Sunday, May 27, 2012

Yuccas


Weather: Lucy Brown weather, with drying winds sent to punish every plant that dared grow or bloom after the winter’s snow; last rain 5/13/12; 14:21 hours of daylight today.

Friday smoke from the Gila Wilderness fires arrived with winds that were gusting to 30 miles an hour in Santa Fé. Humidity levels got down to 6% there. Yesterday the humidity levels were fractionally better, the winds much worse, up to 48 mph, and the smoke came in before sundown.

The weather bureau (NOAA) doesn’t report on Española, so you decide which information applies best by the direction of the winds - south it’s Santa Fé, west it’s Los Alamos.

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpas, wild pink, Persian yellow, Dr. Huey and other hybrid roses, Japanese honey suckle, silver lace vine, Spanish broom, bearded iris nearly gone, yuccas, red hot poker, datura, donkey tail spurge, sweet pea, alfalfa, purple clover, blue perennial salvia, yellow flowered yarrow, brome grass; buds on Virginia creeper, daylily.

Cherries available from roadside vendors.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, hedgehog cactus, four-wing saltbush, yuccas, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless cryptantha, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, purple mat flower, gypsum phacelia, stick leaf, tufted white evening primrose, scarlet bee blossom, blue gilia, white and pink bindweeds, nits and lice, oxalis, wild licorice, scurf and bush peas, loco, sweet sand verbena, English and woolly plantains, silver leaf nightshade, horse tail, flea bane, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, cream tips, strap leaf and golden hairy asters, native dandelion; needle, rice, June and three awn grasses; buds on prickly pear, showy milkweed.

In my yard, looking east: Peony, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, small leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, Maltese cross, sea pink, coral bells, pink evening primrose, oriental poppy, winecup mallow, Rose Queen salvia, purple clover; buds on hollyhock, baby’s breath.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, raspberries, beauty bush, Dutch clover.

Looking west: Chives, vinca, blue flax, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, baptisia, Johnson’s Blue geranium; buds on Husker and purple beardtongues, sea lavender, Rumanian sage.

Looking north: Black locust, privet, golden spur columbine, hartweig evening primrose, chocolate flower, coreopsis; buds on blanket flower, anthemis, Mexican hat.

Bedding plants: Pansies, sweet alyssum, petunia, nicotiana, moss rose, impatiens.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Gold finches, geckos, orange paisley butterfly, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.


Weekly update: The day of the hedgehog, the year of the yucca. The near desert plants took last summer’s monsoons and last winter’s snows as signs of grace. What’s happened since has just been one of those things they endure.

Thursday and Friday, two hedgehog cacti bloomed in my yard. The last time I saw them was July 19 of 2008 and before that June 27 of 2003. The volunteers may have bloomed other times, unseen, but they definitely are sporadic.


Yuccas are much more reliable, blooming roughly the same time every year, except of course for those times like last year’s drought when they pass. The one favored in yards is the broad leafed Yucca baccata associated with the bases of mountains and Santa Fé canyon. The leaves get thick and curve ever so slightly to make room for large stalks that rarely rise much above the leaves. It was blooming this year mid April.


The one just coming into bloom, Yucca recurvifolia, has softer leaves, more like an iris or red hot poker and florets on tiny stems that allow them to hang like bells. This is not native, but comes from the southeastern United States.


Everyone knows, but few grow the tall Yucca elata. The roots of the southern New Mexico native are large and hard to transplant, and so they tend to be grown in front of commercial establishments where backhoes are not intrusions. One woman told me they were called century plants because they bloomed so rarely.


Those that grow wild are more elusive. When they’re brought into town where they get more water, the members of the agave family get as large as the broad leafed cousins. They’ve been blooming for a few weeks now.


Out on the dry grass lands, the plants are smaller, the straight, narrow leaves more often a faded green with fewer of the loose fibers found on the broad leafed ones.


Like the others, Yucca glauca, is a tease. It sends up a narrow blooming stalk, then pauses a week before opening a few lower florets.


By the time the middle ones are open, the lower ones already are dying. Before the top has bloomed, the middle flowers are gone and fruits are appearing below.


If you want to see the individual, downward facing florets, you must get very close, something the sharp edged leaves discourage.


Well you may ask, is this all there is, after a year without blooming, after years of browned out leaves, a stalk that looks ratty before it’s done blooming, and leaves a dried gray carcass?

The woman who called the one a century plant was waiting for the narrow leafed native to burst on her daily commute to town from Velarde, for she knows they, like everything in New Mexico, do well more often than once a hundred years. You just have to wait.


The winds can’t last forever. Mañana will be better.


Notes:
Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.

Photographs:
1. Tall Yucca elata blooming outside the Santa Clara casino, 17 May 2012.

2. Hedgehog cactus blooming wild in my yard Thursday, 24 May 2012.

3. Broad leafed Yucca baccata blooming in a yard down the road, 19 April 2012.

4. Weeping Yucca recurvifolia blooming outside a commercial building in Española Thursday, 24 May 2012.

5. Close up of above Yucca recurvifolia flowers, 24 May 2012.

6. Narrow leafed Yucca glauca blooming near a ditch spillway on Santa Clara land, 9 May 2012.

7. Yucca glauca blooming in a yard in town, 10 May 2012, with one plant in full bloom and another with just the bud stalks.

8. Yucca glauca growing on dry Santa Clara land, 19 April 2012; only some of these bloomed.

9. Close up of Yucca glauca stalk in my garden, 17 May 2012; plant was purchased from a nursery.

10. Yucca glauca before it’s done blooming in my garden with good and bad florets this past Thursday, 24 May 2012

11. Close up of Yucca gluaca floret in my garden, 20 May 2012.

12. Another variety of tall yucca, being cared for in a garden near the village, 14 April 2012. Yucca schottii, a cross between elata and baccata, grows to the southwest in Hidalgo County and adjacent Arizona.

13. The same yuccas in bloom Thursday, 24 May 2012.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Sweet Sand Verbena


Weather: Rain last weekend, followed by sun and winds determined to take it back; last rain 5/13/12; 14:12 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpas,wild pink, Persian yellow, Austrian Copper, Dr. Huey and other hybrid roses, pyracantha, snowball, purple flowered locust, alfalfa, Spanish broom, silver lace vine, bearded iris, yuccas, red hot poker, peony, datura, donkey tail spurge, sweet pea, blue perennial salvia, yellow flowered yarrow.

One person’s corn is about 8" high.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, Russian olive, tamarix, four-winger saltbush, yuccas, fernleaf globemallow, western stickseed, bractless cryptantha, alfilerillo, hoary cress, tumble and purple mustards, purple mat flower, gypsum phacelia, stick leaf, tufted white evening primrose, scarlet bee blossom, blue gilia, bindweed, nits and lice, oxalis, wild licorice, scurf and bush peas, pale trumpets, sand verbena, woolly plantain, flea bane, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, cream tips, native dandelion; needle, rice, June, three awn and cheat grasses; moss; new growth on prickly pear.

As soon as the storms passed through and left some rain, the biological crust became active in my yard. On Monday morning, my neighbor’s yard was a silvery sheet of two inch high pigweed. Lamb’s quarter germinated soon after.

In my yard, looking east: Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, small leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, sea pink, coral bells, pink evening primrose, oriental poppy, winecup mallow, pink salvia; buds on hollyhock, baby’s breath.

Looking south: Rugosa and miniature roses, raspberries, beauty bush, Dutch clover; buds on floribunda roses.

Looking west: Skunk bush, vinca, blue flax, catmints, baptisia, Johnson’s Blue geranium; buds on chives, purple beardtongue.

Perennial four o’clock broke through on Tuesday morning, a few days after rain finally reached it.

Looking north: Fragrant black locust, privet, golden spur columbine, chocolate flower; buds on blanket flower, coreopsis, Moonshine yarrow.

Bedding plants: Pansies, sweet alyssum, petunia, nicotiana, moss rose, impatiens.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, hummingbirds, skinny tan snake with darker markings, geckos, lady bugs, bees, cabbage, black, sulfur and orange butterflies with brown paisley markings, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: In Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T. S. Eliot tells us “a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.”

“First of all, there's the name that the family use daily” and then ‘There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter.”

For plants these correspond roughly to the Latin names used by botanists like Abronia fragrans and the commonplace ones like sweet sand verbena and prairie snowball.

But, Eliot says, there’s something far more important to keeping a cat’s “tail perpendicular” and his “whiskers spread wide” and that’s

“The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.”

I’m not enough of a new ager to devine what plants think, but I do know, for plants I’ve discovered on my own, without aid from some adult, I have private names, the ones I used before I was corrected. Even now, with sand verbena, I revert to things like allium head


or spoon leaves


when I come upon it in an unexpected location because adult onset knowledge isn’t as instantaneously recoverable as that acquired as a child.

The problem of names go much deeper, extends to every piece of a plant. I may contemplate the sand verbena’s flower cluster, but a botanist, tsk tsk, will remind me that, like bougainvillea and other members of the four o’clock family, the inflorescences have no actual petals.

Bracts form a pale pink tinged cap that opens to reveal any number of long white tubes that flare into five fluted points called limbs.


The structure’s more obvious when the flowers dry.


The fragrant night bloomer ranges through the great plains and intermontane region from Montana and North Dakota south to Chihuahua. To the west, it shades into Abronia elliptica in Utah; to the east it’s evolved into Abronia macrocarpa in Texas. Abronia bolackii, found only in San Juan County, is probably an intermediate form of elliptica.

The morphological variability that led some to classify elliptica as a form of the local wildflower exists here in its blooming habits. It seems to be closely related to the availability of moisture. When I first saw the white flowers in 2009 it was late August.

The next year, I saw them blooming in mid-May. The heads were dead by late July. After the monsoons began, new seedlings emerged in August with a few plants blooming.

Last year, the year after the drought and early May snow, the plants emerged in April, but there were no flowers. I didn’t see any new seedlings until October.

This year, the flowers began to appear the end of April, and the hillside where the biological crust is often active is now covered with flowers.


The past few weeks have seen a change in the winds from cool ones carrying moisture to hot, dry, water sucking ones. Yesterday, when I put my fingers around the rubbery, white taproot of one growing where it would be trampled in a path, there was no moisture in the top inches of sand.


When I tugged, there was some resistence from below, indicating the plant was still able to find water, but that its disappearance was probably a factor encourgaing so many to rush to seed in the past few days.

Ken Fern, who’s tried to grow the hairy perennial in England, says the long, darkly lustrous seeds are slow to germinate unless you peel their outer skin and soak them for 24 hours in warm water. Even then, it may take a month or two to see results at 59 degrees.

Such variability makes it difficult to interpret Leonora Curtin’s statement that new mothers who used it to stimulate the flow of milk gathered entire plants in August. Is that when they were green, blooming or completely dried?

She says local Spanish speaking women made a tea which was drunk every third morning, with the last dose on the ninth day, and that they rubbed some on their breasts while they were drinking the fluid. Michael Moore suggests others take it “frequently in small amounts.”

One thing they agree is the women called it lechuguilla, a term derived from sappy lettuce that Curtin said was also used for Indian hemp and Moore says was used for some agaves. The Ramah Navajo, who’ve used a cold lotion to treat sores or bathe their feet in a strong infusion, called it beetle food. The Zuñi, who eat the flowers to ease stomach pains, call it k'opwe:ah awan ak'wa:we.

Little lettuce, beetle food, stomach-ache medicine, like my spoon leaves, are clearly mnemonic names, but not likely the plant’s very own

“ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

Notes:
Ackerman, Jennifer and William F. Jennings. “The Genus Abronia (Nyctaginaceae) in Colorado, with Notes on Abronia bolackii in New Mexico,” Research Institute of Texas Journal 2:419-423:2008.

Camazine, Scott and Robert A. Bye. “A Study of the Medical Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 2:365-388:1980.

Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Eliot, T. S. “The Naming of Cats” in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, 1939.

Fern, Ken. “Abronia fragrans - Nutt.” Plants for a Future Database; his source is Growing from Seed, a magazine edited by G. Rice.

Moore, Michael. Los Remedios, 1990.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952.

Williamson, Paula S. and Charles R. Werth. “Levels and Patterns of Genetic Variation in the Endangered Species Abronia macrocarpa (Nyctaginaceae),” American Journal of Botany 86:293-301:1999.


Photographs:
1. Sand verbena bud, opening bud and fully opened head, growing on rise on bank of far arroyo, 23 August 2009.

2. Sand verbena heads, with unopened buds farther along the stem to the left; same general location, 25 September 2011.

3. Sand verbena leaves growing in area of active biological crust near far arroyo, 25 April 2010.

4. Sand verbena flower and bud clusters showing the long tubes in their caps, same general location, 19 May 2012.

5. Drying sand verbena head, same general location, 20 June 2010.
6. Sand verbena growing on a hill where the biological crust is active near the far arroyo, 9 May 2012.

7. Sand verbena root, 19 May 2012.

8. Small sand verbena plants with two flower heads in the area near the far arroyo, 19 May 2012; purple mat flower at lower left.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Known Unknowns


Weather: Real rain yesterday, with a bit of hail; 14:03 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Wild pink, Persian yellow, Dr. Huey and other hybrid roses, pyracantha, snowball, purple flowered locust, silver lace vine, bearded iris, yuccas, red hot poker, peony, datura, donkey tail spurge, blue perennial salvia; buds on oriental poppy, sweet pea.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, tamarix, yuccas, fernleaf globemallow, western stickseed, bractless and tawny cryptanthas, alfilerillo, hoary cress, tumble and purple mustards, purple mat flower, gypsum phacelia, tufted white evening primrose, scarlet bee blossom, blue gilia, bindweed, oxalis, wild licorice, scurf and bush peas, golden smoke, pale trumpets, Indian paintbrush near a chamisa, woolly plantain, flea bane, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, cream tips, common and native dandelion; needle, rice, June and cheat grasses; buds on three awn grass; berries formed on juniper.

In my yard: Black locust, rugosa roses, spirea, beauty bush, skunk bush, baby blue iris, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, small leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, coral bells, golden spur columbine, vinca, yellow alyssum, blue flax, pink evening primrose, chocolate flower; buds on floribunda roses, privet, sea pink, blanket flowers, coreopsis, Moonshine yarrow; sour cherries formed; berries on sand cherries; pods forming on Siberian peas; zinnia and reseeded morning glory seeds coming up.

Bedding plants: Pansies, sweet alyssum, petunia, nicotiana, moss rose, impatiens.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, goldfinches, pair of hummingbirds around beauty bush, skinny pale red snake, geckos, cabbage butterfly, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed when he divided reality into known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Overlooking his context, it seems a perfectly reasonable way to deal with the fact many plants exist outside popular wildflower guides.

The known unknowns are the ones that appear every year in roughly the same place at roughly the same time with enough consistency that you recognize them, much like the man who sold newspapers at a street booth in Philadelphia in the 1960's. I saw him every day, but he discouraged any conversation, made himself anonymous.

The unknown unknowns are the ones you see once or twice, but not often enough to see any pattern, much like customers at the wooden shack you think you’ve seen before but aren’t quite sure if they even live in the neighborhood.

The one can be given a label, the others remain lists of characteristics.


Pink bud is a known unknown. It bloomed profusely in 2010 and hardly at all last year, though there were many buds. This year it's blooming again near the chamisas where it grows on a platform raised a few inches from the water path in the far arroyo. I don’t know if it was the drought of 2010 that determined the blooming pattern in 2011, or the late snow.

It seems to only boom once in spring, with the behavior of an annual. The heads emerge from the leaves as the stems push their way through the earth.


They begin as tight knobs of round pink balls that break into groups of five, with one in the center. These each break into two. The pink turns ivory before the five petaled flowers open. The resemble the tops of milkweed flowers, but not the undersides. Within each cluster, the center floret opens first, then the others in succesion.


Within a few weeks they produce what can only be called berries that begin green, then turn purple.


The leaves that grew lush during the summer, begin to brown in August.


The stems thicken and become wooden. The empty flower stalks turn black, their fruiting ends harden.


The roots are straight, stiff single white shafts with asparagus like scales.

After the leaves die, everything blows away, leaving no surface evidence of their existence.


Rosemary is a very different known unknown. While pink bud flourishes in late spring, this perennial likes colder, damper days.

It took me a while to distinguish it from blue gilia, which has similar clusters of basal needle shaped leaves and grows in the same area. However, the leaves of this form a ring, rather like ring muhly grass, that produces new growth on the edges of the old in late fall. This turns chartreuse, even rust, in winter, then begins to brighten in March. When you look carefully, they look a bit like shrubby branches.


The flowers are impossible to see, unless you bend to them - the tiny champaign white flowers blend into the sand around them. You’re only alerted to their existence when you see the stems rising above like grass pinks. The fact I rarely see them fully open may mean they aren’t morning flowers.


While it’s blooming at the moment, last year I didn’t see the flowers until October. And, while I’ve seen it in other places, the place it’s growing on the prairie is on the north facing side of a hilly rise that’s often covered with active biological crust that supports moss.


Photographs:
1. Pink bud under grass and a chamisa near the far arroyo floor, 27 April 2012.

2. Pink bud flower, 22 May 2011.

3. Pink bud emerging, 11 April 2010.

4. Pink bud groups of five with central floret opening first; just emerging cluster at the back; 22 May 2011.

5. Pink bud green berries beginning to turn purple; leaves have grown lush; 30 May 2010.

6. Pink bud leaves turning brown under a chamisa, 14 August 2011.

7. Pink bud remains, 25 September 2011.


8. Rosemary flower, 30 May 2011.

9. Mature rosemary plant with this year’s growth coexisting with the ruins of the past, 4 March 2012.

10. Greened up rosemary plant with barely visible flower buds, 27 March 2011.

11. Rosemary in winter, with an activate biological crust and moss on an north facing rise edging the far arroyo, 29 December 2010.

12. Bright green rosemary in bloom in fall, 9 October 2011.

Sunday, May 06, 2012

White Evening Primrose


Weather: March winds and June temperatures; the end of afternoon clouds marked the beginning of what is usually an early summer drought; last useful precipitation 4/9/12; 13:47 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Wild pink, Austrian Copper, Persian yellow, Dr. Huey and other hybrid roses, snowball, silver lace vine, bearded iris, muscular yuccas, red hot poker, peony, datura, donkey tail spurge, blue perennial salvia; buds on pyracantha.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, tamarix, fernleaf globemallow, western stickseed, bractless and tawny cryptanthas, alfilerillo, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustards, purple mat flower, gypsum phacelia, tufted white evening primrose, antelope horns, blue gilia, running sand verbena, bindweed, oxalis, flea bane, goat’s beard, common and native dandelion; needle, rice, June and cheat grasses; buds on cream tips, three awn grass.

In my yard: Black locust, spirea, beauty bush, skunk bush, tulip, baby blue iris, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, small leaved soapwort, coral bells, vinca, yellow alyssum, blue flax, pink evening primrose; buds on floribunda roses, privet, Jupiter’s beard, sea pink, golden spur columbine; squash seeds up.

Bedding plants: Pansies, sweet alyssum, petunia.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, goldfinches, hummingbird, geckos, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Ants have been taking Siberian elm seeds back to their hills. I’m not sure which is worse, the botanical problem or the zoological cure.

Weekly update: This has been a most peculiar spring. After a prolonged drought with severe winters, the year started out as one of recovery - good snow in December with more in February and tolerably low temperatures.

Then came March. The winds didn’t seem unusual in the beginning, but by the end of the month there’d been several bursts of unusually high ones with afternoon temperatures jumping from the mid 50's at the beginning to the mid 70's by the end. Then, no more rain. Weather watchers were proclaiming it the driest, hottest month in recorded history (which isn’t more than about a hundred years).

Unlike modern Cassandras who live in darkened rooms where the only information on climate comes from television, plants take their cues from so many sources it’s hard to know what’s motivating them. Take the large flowered white evening primroses, which are blooming in my yard for the first time since 2008.

At first, I assumed they had returned because of the extended warm growing season with wet soil and moisture in the winds, but my memories get a bit confused. As near as I can tell there are two species that grow around here, the ones blooming now with large flowers on low plants


and ones that bloom later in the season with small flowers on taller plants.

The one with abutting petals is probably the tufted species, Oenothera caespitosa. The one with petals separated into crosses is likely the prairie evening primrose, Oenothera albicaulis.

The small flowered annual is relatively common, especially later in the season when it grows in what seem the same places outside the fences along the orchard road. The perennial large flowered species seems to only appear this time of year and is more sporadic. The greatest florescence occurred some years ago when I was still commuting to Los Alamos and one field where cattle were grazing was filled with glowing white early in the morning.

When I didn’t see them again, I assumed the animals had eaten or trampled them before they had produced seeds. When they stopped appearing in my yard with any predictability, I blamed the primrose beetle invasion of 2003.

Then I drove to Albuquerque Saturday where I saw the four petaled flowers scattered along the west side of the road and in the median in the San Domingo area. They weren’t prolific, but they were there.

My curiosity was piqued. I drove the road to Los Alamos earlier this week to see if they were back there like they were here. The area of relatively flat Santa Clara lands between the road and the river was filled with white. The ravines were empty and the area further south where I remembered them from the past had few.


When I went back to my notes, such as they were then, all I found for 2001 was: “4/30 bloom beyond fence, bloom SI and SC.” I made no notes the next year. In 2003 all I wrote was “6/9 not see on way to work.” In 2004 I was equally cryptic, “5/15 some blooming along SL roadside, not see any yet in fields.”

I know SI refers to the San Ildefonso section of the road to Los Alamos from Española and SC to Santa Clara domain, but SL is a mystery. It’s always hard to record the absence of something, which is what I was trying to do.

I have no idea what the weather was like in 2001. It’s hard to describe the actual weather a month ago - it's more than the recorded temperatures and wind speeds. But one thing I realized is 2001 was the year after the Cerro Grande fire, and this is the first season after the Las Conchas and other fires.

Fire can affect seeds in a number of ways. Heat, smoke or chemicals can stratify long dormant seeds, but which is hard to know. Nurseries use sulfuric acid when they need to duplicate the effects of smoke.

When I was trying to learn what was in the smoke last summer, the laboratory was more concerned with telling us what wasn’t there. If I went beyond its published test results to discover the constituents of smoke in general the available information was too contradictory to help.

While smoke may be important, it’s been many months since the worst passed and ten years is a long period for seeds to survive in the soil. Potted plants are sold by some native plant nurseries who probably don’t treat the seed. Something else must have contributed to outbrust of color.

Winds can carry warmed or water soddened seeds that have been dislodged from the ground by the fire’s own wind currents or those of aerial fire fighting equipment. When I look at the general distribution of the current flowers, they spread out in a narrow area north of the Black Mesa on both sides of the river, that is, the Santa Clara land on the west, and my yard and the prairie to the south on the east side of the Río Grande along with the scattered area some miles south of last year’s Cochiti fire corridor.

The Cerro Grande fire didn’t move as far north as the Las Conchas one, and the flowers in 2001, if my memory set by the presence of those cattle is correct, were close to the path of that fire which was successfully contained before it reached far into Santa Clara land.

If fire, wind and smoke are the reason for the many flowers this year, then I probably won’t see them like this again - much of the available fuel was consumed last year. But, if they are the product of the unusual growing season, I may never see them again, or they could become a standard feature of late spring. The future is impossible to know, and its historic sources difficult to reconstruct, even when you’ve lived through them.


Photographs:
1. Large flowered tufted white evening primrose with western stickseed in my yard the last time they appeared, 17 May 2008.

2. Tufted white evening primrose, Santa Clara land, 2 May 2012.

3. Small flowered prairie white evening primroses on a neighbor’s land, 3 August 2008.

4. Tufted white evening primroses on Santa Clara land, 3 May 2012; the line of brighter colored trees marks the Río Grande; the Sangre de Cristo rise in the distance.

5. Tufted white evening primroses on Santa Clara land with cholla cacti, 3 May 2012.