks.

I’ve spent the past two weeks rather rudely looking under the skirts of dowager junipers to see how many were associated in some way with rocks. I even drove up to Ojo Caliente and back through the Wild Rivers National Recreation Area. Some, most dramatically, were growing with boulders.


Many others appeared to be growing in sandy loam, but when I got close I saw gravel scattered on the ground. Sometimes, the road bank was covered by gravel that had tumbled from soil that looked smooth on the surface.


When I drove down to Albuquerque two weeks ago, I paid more attention to the juniper beside the road that I ought. Around Santa Fé the trees were denser than here or in the north. Again I could see gravel on the surface or in the road cuts.

The roadside trees disappeared after the Bernalillo exit, just as the Sandias replaced juniper covered hills in the distance. Although elevation could be a factor, I thought it more likely the wooded hills were the seed source and when they disappeared so did their offspring. Reid’s group found that when it rained hard on the Pajarito Plateau, water and sediments moved down from the areas with trees into the more barren areas, dropping their booty as they moved.


I suspect the juniper distribution in my immediate neighborhood is related to the underlying geology. Daniel Koenig has mapped the provenance of surface rocks in this area and shown a line separating recent alluvial soils from older, rockier Tertiary sediments. The foothills where I see the most trees lie in the Tertiary area.

Rocks and stones, either on the surface or in the ground, trap water. It probably doesn’t matter what kind. Teralene Foxx and Gail Tierney found junipers have taproots that could reach down 20' through cracks in tuff around Los Alamos. In addition, junipers put out lateral roots, usually within the top 3', that reach two to three times the height of the tree.


Some in the prairie keep their secrets under a thick mulch of their own needles that keeps dry air from evaporating water quickly. No gravel appears in the immediate area. It could be some thin layer exists below the surface, or it’s non-existence may explain their small size. Many of these, as well as many elsewhere, grow on slopes that allow them to exploit runoff.


Notes: For more on conditions for piñon and juniper in the Albuquerque area, including the underlying geology, see Vicki’s comment at the bottom of the next posting. She lives on the other side of the Sandias in an area the New Mexico Geological Society’s highway map indicates is sedimentary from the Pennsylvanian age.

Bailey, Vernon. Life Zones and Crop Zones of New Mexico, 1913.

Foxx, Teralene S. and Gail D. Tierney. “Rooting Patterns in the Pinyon-Juniper Woodland,” Pinyon-Juniper Conference, 1987.

Johnson, Kathleen A. “Juniperus monosperma”, 2002, United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System.

Koning, Daniel K. “Preliminary Geologic Map of the Española 7.5-minute Quadrangle,” 2002.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

New Mexico Geological Society. “New Mexico Geologic Highway Map,” 2005, compiled by Maureen E. Wilks.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. “Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches,” Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.


Photographs:
1. Upstream of the far arroyo where junipers begin to appear in grass, then get denser towards foothills before disappearing again, 20 November 2011.

2. Hill northeast of my house with grass at the base and Tertiary rocks on top where some junipers grow, 8 November 2011.

3. Juniper in Tertiary rocks atop hill in #2, 8 November 2011.

4. Juniper growing atop debris collected at the base of the volcanic northern black mesa near Chamita, 15 November 2011.

5. Juniper growing along side route 554 in Wild Rivers where exposed bank shows gravel in soil, 15 November 2011.

6. Juniper growing at bottom of a wash northeast of my house, 19 November 2011.

7. Exposed lateral roots of a juniper growing between sedimentary and volcanic rocks at the base of the northern black mesa near Chamita, 15 November 2011.

8. Mulched base of a juniper growing along route 554, 15 November 2011.

9. Juniper growing on slope along route 284 south of Ojo Caliente with volcanic and sedimentary rocks, 15 November 2011.

10. Juniper growing in gravel covered soil on a slope southeast of my house, 10 November 2011.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Piñon-Juniper Belt


Weather: Rained Sunday night; frost in the mornings and sunny afternoons since; changed into my heavier weight winter clothes yesterday; 10:06 hours of daylight today.

Can smell wood smoke some mornings. Seven pickup trucks were filled with firewood for sale in the parking lot of the local grocers Tuesday afternoon.

What’s blooming: Pansies.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, roses, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, coral beard tongue, snapdragons, soapworts, ladybells, Saint Johns wort, hollyhocks struggling, winecup, cheese, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, anthemis, chrysanthemum, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses; next year’s leaf buds on peach.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Japanese honeysuckle, Husker’s and purple beard tongue, coral bells, pink evening primrose, alfilerillo.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, winterfat, young chamisa, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, sea pink, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; fruit on pomegranate split open; aeonium put out new branch.

Animal sightings: Small birds, rabbit out in my neighbor’s yard where it lives.



Weekly update: Many people in this country may no longer live on a flat Earth, but they can still garden in two dimensions.

The earliest settlers only recognized latitude. They knew the sugar that grew in Barbados wouldn’t do in Virginia, that the tobacco that made Virginia wealthy wouldn’t survive in Boston, that Boston was more congenial to farmers than Maine or New Brunswick.

As people moved west, they gradually became aware that longitude mattered. However, it wasn’t important until they reached the 100th meridian where they saw the beginning of what they called the great American desert, the great dry plains that only supported settlement after they introduced artesian wells.

With the acquisition of the southwest from Spain after the Mexican War, US citizens moved into mountainous areas and discovered the importance of altitude. In 1889, Hart Merriam went to Flagstaff to investigate vegetation by elevation in the San Francisco mountains and Grand Canyon. He defined seven life zones: Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, Timberline and Arctic-Alpine.

His terms, especially Sonoran, were specific to Arizona: the Chihuahuan desert south of New Mexico is considered a different ecological sphere. The labels used by the Forest Service have evolved to identify trees or plants characteristic of an altitudinal band: chaparral and grassland, piñon-juniper woodland, ponderosa pine forest, fir-aspen forest, fir-spruce forest, arctic-alpine-timerline, and alpine tundra.


This part of New Mexico lies in the Upper Sonoran or piñon-juniper belt between 5000' and 7000'. While Merriam was thinking specifically of Colorado Piñon and Utah Juniper, here it’s Colorado Pinus edulis and single-seed Juniperus monosperma that are common.

One of the things that’s always puzzled me about the category is the exact relationship between piñon and juniper. Did the hyphen imply they would be found together, or was it more of an and/or slash distribution.

Francis Elmore says that in some places the two coexist in equal numbers, but that generally juniper are found in the lower elevations and piñon in the upper. Along Pajarito Road, which runs between 7000' White Rock and 7500' Los Alamos, a lab team found large junipers tended to be associated with smaller piñons, and larger piñons with smaller junipers.

In this part of the valley, piñon are found in and around the village, especially near irrigation ditches, and juniper exists in the wild. I haven’t seen a piñon tree on the 5650' prairie, and many of the junipers I’ve see along the roads to the 5600' village could have been, judging from their positions, transplanted.

The piñon may originally have been moved for dietary reasons. Now nostalgia may be more important. Once introduced, they spread themselves by following lines of water, eventually finding my yard.

After I transferred some seedlings from under my eaves to the drive five years ago, I’ve been treating the new volunteers next to my garden hoses as prickly nuisances. The rate of growth for the transplanted trees slowed after they were moved to the dryer area. This summer the saplings reached above the protecting winterfat; their tips are just over 5' high.

When you drive around the village, you see place after place where piñon have taken over and people have done their best to accommodate them by trimming the lower or upper branches.



I drove north this week past Ojo Caliente and back south through El Rito to see if the distribution of juniper and piñon in this area is typical or anomalous. The only piñon I saw along the road were near homesteads. Juniper was almost everywhere, with denser stands at elevations near 7500' approaching the next vegetation zone where an occasional small pine was growing.

In this part of the piñon-juniper belt piñon can naturalize in the most domesticated of circumstances, but they don’t behave like true natives.


Notes:
Elmore, Francis H. Shrubs and Trees of the Southwest Uplands, 1976.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. “Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches,” Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.

Photographs:
1. Piñon growing above the covered irrigation ditch that towers above the one-story house indicated by the utility wires, main road, 14 November 2011.

2. Juniper growing on the prairie, 8 November 2011.

3. Piñon growing in the village with lower branches cut up to the roof line so people could enter their house; 18 November 2011.

4. Several cropped piñon growing inside a yard wall; the roof line is just visible from the main road, 14 November 2011.

5. Pine growing with juniper going south on route 554 in the northern part of Wild Rivers National Recreation Area before the crest that leads down to the Carson National Forest and El Rito, 15 November 2011.

6. Piñon I transplanted from my garden to an area protected by winterfat along the drive in 2006, 19 November 2011; it’s still in the puppy stage when it looks like it’d be nice to have around the house.



See entry for 27 August 2006 that provides more information on piñon and describes my attempts to transplant them.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Cottonwood Copse


Weather: Morning temperatures settled into low 20's, last rain 11/05/11; 10:20 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Pansies, sweet alyssum, other plants in sheltered positions may have one or two flowers left.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, purple and coral beards tongue, sea pinks, coral bells, Saint Johns wort, oxalis, hollyhocks, winecup, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tansy, Hopi teas, anthemis, blanket flowers, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses.

Pepper plant dropped its drying red pod when the stem holding it was killed by the cold.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum and sand cherry, leathery Bradford pear, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Husker’s beard tongue.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, blue flax, stickleaf, winterfat, chocolate flower, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Berries have disappeared from my Russian olive along with the leaves that covered them. Berries are also gone from the pyracantha near the village. With the drought leaving less food for local animals, those passing through seem to have taken more that I can see than usual.

Weekly update: Cottonwoods have become endangered in this area because their habitat has been altered, partly from draining malaria incubating wetlands, party by dams that have stopped tributaries from flooding the banks of the Rio Grande, and partly by generally drying weather the past decades.


A few weeks ago I walked out in the far arroyo and discovered a cottonwood copse in the process of forming. There were mature trees near the point where the arroyo and the county road intersect. Trees about three feet tall were growing back by a high sand and clay bank. Much younger seedlings were growing in raised areas in the arroyo bottom itself.

Cottonwoods don’t easily reproduce themselves. The seeds are only viable for a couple weeks after they mature, which is in the spring, but they germinate within 24 hours if they land on bare, moist soil.

They then need to stay moist at the level of the young roots, but the leaves need full sunlight to feed the roots, a difficult balance in this environment. During the time the roots are reaching down to the water table, seedlings can tolerate very wet conditions. However, young plants don’t always survive heavy water flows.


In the wild, good conditions for developing new trees occur periodically, maybe every five to ten years. The existence of three generations of trees so close to each other means these ideal conditions have been met at least twice in the past decade.

The mature trees are growing where water would have collected or washed from the river ford.

The dirt road through the arroyo has been there for more than 60 years; it shows on the USGS map from the early 1950's. It dropped from relatively high, maybe 15' high, banks. Work must have been done by the county to keep the banks stable and provide a slightly sloped route in and out. I saw the remains of one protecting drain pipe that had emptied water upstream.

The upstream trees lie in the path of water that flows along the arroyo bank from the point where local acequia water enters the arroyo. That area gets lots of water during the summer, but the rate is probably slow and constant so the water supply is fairly reliable. Still it has cut a channel around an island which also supports a tamarix and some chamisa.

Trees could have germinated there any time. The fact they have not is probably indicative of the difficult balance of water and sun young trees require.

One set of young trees are growing between these saplings and the ford, very close to the island bank. I’ve noticed in other parts of the arroyo, those short banks seem to retain water later than the bottom itself.


The other set is in the wide bottom itself on the other side of the island, still closer to the ford. They look about the same age, but were battered by the scouring water that poured through earlier this fall.

I’m guessing these may all have germinated in the spring of 2010 when we had a cold, wet winter followed by a wet spring that lasted long enough for the seedlings to get established. The drought began that summer and lasted until this fall.

Their survival may be helped by changes made to the road this summer. They finally built a bridge over the arroyo. This narrows the water channels and creates a need for a larger area for water to back into while it waits to flow through. Those areas may become pools if the surface is rough enough to prevent the lowest level of water from moving when the flow drops and islands may develop around the area where the young trees are growing.

Notes:
Braatne, Jeffrey H., Stewart B. Rood and Paul E. Heilman. “Life History, Ecology and Conservation of Riparian Cottonwoods in North America” in R. F. Stettler, H. D. Bradshaw, P. E. Heilman, and T. M. Hinckley, Biology of Populus.

Photograph: Cottonwoods taken in the far arroyo, 25 October 2011.

Sunday, November 06, 2011

Weeds


Weather: After weeks of morning temperatures just below 32, they fell to the low 20's Thursday; last rain 11/05/11; 10:36 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses.

Even before Thursday’s cold temperatures, trees were dropping their leaves.

Beyond the walls and fences: Cheat grass bright green under Siberian elm in wash; Siberian elm leaves getting golden bronze tinge; choke cherries turned red-orange.

The arroyos and prairie: Chamisa in sheltered locations, broom senecio and purple asters going to seed; new loco plants up; more gypsum phacelia and stickleaf seedlings up.

With last week’s rain, the soil crust became active in the prairie and arroyo and other places near my house I explored. Bright green moss appeared and more of those grey-white mushrooms pushed through, and didn’t seem to have been affected by Thursday’s cold. I also saw one cream colored, flat-topped mushroom along the ranch road.

Juniper berries on the tree I visit near the far arroyo disappeared. Since it seems a little early for local birds to have striped the tree, I assume something passing through ate them.

Four-leaved saltbush, whose root was exposed when water washed away the surrounding dirt in the arroyo, put out tiny leaves along the exposed area.

In my yard, looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose.

Looking south: Floribunda roses.

Looking west: Flax leaves beginning to turn yellow.

Looking north: Sheltered blanket flowers, chrysanthemums; privet leaves have burgundy leather look.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragons.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches on Maximilian sunflower seed heads; bee on florist mum.

Weekly update: Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian born detective, told Dr. Burton that when he had time “I am going to attend - seriously - to the cultivation of vegetable marrows,” not as a mere gardener, but as someone who improves their taste.

Then, when he’d actually had time to grow them, he told Dr. Sheppard that “a man may work towards a certain object, may labor and toil to attain a certain kind of leisure and occupation and then find that, after all, he yearns for the old busy days and the old occupations that he thought himself so glad to leave?”

My retirement coincided with a change in my garden. I’d never before been in one place long enough to get beyond the discovery phase, the one where you buy all sorts of new seeds and plants while trying to learn what will actually grow.

After some 15 years, my garden has been refined to what works here most years. I could still be lured into buying things just to see how they do, but the economy has caused nurseries to retrench, to offer less and less, to grow what banks will finance. Few new plants have been introduced recently to tempt me. There’s little left to read about.

I began wondering what to do next. I could see how people might concentrate on the one or two plants that thrive and give pleasure, how one could, in fact, become a rabid rosarian.

However, I also knew that, if I truly cared about deadheading and weeding, I’d have found a way to do it before now, that the demands of my job weren’t the real reason my garden was always a bit slovenly - Bohemian or natural I’d say - but overgrown and slovenly none the less.

To escape such tedium, I’d begun creeping out onto the prairie to discover the local wildflowers and weeds, for I’ve never been snobbish about anything that blooms. For a while there was always something new. Then, given the limits of this arid environment, I encountered fewer and fewer new species. I’ve now written about all the ones I can identify.

What to do next?

Now that I actually have quit working, I’ve discovered that after a certain time each day, I can’t stand to be in the house. This doesn’t mean, like Poirot, I want to return to some sort of volunteer version of what I used to do.

It means literally, I can’t stand to be in the house. I want to be out walking beyond my old paths or driving about the area.

Two weeks ago I stopped when I saw something red in a field, and discovered those peppers I photographed. To get a better angle, I’d done something I almost never do, crossed through someone’s barbed-wire fence. After all, I had time. I was only going into town to finish something the new person didn’t need to learn. I could get there whenever.

On my way out I noticed someone across the road watching me unhook my sweater. When I went across to say hello and otherwise defend myself, I discovered Rod, for that was his name, had graduated from Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Farm School sometime around 1950 and lived in a trailer on land owned by the man who also owned the pepper field.

He told me about the family that had leased that field to grow vegetables and that he and the land owner had helped put up that pesky fence after people like me had stopped to look. Only they had helped themselves to the produce.

I’d been watching that field all season, had noticed it seemed to have three sections, squash on the north, corn in the center, and something that didn’t seem to have done much on the south. I’d seen the man, his wife, and children out cleaning the fields.

Then, the middle of July I noticed weeds were taking over the aisles.

I thought they were like so many people here who begin ambitiously with a new vegetable plot, improve the soil, keep things neat, then retreat with the heat of summer and find themselves overwhelmed when weeds germinate after the monsoons. Just when the weather’s most foul, the work doubles and triples.

Like Poirot when he threw a marrow over the fence because, after some months of effort, he’d become enraged with its failure, people simply give up mid-summer.

I noticed the same thing happening in another field where someone had planted some kind of melon for the first time, then let pigweed take over. However, they may simply have abandoned the crop in early September after the listeria breakout make all melons suspect. This week they finally got around to plowing the field to remove the weeds, but left melon remnants.

When I made some comment to Rod about people here not understanding the dangers of weeds as competitors for resources, he denied the people across the road were unwise. They’d gotten several sweeps of their peppers before they cleared the dead vegetation the end of September. This week they removed the last vestiges of the chiles.

Now I think those weeds were left deliberately to prevent people from seeing the bright colored vegetables, for it was that part of the field that was most overgrown. Pigweed may have been a useful camouflage, for we all react negatively to it. It had become a defender, not a predator.

Poirot discovered “we miss the daily toil.” He hadn’t grown marrows before, only thought about it. He found his continuity as a private investigator.

For me, the routine of work has always been a way to support my hobbies. I’m not ready to substitute manicuring a garden for paid labor. I still want to explore, do something new, but without moving again.

Nature is still the greatest source of surprise. Only now, novelty is no longer some new flower, but the ways of the familiar. I want to find a way to comment on the pepper farmer and the melon field when I notice them, not wait until I can focus on some plant.

The immediate challenge won’t be in the noticing, for nature trains you to look, but in finding a way to describe the seeming mundane. I don’t know what format will work best as I change from writing about specific plants to writing about the processes of growing, but something always arises from experiment.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. “How It All Came About” in The Labors of Hercules, 1939, first quote.

_____. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, second quote.

Photograph: Melon field overrun by pigweed, 26 October 2011.