Sunday, July 29, 2012

Gladiola


Weather: Rain Thursday night; 14:02 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Tree of heaven, hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, rose of Sharon, hibiscus, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Shasta daisies; corn tasseling.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, bush morning glory, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet and white prairie clovers, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, knotted spurge, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, pale blue trumpets, Hopi tea, gum weed, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, horseweed, wild lettuce, golden hairy asters, native dandelion, goldenrod; summer grasses coming into bloom.

In my yard, looking east: Bouncing Bess, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, large-leaf soapwort, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort peaked.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower, scarlet flax, Sensation cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, calamintha, leadplant, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Hartweig evening primrose, nasturtium, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos, bachelor buttons.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons, sweet alyssum.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, butterflies, hummingbird moth, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Fruit still on sour cherry and sand cherry.

Weekly update: Glads were no longer exotic flowers when I was in 4-H in Michigan in the 1950's. They were a crop.

Received wisdom was still that after the first fall frost you needed to “start digging up plants, cut off the foliage, about 1/4 to 3/4 inches above the corm, allowing the corms to dry somewhat” and store them indoors at temperatures “just above freezing” because the South African derived hybrids were so tender they “must never be exposed to freezing temperatures.”

The key word is exposed. In 1934 Liberty Hyde Bailey noted that undisturbed “corms often persist, even in northern states if well protected with ground covering” while the author of the "Gladiola" article in E. L. D. Seymour’s Encyclopedia reported research from 1937 by the Missouri Botanical Garden that plants could survive if the corms were “planted at least six inches deep and protected.” The author eschewed responsibility for the heresy by adding “This is a question that growers can well investigate for themselves.”

Lifting the molting brown corms fit the then pervading idea in the 1950's that one didn’t spend time in one’s outdoor room, but had a cutting garden to grow flowers to bring indoors. Such gardens were often sections of existing vegetable gardens where seeds were planted in furrows and cultivated at the same time.

I had problems my first years in 4-H finding something to send to the county fair because my space in my mother’s herbaceous border didn’t produce exhibition sized flowers. But there came a time when we were supposed to show flower arrangements, rather than flowers, and the fine print allowed you to purchase the flowers.

Gladiolas are the simplest plant to arrange. You need no skill or imagination to take an odd number of stalks, cut them in decreasing lengths, and stick them in a nest of upright pins. The stalks don’t need wiring because they’re naturally stiff and often have interesting forms. The flowers in their various stages of opening provide the required anchoring base and diminishing upright line. All you need do is add a few leaves from some other plant at the bottom to emphasize the focal point.

The one thing you do need, though, is glads. My mother would bundle me into the car and drive around country roads looking for men with large cutting gardens or fields of flowers willing to sell us the necessary flowers.

All that time, I was suspicious of anything that required digging and replanting. When I moved here, I saw people growing gladiolas, and gave them a try, with little success. The first thing I learned was that you couldn’t use the corms sold in the local stores which had died from poor storage.

The second thing I learned is that while gladiolas may have been the “most popular annual-growing plant” in 1943, they no longer were widely available in nursery catalogs. Bulb catalogs focus on species planted in the fall, like tulips and daffodils. Gladiolas not only are planted in the spring, but are an American innovation outside the distribution of the Dutch bulb importers for spring sales.

The third thing I learned, through trial and error, is that I had much better luck with the smaller flowered varieties than the large exhibition ones. However, they were even harder to find in mail order sources.

The fourth thing I learned is that even those varieties that would grow here weren’t all that successful. Gophers attacked them in 2000 and grasshoppers would occasionally go after the leaves. I haven’t seen many growing in the area since 1999 and I planted my last corms in 2005. The next year one stalk emerged that produced a small yellow flower with reddish blotches in late June.

They were planted along the back porch where roses now grow in water that drips from the roof. In last year’s drought, there was no moisture to condense from the air to maintain them. I put down a soaker hose to help the roses survive.

The middle of July I saw something that looked like gladiola leaves within the canes of a hybrid tea rose that had died back to the Doctor Huey root stock. I couldn’t be sure, since it never bloomed, but once you’ve handled gladiola leaves you recognize the long narrow, light green blades that are flexible enough to curve slightly. They may be members of the iris family, and compared to iris, but you never confuse the two.

This year I noticed the leaves on June 7 and discovered a stalk was flowering last week. It was probably the same bi-color that had appeared six years ago.

I say probably, because it wasn’t the exact same root. Each year, gladiolas produce new corms above the existing ones that flowered, as well as two smaller ones in the roots. Albert Wilkinson tells you to replant the top corm to produce flowering stalks, and, if you’re interested, to plant the smaller ones for two seasons to “work up a stock of a variety.”

However, Jo Ann Gardner was told, the process of renewal introduces genetic changes, so that the fancy hybrids tend to change “form or color over many years of propagation” and heirloom varieties disappear.

So what do I have growing? A gladiolas for sure, and most likely the offspring of a butterfly type. But it may or not be exactly what I planted or what I saw in 2006. It is what could survive on its own in an area protected in winter by cheat grass without uplift.


Notes:
Bailey, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1934.

Gardner, Jo Ann. The Heirloom Garden, 1992; she got her information from Grant Wilson of the Canadian Gladiolas Society.

Seymour, E. L. D. The New Garden Encyclopedia, 1946 edition; source of the third quotation.

Wilkinson, Albert E. The Flower Encyclopedia and Gardener’s Guide, 1943; source of the first, second and fourth unattributed quotations.

Photographs:
1. Gladiola flower, 22 July 2012.

2. Gladiola stalk, the same day.

3. Gladiola leaves growing with a Doctor Huey rose, 7 July 2012.

4. Gladiola buds, 22 July 2012, which make flower arranging easy.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Dry Weather


Weather: Storms passed through but left no water; last rain 7/12/12; 14:12 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Tree of heaven, hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Shasta daisies; cutting hay.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, bush morning glory, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet and white prairie clovers, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, knotted spurge, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, pale blue trumpets, Hopi tea peaked, gum weed, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, horseweed, wild lettuce, golden hairy asters, native dandelion, goldenrod; clammy weed germinating.

In my yard, looking east: Snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, coral beardtongue, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose peaked, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower, scarlet flax; buds on Sensation cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, calamintha, leadplant, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, ladybells, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Hartweig evening primrose, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons, sweet alyssum.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, butterflies, bees, hornets, harvester, large red and small black ants.

Weekly update: When I check the web each morning to find the previous day’s humidity levels for Santa Fé and Los Alamos, I see more and more alarmist stories about what a dreadfully dry year this has been with some of the worst fire conditions.

They reached a crescendo this week when the Weather Channel ran the headline “2012 Drought Rivals Dust Bowl.” They were reporting drought conditions have now touched 54.6% of the country. If you looked at their detail, that percentage was 54.4% in 1936, but 79.9% in 1934, and there were two years in the 1950's were worse, 1954 and 1956.

Those still recovering from storms that took down power on the east coast didn’t bother with the detail, either in the Weather Channel report or in the underlying “State of the Climate” report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Web sites for The Atlantic and the Daily Beast repeated the Weather Channel headline.

I felt like I was in a time warp. That’s last year they were discussing, not this. Conditions are dry. We had no spring rain, but we had snow in winter that lingered long enough to penetrate. There’s still enough water in the Santa Cruz dam to support irrigation; last year it was rationed.

I have yet to see the arroyo bottom turned into a wind swept dune like it was last year. My feet haven’t gotten hot from heat accumulated in sand like they did last June 26, the day the Las Conchas fire broke out.

In the past few weeks, monsoon conditions have returned. There’s been a little rain, but afternoon humidity levels have increased. In June they got down to 4%. This week they were 16% on Monday afternoon, but the low Wednesday was 22% in Santa Fé.

When I walked out on the prairie Thursday, there was a layer of soft sand, but the ground was hard below from stored moisture. I saw areas where the vegetation was brown.


But, if you looked closely, the dead gypsum phacelia plants had seed heads.


Stimulated by the winter’s moisture, more plants had germinated than usual, many in marginal areas. When they detected the spring drought, they accelerated their cycle. I saw the first flowers on April 19. In last year’s drought it had been a few days later in April before they bloomed, and in the previous, more normal year it had been mid-May.

They bloomed as quickly as possible to produce seeds, the way a drought adapted species does.


When I walked past the hill where the sand verbena had bloomed earlier, there was nothing to be seen. Even the biological crust was dry and crumbling.


But, they too had bloomed, beginning around April 24. Last year I didn’t see one until September 25, after the drought had been broken.

July is always a drab time here when the effects of the summer solstice heat have not yet been offset by the monsoons. With the early spring, the darkness arrived earlier than usual. But, there were promises for late summer Thursday. Pale trumpets were blooming in areas along the ranch road and arroyo where high banks protected the little water we’ve gotten. The first clammy weeds had germinated in the shaded arroyo bottom.


The most cheering sign of nature’s endurance in the face of an ever changing, ever hostile climate was the bush morning glories. They had been magnificent in 2009 and 2010.


Someone was so attracted they marked their locations with rocks and dug them up last April.


The roots tried to recover, put out a few stems.


Someone came back and cut every stem.


I don’t know if they thought they could take cuttings or their coveting had become so extreme they were jealous of any possibility someone else might see the flowers. They left stems to die by the holes.

The plants tried again, then gave up in the drought. I thought they were gone.

But, people at Plants of the Southwest told me it’s nearly impossible for someone to get the entire root of a mature, drought adapted plant. Their catalog has a photograph of one covered in a woody shell several feet long.

This year, the plants put out some tentative sprouts. Then, with the rain of a week ago, they’re back in bloom.


It isn’t that I live in an alternative universe from that of web page Henny Pennies eager to find signs of climate change doom. It’s that they live in the current moment. That can be a distorting experience. One day this week the afternoon temperatures reached 90 like they had in late June (the hottest month on record, i.e., since the weather service began keeping records in 1895), but most days temperatures were in the low 80's.

Gardeners always live in multiple dimensions. We are blessed with patchy memories, we recall only the good years and somehow forget we’re living in an arid region. We always see future possibilities when we look at this year’s failed experiments. We stare at a hole but see lavender flowers.

Notes: For more on bush morning glories, see post for 19 July 2009; for gypsum phacelia see 28 November 2010; for sand verbena see 20 Mary 2012; and for clammy weed see 6 September 2009.

Atlantic. “The 2012 Drought Reaches 'Dust Bowl' Proportions,” TheAtlanticWire.com website.

Daily Beast. “2012 Drought Rivals Dust Bowl,” 15 July 2012, TheDailyBeast.com website.

Plants of the Southwest. Catalog 2011.

United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climatic Data Center. “State of the Climate National Overview, June 2012"

Weather Channel. “2012 Drought Rivals Dust Bowl,” updated 16 July 2012 by Weather.com website.

Photographs:
1. Pale blue trumpets blooming in the far arroyo bottom, 19 July 2012, in front of a washed up chamisa or four-winged saltbush trunk.

2. Dried gypsum phacelia in the far arroyo bottom, 19 July 2012.

3. Dried gypsum phacelia heads, 23 June 2012.

4. Purple gypsum phacelia growing around white sand verbenas in the far arroyo bottom, 9 May 2012.

5. Prairie hill, 19 July 2012, where sand verbenas had flourished in May.

6. Clammy weed seedlings in far arroyo bottom, 19 July 2012.

7. Bush morning glory blooming along the ranch road near the far arroyo, 27 June 2010.

8. Bush morning glory hole, 15 May 2011.

9. Bush morning glory’s regenerated stems, 19 June 2011.

10. Bush morning glory after someone returned, 3 July 2011.

11. Bush morning glory this week, 19 June 2011.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Fernbush


Weather: No sooner did I spray my black locust stump to kill the borers than we got three days of rain. 14:20 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Tree of heaven, hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, daylily, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Shasta daisies; red beginning to show on apples.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, mullein, tumble mustard, scarlet bee blossom, velvetweed, white and pink bindweeds, scurf peas, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, knotted spurge, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, Hopi tea, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, horseweed, wild lettuce, golden hairy asters, native dandelion, goldenrod.

In my yard, looking east: Snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, coral beardtongue, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower, scarlet flax.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, calamintha, leadplant, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, ladybells peaked, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Hartweig evening primrose, nasturtium, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, hummingbird moths, cabbage and other butterflies, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

The day after I put down a soaker hose to the new cherry tree to replace the sprinkler I’d been using in the heat of June some burrowing animal left mounds under its trail of water to remind me you cannot just put a plant out in virgin territory here.

Weekly update: There’s something about an abandoned building that evokes thoughts of what must have been, places like those along the main road from Santa Fé to Taos that remind you Española wasn’t always the domain of chain outlets with paved parking lots. It once was the proud center of small shops serving tourists and the locus of the finest homes.

One vacant compound has a step down into what looks like it had been a store in a wall that joins the buildings so nothing is visible from the main road but various sorts of masonry. In front of the public entrance an iris grows with an ivy plant and some Virginia creeper. At the side street end, which probably was the residential entrance, daylilies grow under an old tree and one hosta survives in a raised bed.

When I say survive with a property like this, I mean the plants not only have persisted despite neglect but also have not been dug up by thieves. In this case, I suspect the original plantings have been taken and the iris and hosta represent roots that broke off and somehow came back.

The back of the property is fenced but not walled with a blooming silver lace vine at the far end. Along the fence, fernbushes grow about 4’ high, forming a nearly contiguous hedge of green.


Now what’s odd is that fernbushes, unlike the iris and hosta, aren’t common in old yards of the local well to do. They weren’t mentioned in Rosalie Doolittle’s 1953 garden guide that embodies the aesthetic of a home like this.

Even today, the rust brown branches aren’t particularly common. You need to go to one of the upscale nurseries that features drought resistant shrubs to find one. They’re not carried by the mass market retailers or local hardwares.

The only one I saw blooming this year was in a mixed shrub border of a home whose owners have the resources to develop and maintain a garden on an estate scale in a dry environment.

If the shrub isn’t easily available in local stores, it’s also not something you can dig up somewhere in the wild. It’s native to the Great Basin to the northwest where it’s been used medicinally by the Gosiute, Paiute, and Shoshoni.

The Ramah Navajo recognized it was eaten by sheep, cattle and mule deer. According to Paul Vestal, they smoked the leaves in corn husks to prepare for a hunt and blew the smoke toward the place where they hoped to find deer. Then they rubbed the ashes on their bodies and said prayers “to a plant if one is found.”


Chamaebatiaria millefolium, with its 3/8” wide, white, five-petaled flowers on sumac-shaped cones and deeply dissected grey-green leaves, is a bit of an anomaly, the only member of its genus in the rose family. There’s some evidence it evolved during the Eocene when the climate was drying in the mountains, and that they were growing on sun-exposed ledges some 10,000 to 50,000 years ago during the Middle Wisconsin glacier period in the Grand Canyon.

In 1928, a group exploring an isolated part of the canyon that once had been used by Indians hunting mountain sheep and prospectors found fernbushes growing with cliff roses and Apache plume on the edges of meadows on the Cococino Plateau. In California, it’s one of the plants growing in the interior passages of cave mouths in the Lava Beds National Monument.

The shrubs stand today, like the catalpa near the rear of the building complex, as possible relics from those distance days when communication and trade routes were different, when the railroad still ran to Colorado and men who left the state seeking work brought back exotic souvenirs.

Notes:
Coats, Larry L., Kenneth L. Cole, Jim I. Mead, John A. Cannella and Jessa Fisher. “Middle Wisconsinan Vegetation on the Colorado Plateau, Utah and Arizona, USA: Evidence for Glacial-age Monsoons?,” Geological Society of America annual meeting, 2003.

Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1953, revised 1967.

Matthews, Robin F. “Chamaebatiaria millefolium,” 1994, in United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

Shaw, Nancy and Emerenciana G. Hurd. “Chamaebatiaria millefolium” (Torr.) Maxim.,” in Franklin T. Bonner and Robert P. Karrfalt, The Woody Plant Seed Manual, 2008, describes work by Howard E. Schorn, W. Wehr and Jack A. Wolfe on the evolution of fernbushes.

Strurdevant, G. E. “A Visit to an Un-frequented Part of the Grand Canyon!,” 28 February 1928, Grand Canyon Treks website.

United States. Department of the Interior. National Park Service. “Plants” page on Lava Beds National Monument website.

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

Photographs:
1. Fernbush flower, 11 July 2012.

2. Fernbushes growing near an abandoned building, 6 July 2012; catalpa at right rear.

3. Hornet on fernbush flower, 14 July 2012.

4. Fernbushes in winter, 3 February 2012.

Sunday, July 08, 2012

Great Mullein


Weather: Storms passed over all week, but only brought increased humidity and, one morning, a wet fence; last rain 5/13/12; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Afternoon clouds first appear over Tsikomó, then drift north behind the Jémez. This is probably one reason this was seen as a sacred mountain.

With afternoon clouds moderating temperatures a little, buds that didn’t open in the heat are coming out, including a hedgehog cactus, a Dr. Huey rose, the Persian rose and a cluster on the catalpa. Also, the raspberries are no longer drying before they’re ripe, though they’re stunted.

What’s blooming in the area: Tree of heaven, hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, daylily, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Shasta daisies; apricots ripening.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, leatherleaf globemallow, mullein, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, stick leaf, scarlet bee blossom, velvetweed, white and pink bindweeds, scurf peas, bush morning glory, silver leaf nightshade cut down, buffalo gourd, Indian paintbrush, horse tail, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, Hopi tea, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, fleabane, horseweed, local Mexican hat, golden hairy asters, áZil del muerto, native dandelion; buds on goldenrod.

In my yard, looking east: Snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, white and creeping baby’s breath, coral beardtongue, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort; leaves turning brown on oriental poppies.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower.

Looking west: Caryopteris, oriental lilies, blue flax, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, leadplant, Johnson’s Blue geranium, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, ladybells, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, squash, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, hummingbird moths, cabbage and other butterflies, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.


Weekly update: When I was child in the 1950’s I believed almost anything I was told about how Indians had lived. The protests of the 1960's and 70's made me less credulous.

When I recently read that native Americans used mullein leaves for diapers, my first thought was have you - and I think it was a male blog writer - have you ever really handled a mullein leaf?


I know the leaves are large, up to 20" long, 4" wide, and 3/8" thick. I also know they’re covered with soft, tiny hairs which give them a fuzzy feel. But would you seriously place them next to your more sensitive body parts if anything else was available?

I picked a leaf from a roadside plant and stuck it in some water to bring home. Within half an hour, the submerged section was dark green from the moisture. The exposed part still repelled droplets. I’m not sure which attribute the blogger thinks would make it useful as a diaper.


When I was searching the web to reread that blogger, I came across another man who called himself Quaker Dan who said he knew great mullein as Indian Toilet Paper when he was a child. That’s a very different thing. Verbascum thapsus has also been called Witch’s Candles, Beggar’s Blanket and Quaker Rouge.

Most such names are less facts than negative stereotypes perpetuated by outsiders.

The only natives I’ve found who claim to have used the leaves for diapers are the Lumbees of Robeson County, North Carolina, a people who know better than most the dangers of exoteric perceptions. Anthropologists consider them to be tri-racial, while local politicians defined them as legally black in an era when that condemned them to Jim Crow segregation.

They’ve been arguing ever since they’re pure descendants of the Cheraw who migrated to the Pee Dee river from the Danville area of Virginia in 1703. In 1737 they sold their land in South Carolina and moved north.

The source of their belief they used the leaves as diapers could have come from local Scots Irish, slave or Indian traditions, or could have been absorbed from stereotypes. I haven’t found any other group in Europe, Africa or this country who admits to such a usage.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, diapers have only been traced back to the 1590's in England, just before European settlement in North America and just as Protestantism was spreading and attitudes toward the body, bodily functions and child rearing were changing. In this country, Matilda Stevenson says Zuni children simply didn’t wear much clothing until they were four years old.

Even had mullein been used by Europeans for diapers, there was none here to be used in 1620. It ranges from Scandinavia to Africa and west toward China. Gene Wilhelm believes seeds were brought here by men who used them to stupify fish.

However, it also had to have been brought earlier for other reasons. Manasseh Cutler reported its long terminating yellow spikes were “common in old fields” in July in New England in 1785.


Dioscorides first mentioned great mullein was used in the Roman empire in the first century AD to treat old coughs, while Francis Quinlan suggested it was particularly valued in Ireland for treating tuberculosis in 1883. Its use for these and related respiratory problems has been reported by tribes with close relations to either the English (Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Lumbee, Malecite, Micmac, Mohegan, Penobscot, Shinnecock) or the French (Iroquois, Menominee, Potawatomi).

Ben-Erik Van Wyk and Michael Wink suggest the efficacy of this and related members of the figwort family comes from the presence of triterpene saponins like verbascosaponin combined with mucilage in the dried petals. They also say it’s been used successfully for ear aches (Iroquois), hemorrhoids (Iroquois), sores (Catawba, Lumbee, Malecite, Micmac) and boils.

All these tribes live east of the Appalachians or around the Great Lakes. The only groups in the west who used the herb are the Atsugewi of California and the Salish of Montana. The first used it for colds and in their sweat lodges; the second for tuberculosis.

The small seeds may not have arrived in New Mexico until modern roads were built. Stevenson doesn’t mention its use by the Zuni in the early twentieth century when Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley could still list all the places it had been found: Cedar Hill, Pecos, Mogollon and along Ruidoso Creek.

It since has spread to many parts of the state, at least those parts where there are major roads. A tall plant’s blooming behind a steel barrier on the way to Santa Fé. Usually leafing stalks get cut by road crews, and only the ones that bolt after the onset of the monsoons survive to flower. They usually leave brown stalks about two feet high and seeds that can survive for decades in the soil.


Someone down the road has let one grow by the entrance to his front drive. The biennial would have appeared as a rosette of wide grey leaves last summer, and wintered over to send up its stem of compressed leaves this spring.


When mullein first appeared in the southwest, people apparently noticed its similarity to the local tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata, and experimented with rolling powdered leaves in corn husks. Local Spanish speakers called the tobacco punche and mullein punchón. As a consequence, they discovered inhaling the smoke was good for asthma symptoms.

The Zuni also recognized the plant’s similarity to tobacco when they finally saw it and called it anna lanna. In the 1970's, people said they had used powdered roots to treat athlete’s foot. They also called the plant amidolan kwiminne when they used the roots to treat sores, rashes and other skin infections.

The Ramah Navajo considered it to be a male plant which they combined with a female, Frasera speciosa or deer’s ears, whose leaves were mixed with mountain tobacco “to give strength and to clear mind if lost while hunting or if confused after returning from a hunt, enables clear thinking so the way to camp may be found.”

The Hopi called their tobacco paviva and mullein wupaviva. The chief smoked the tobacco mixed with Macromeria viridiflora to bring rain. When mullein arrived, people mixed it with yoiviva to “cure people who have ‘fits” or who are not in their ‘right mind’” or who have “power to charm at a distance.”

Dan Moerman thinks the last refers to witchcraft, which brings us back to the nature of plants that leads to the rediscovery of the same traits by different people in different places and different times. The Apuleius Platonicus herbal, a pastiche of Dioscorides, Anglo-Saxon and possibly north African beliefs surviving from the late 1000's, says Mercury gave the plant to Ulysses to protect him from the evil magic of Circe.


Notes:
Apuleius Platonicus. Comments on Verbascum from P. Buchan, Witchcraft Detected and Prevented, 1824. In book 10 of The Odyssey, Homer has Ulysses say “The Slayer of Argus plucked from the ground the herb he promised me. The Gods call it Moly, and he showed me its nature, to be black at the root with a flower like milk. It would be difficult for men and mortals to dig up Moly; but the Gods can do anything” (translated by T. E. Shaw). There’s no scholarly consensus on the identity of moly, since it doesn’t sound like mullein.

Boughman, Arvis Locklear and Loretta O. Oxendine. Herbal Remedies of the Lumbee Indians, 2004.

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, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Cutler, Manasseh. An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions, 1785.

Dioscorides, Pedanius. De Materia Medica, book 4, translation found on Cancerlynx website. He claimed white phlomis was female and listed additional uses, including bruises and wounds.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998. He includes other uses not mentioned here, including its use as ceremonial tobacco by the Isleta and Menominee.

Quaker Dan. “Indian Diapers & Toilet Paper,” Back 40 Forums website, 8 August 2009. The discussion began when someone who called himself The Old Buzzard described the complex way he shredded first year leaves and placed the fragments within layers of leaves to create modern style diapers for his children.

Quinlan, F. J. B. “A Note upon the Use of the Mullein Plant in the Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption,” British Medical Journal 27 January 1883, pages 149-150. He read his paper at the 1884 International Medical Congress in Copenhagen. His talk and article were widely publicized in this country and its recommendations adopted by men like Herman Wilfert, who reported his experiments in “The Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption by the Mullein Plant,” The Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic 14:584-185:1885.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

_____. Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915.

Van Wyk, Ben-Erik and Michael Wink. Medicinal Plants of the World, 2004. They discuss another species, the one used today in commercial herbal medicines, but they indicate all Verbascums have the same properties.

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

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939. He used the synonym Onosmodium thurberi for deer ears.

Wikipedia. On-line articles on “Diaper.”

Wilhelm, Gene, Jr. "The Mullein: Plant Piscicide of the Mountain Folk Culture." Geographical Review 64: 235-52:1974. Although it’s widely cited, I haven’t been able to locate the article or an abstract to determine exactly what location he is describing. If it were Appalachia, the people could have been related to the Scots Irish who made contact with the Cherokee, Creek and Lumbee.

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

Photographs:
1. Giant mullein growing down the road, 6 July 2012.

2. Same plant, 5 June 2012.

3. Leaves on mullein growing along road to Santa Fé, 2 July 2012.

4. Leaf from above plant along road to Santa Fé, 2 July 2012.

5. Flower stalk from mullein growing down the road, 2 July 2012.

6. Dead stalks along road to Angel Fire, 18 June 2012.

7. Young plant growing along road on Santa Clara land, 2 July 2011.

8. Dead stalk on plant left in someone’s yard in town, 6 July 2012.

9. Close up of stem and leaves of plant on way to Santa Fé, 2 July 2012.

10. Flowering stalk from mullein growing along main road some years ago, 13 September 2008.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Local Mexican Hat


Weather: Miserable with last rain 5/13/12; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Strong winds Thursday broke a branch on the cottonwood. For a while the winds were at whatever angle is needed to lift loose sand from ungraveled roads and bare yards.

What’s blooming in the area: Tree of heaven, hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, Japanese honey suckle, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, Spanish broom, red yucca, daylily, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, scabiosa, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Shasta daisies, brome grass.

Catalpas are beginning to show signs of stress.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, showy milkweed, leatherleaf globemallow, mullein, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, stick leaf, scarlet bee blossom, velvetweed, white and pink bindweeds, scurf peas, bush morning glory, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, Indian paintbrush, horse tail, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, Hopi tea, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, fleabane, horseweed, local Mexican hat, golden hairy asters, native dandelion.

In my yard, looking east: Snow-in-summer, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, white and creeping baby’s breath, coral beardtongue, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower, tomatillo.

Looking west: Trumpet and oriental lilies, blue flax, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, Romanian sage, Johnson’s Blue geranium, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, white mullein, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, ladybells, Mönch asters; buds on purple coneflowers.

Tulip leaves turning brown and seed pods opening.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, squash, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, moss rose, snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, hummingbird moth, cabbage butterflies, ladybugs, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Growing wildflowers has always seemed a dubious proposition, if not an outright oxymoron.

When you consider you only trade with reputable suppliers that means you support people who do not gather their seeds or plants from the wild, but use seed or cuttings from plants they’ve perpetuated from ones they or others collected in a sustainable manner.

What little I know of genetics means the nucleus of their stock is probably atypical because it survived being transferred from its natural habitat. Even if the growers had done no selecting for the best flowers or most vigorous plants, nature would have.

When I see black-eyed Susans try to take over my front garden, the idea that émigrés from the eastern United States can do so well leaves me a bit queasy. I can see when they germinate along side improved versions of themselves, that they still look like their wild ancestors, but I can’t say my Rudbeckia hirta are still true wildflowers.


I’ve always been a bit more comfortable with the status of my Mexican hats. Ratibida columnifera, after all, is native to the plains, prairies and mountains below 8300' from Saskatchewan to Chihuahua. Local people have tested it and learned it’s not edible. Keres speakers rubbed the crushed leaves on a woman’s breast to wean an infant. Zuñi curing fraternities used what they tactfully call bile vomit (ya’konakia) as an emetic.


However, I’ve never actually seen Mexican hats growing in the wild. When I’ve seen them blooming along a shoulder I’ve suspected they either had escaped from someone’s garden or been planted by someone taking to heart Ladybird Johnson’s admonishment to beautify. Still, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley say they’re found in the Santa Fe mountains.

Then, last summer, I saw something that looked like a more feral version growing near the wild asparagus on the farm road. The cones were shorter and fatter, the disc cruder, the red petals smaller, the plants bushier - just the sort of differences one would expect between a true wildflower and its cultivated cousin.


These, however, turn out to be another species, Ratibida tagetes, sometimes called green Mexican hats because they send up a number of stems from their taproots with leaves closer to those of marigolds. It has a smaller range, limited to the southwest, and is part of the diet of a rare form of Chihuahuan grasshopper.

It’s also more useful. Keres speakers considered it strong medicine and used it to treat epileptic fits. They also took it when they went hunting to handle other forms of “craziness.”

The Ramah Navajo, who used common Mexican hat for colds and to treat sheep who were “out of their minds,” used the more localized species as a Life Chant lotion for stomach aches, fevers, birth injuries and sexual infections.

Even Spanish speakers used the ground dry roots in water for lung congestion and to treat female trouble. Leonora Curtin, who found it growing at 8000' at Truches, says people used the same term, dormilón, for this and for cut leaf coneflower. They used the second for gonorrhea and menstrual problems.

The implied relationship between Rudbeckia laciniata and Ratibida was explored in 1935 by Ward McClintic Sharp. He believed Rudbeckia’s center of diffusion was on the Ozark-Appalachian plateau where many plants had sought refuge during the glaciers, and that Ratibida was an offspring that moved into the new geological formations when conditions permitted, abetted by its unique seed dispersal methods.

More recently, Lowell Urbatsch and others have discovered DNA doesn’t support a mother-daughter relationship, but a sisterhood instead. The genetics do suggest the local Mexican hat, which has 32 chromosomes, is older than the common one with 28.

The local Mexican hat is still growing wild by the asparagus this year while the common ones were evicted from my garden years ago after they became too aggressive and proved they could survive quite nicely in the native grasses.

The black-eyed Susans are going to be expelled as soon as they establish themselves where I don’t have to handle their spiny wooden stems when I clean the front bed in spring. So far, they’ve objected, choosing other, choicer spots around the house instead. They’ve proven themselves independent if not wild.

Notes:
Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Edelman, William C., David C. Lightfoot and Kelly B. Miller. “The Phylogenetic Placement of the Rare North American Band-winged Grasshopper Shotwellia isleta Gurney, 1940 (Orthoptera: Acrididae: Oedipodinae),” Insect Systematics & Evolution 41:303-316:2010.

Jackson, S. Wesley. “Hybridization Among Three Species of Ratibida,” University of Kansas Science Bulletin 44:3-27:1963.

Swank, George R. The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932, described by Dan Moerman in Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Sharp, W. C. “A Critical Study of Certain Epappose Genera of the Heliantheae-Verbesinae of the Natural Family Compositae,” Missouri Botanical Garden Annals 22:60-77:1935, described by both Jackson and Urbatsch.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

Urbatsch, Lowell E., Bruce G. Baldwin and Michael J. Donoghue. “Phylogeny of the Coneflowers and Relatives (Heliantheae: Asteraceae) Based on Nuclear rDNA Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) Sequences and Chlorplast DNA Restriction Site Data,” Systematic Botany 25:539-565:2000.

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

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

Photographs:
1. Local Mexican hat with red petals growing along the farm road this year, 18 June 2012.

2. Black-eyed Susans with cultivated gloriosa daisies to the right, 29 June 2012; both are Rudbeckia hirta.

3. Mexican hats where they planted themselves by the drive, some red, some yellow, and some mixed, 28 June 2012. A daylily and plains coreopsis are to the right.

4. Local Mexican hat with mixed petals growing along the farm road last year, 25 June 2011.

5. Local Mexican hat growing along the farm road, 25 June 2011.