Sunday, August 30, 2015

Watermelon Diffusion


Weather: Ground wet Thursday morning, but all the forecast rain produced were clouds.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, morning glories, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, David and purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, African marigolds, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, scarlet creeper, green-leaf five-eyes, yellow and white prairie evening primroses, leather leaf globe mallow, green amaranth, pigweed, Hopi tea, native sunflower, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters, side oats grama grass.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, caryopteris, garlic chives, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, Maximilian sunflowers, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, purple and cut-leaf coneflowers, Mönch aster, yellow and reseeded Sensation cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, moss roses, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Woodpecker in the black locust, small birds, geckos, cabbage butterflies, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, dragonflies.


Weekly update: This hasn’t been a good year for watermelon. When it rains, the vines and leaves grow; when it rains a lot, as it has this year, they’re all that grow. Female flowers abort. Fungus attacks.

The vines have survived worse. They grew in the valley for nearly 300 years before seed companies began selling packets. That’s 300 times the annual reproduced enough for farmers to gather seeds for the next spring.

The melon’s path north to San Juan, where it was seen by Juan de Oñate in 1598, is impossible to trace today. All we know is when Spaniards saw the fruits. That’s a record of colonial expansion not ecological diffusion.

In 1582, Antonio Espejo rode north tracing some Franciscans who had gone to Tigua. Two days from his starting point at San Bartolomé in Chihuahua, he saw Conchos rancherías where they grew "some crops of maize, gourds, Castilian melons, and watermelons, like winter melons."

Their neighbors, the Pazaguantes, grew "food like the Conchos." Espejo continued north to Sia, then went west to the Hopi. All he recorded were maize, beans and gourds. It’s sometimes hard to trust a soldier’s vegetation report. Military men only see what grows where they ride, report only what they recognize. Depending on the season, squash, gourds and watermelons all look alike, trailing vines with yellow flowers.

The important thing is that at each place Espejo stopped, the natives told them about the next group north or west. His journal suggests the communication links that existed between bands fifteen years before Oñate. We have to guess seeds flowed through those networks.

The colonists brought their own watermelon seeds. In 1600, Juan de Torquemada wrote "many good melons and sandías" were growing under irrigation along the Chama river. Since he was a Franciscan, he may have been referring to mission gardens, and not the crops of the settlers in the area now called Chamita.

The same caveat applies to the comments of Alonso de Benavides in 1630 that the land was fertile, "yielding in great abundance from whatever seeds are planted." The Franciscan’s list included "squashes and pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupes and cucumbers."

Watermelons reached the Hopi before the Pueblo revolt of 1680. Seeds were found buried in the destroyed pueblo of Awátovi. They may have been chewed to create binders for the pigments on the murals. They did become the fat used to grease stones used to make piki bread.

To their west, Eusebio Kino recorded the Yuma grew "fields of maize, beans, calabashes, and watermelons" in 1698. Earlier Pima speakers had met him with "many of the foods from their fields - maize, beans, and watermelons." So far as he knew, the Jesuit priest was the first to explore that part of Sonora and Arizona.

Leonard Blake thinks the reason melons were so quickly accepted by Native Americans is they could be grown like the familiar squashes. He noted the Huron sprouted squash seeds in "a box filled with rotted wood, which was moistened and suspended over the smoke of a fire."

In 1721, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix observed "Sun-Flowers, Water-Melons and Pomkins are set by themselves; and before they sow the Seed, they make it shoot in Smoke, in light and black earth." At the time, he was at the Jesuit’s mission to the Potawatomi in western Michigan.

The similarities were more fundamental than planting techniques. Squash and watermelon are, after all, in the same gourd plant family.

Squashes could be planted in spring by nomadic bands. Unlike corn, they could be abandoned during the summer and harvested in fall.

William Weaver says watermelons are uniquely adapted to drought. During wet periods they store water in their fruits, then go dormant "when the vines die and the thick-rinded fruit lies scattered in the sun." When the time comes to reproduce, the melons split open and seedlings that have germinated in the watery reservoir spread forth.

The Ramah Navaho replicated nature by soaking seeds in cold water with golden smoke or spreading yellow cress. Both have yellow flowers like watermelons. Corydalis aurea is in the poppy family. Rorippa sinuata is a mustard.

The Navajo and Apache probably got their seeds after the Revolt, perhaps from the pueblos, perhaps from abandoned fields. Roque de Madrid led an expedition against the Navajo living in what is now northwestern New Mexico in 1705. Years after, Antonio Tafoya remembered he had seen them growing "maize, beans, squash and watermelons in the cañadas."

Fourteen years later, Juan de Ulibarrí led an expedition to the Apache living at El Cuartelejo on the plains. He reported, they were "growing corn, watermelon, pumpkin, wheat, kidney bean."

Historians attribute their appearance in the Awátovi ruins to the priests who built their church over the original kiva. However, the Hopi words for watermelon suggest they had the fruits first and, in the absence of a name, used descriptive labels for them. Kawa’yo and kawaivatnga meant horse pumpkin. They told Alfred Whiting the fresh fruit smelled like sweating horses.

Barbara Friere-Marreco said the Santa Clara name for watermelon was tuwi’ig for spotted. She added the word was used "in the presence of Mexicans, as it is feared that they will understand sandía."

It was politic to not show vines to Espejo, and wise to not mention them to local Spanish-speaking settlers.

Notes: The last post mentioned the melons found at San Juan in 1598. Piki bread was discussed in the post for 28 February 2015.

Benavides, Alonso de. Memorial que fray Juan de Santaner de la Orden de S. Francisco Presenta a la Magestad Catolica del Rey don Felipe Quarto, 1630, translated in Baker H. Morrow, A Harvest of Reluctant Souls, 1996.

Blake, Leonard W. "Early Acceptance of Watermelon by Indians of the United States," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 1:193-199:1981.

Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Kino's Historical Memoir of Pimeria Alta, 1683-1711, 1919, on Yuma.

_____. The Rim of Christendom, 1936, on Pima.

Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de. Letters to the Dutchess Lesdiguierres, 1763, anonymous translator. He also wrote about watermelon when he was in the area of the Iroquois and at Kaskaskia in 1721.

Espejo, Antonio. "Account of the Journey to the Provinces and Settlements of New Mexico," 1583, translated in Herbert Eugene Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, 1916.

Friere-Marreco, Barbara, John Peabody Harrington and, William Wilfred Robbins. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Montgomery, Ross Gordon, Watson Smith and John Otis Brew. Franciscan Awatovi, 1949, cited by Robert W. Preucel, Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt, 2007.

Tafoya, Antonio. Quoted in Rick Hendricks and John P. Wilson, The Navajos in 1705, 1996.

Torquemada, Juan de. Monarquía Indiana, 1615, cited by Friere-Marreco.

Ulibarrí, Juan de. Diary of expedition to El Cuartelejo, 1706, translated in Alfred B. Thomas, After Coronado, 1935.

Vossen, H. A. M. van der, O. A. Denton, and I. M. El Tahir. "Citrullus lanatus," in G. J. H. Grubben and O. A. Denton, Plant Resources of Tropical Africa, volume 2, 2004.

Weaver, William Woys. Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, 1997.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Photographs: Taken in the area on 21 August 2015.

1. Large leaves in back dwarf the peppers; the vine looping in front rambles over ten feet without a fruit or flower.

2. White spots on leaves, probably a fungus.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Watermelon Origins


Weather: Afternoon temperatures in the high 80s with humidity levels below 10% in Santa Fé and everything in a haze of smoke particles drifting down from the Pacific northwest Thursday and Friday; last useful rain 8/8.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, morning glories, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, David and purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, green-leaf five-eyes, yellow evening primroses, leather leaf globe mallow, green amaranth, pigweed, Hopi tea, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters; side oats and black grama grasses; Virginia creeper stems turning bright red.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, fernbush, caryopteris, garlic chives, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, nasturtium, Maximilian sunflowers, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, white yarrow, purple and cut-leaf coneflowers, Mönch aster, yellow and reseeded Sensation cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, moss roses, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds, geckos, cabbage butterflies, grasshoppers, hornets.


Weekly update: Watermelons evolved in Africa and were brought to this country by slaves. That’s the standard Black and Anglo-American history of Citrullus lanatus. It’s quite true, but has little to do with Native Americans or New Mexico.

When Juan de Oñate came up the Río Grande to San Juan in 1598, the pueblos already were growing "beans, corns, and squashes, melons and rich sloes of Castile and grapes in quantity through the desert." At that time, the only African slave anyone had seen was a Moor, Esteban, who accompanied Marcos de Niza. The Zuñi had dispatched him in 1539 before he left any seed.

When Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet were exploring the Mississippi river in 1673, they visited the Illinois at modern-day Peoria. They were growing " beans and melons, which are Excellent, especially those that have red seeds."

When the two Frenchmen reached the Arkansas river, they could go no farther south. Slave traders in Charleston had armed eastern bands, who were taking captives along the Mississippi drainage to sell to sugar plantations in Barbados. The sugar boom didn’t occur until the 1680s. The English hadn’t yet developed strong trade relations with Africa.

The band they met was so terrorized by the Cherokee they didn’t dare leave its village. The Quapaw subsisted on corn, with some occasional dog’s meat. Marquette noted, "we ate no other fruit there than watermelons."

If you accept the standard origin tale for watermelon, it’s not only a surprise the fruit preceded European explorers into the interior, but it’s also unexpected that Oñate’s chronicler recognized melons when he saw them and had a word to describe them, melón. Similarly, Marquette knew a watermelon when he saw it, even though the French didn’t import slaves into Illinois country until 1719.

The Citrullus genus evolved in southern Africa as a dryland plant. Four primary species are recognized today; many other variants are found in southern Africa. The citron of the Kalahari desert was grown as a water source in the dry period or dried, then cooked. The colocynth from north African deserts was used medicinally and for the oil extracted from its seeds. Egusi seeds were eaten in west Africa. This was the only one grown in an area affected by slave raids.

The sweet melon has a much smaller genome than the others, suggesting it was selected from a single population when it was domesticated in northeastern Africa. Sweetness is a recessive gene. This is the one known from 4,500-year-old Egyptian tombs.

Moors took the fruit to al-’Andalus where ‘Arib ibn Sa‘d reported dulla‘ growing in 961. In Sevilla in 1158, Ibn al-Awwam reported two types of watermelons. One had a red seed, the other was black. It sounds like they had imported the oily, medicinal variety from north Africa and the sweet melon from northeast Africa. The later, battikh sindi, became sandía.

The Spanish apparently took them everywhere. The official chronicler for the Council of the Indies wrote "pumpkins and melons were picked twenty-eight days after the seeds were sown" along the coast of what’s now Panama. The maturity date’s unlikely, but, if nothing else, his 1630 comments signified intent.

Once the Spanish began shipping silver back to Europe, they needed to protect the route along the Florida coast from privateers. In 1566, they built a fort at Santa Elena, now Port Royale, South Carolina. Jeanette Thurber Connor found evidence "maize, pumpkins and watermelons" were growing on the island in 1576.

Twenty some years later, the Guale destroyed the Franciscan mission there. The same year, 1597, a Spanish soldier noted the Tama up the Ocmulgee river in modern Georgia were growing "watermelons and other fruits."

Watermelons spread north in Europe. Harry Paris and his colleagues found the earliest manuscript with an accurate image was produced in Salerno, Italy, around 1300. The fruit appeared in a Lombard document around 1385.

They didn’t appear in northern France until 1430, by which time they were being depicted as a commercial crop in northern Italy. The botanists noted only the citron could be grown in the north. Before modern breeding, the dessert melon wouldn’t thrive or ripen there.

John Gerard described sugar melons in England in 1597, but was only able to grow citrons. The latter were boiled, and kept for some time. They must have diffused from the nobility because the engineer who laid out Charlestown said, they were "abounding in Massachusetts in 1629."

Thirty-five years later, John Josselyn noted local New England tribes were growing water-mellon and that it was a "rare cooler of Feavers, and excellent against the stone." From that one would guess they were growing a medicinal variety.

If one were going to guess the source of the seeds planted by Sioux-speaking Quapaw met by Père Marquette, one would suspect the Spanish in Florida. In the twentieth century, the Cherokee were using "seed tea for kidney trouble." The Sioux-speaking Illinois could have obtained English or Spanish seeds. The Iroquois, who harassed both Illinois and New England, mentioned a "decoction of roots and seeds" for "urine stoppage" in the 1970s.

Notes: The citron or tsamma watermelon is Citrullus lanatus citroides; colocynth is Citrullus colocynthis, egusi is Citrullus lanatus mucosospermus, and the common supermarket melon is Citrullus lanatus lanatus.

‘Arib ibn Sa‘d. Kitab al-Anwa’, translated as The Calendar of Cordoba for the year 961; quotation from Miquel Forcada, "Calendar of Córdoba," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson.

Blake, Leonard W. "Early Acceptance of Watermelon by Indians of the United States," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 1:193-199:1981.

Connor, J. T. Colonial Records of Spanish Florida, volume 1, 1925, quoted by Blake. She cites a "farmer named Juan Serrano."

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597, cited by Paris, 2013.

Hamel, Paul B. and Mary U. Chiltoskey. Cherokee Plants and Their Uses, 1975.

Herrick, James William. Iroquois Medical Botany, 1977, quoted by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Ibn al-Awwam. Kitab al-Filaha, late 1100's, 1864 French translation by Jean Jacques Clement-Mullet translated by Blake.

Josselyn, John. An Account of Two Voyages to New England, 1865 edition.

Marquette, Jacques. Journal included in Claude Dablon’s "Le Premier Voÿage Qu’a Fait Le P. Marquette vers le Nouveau Mexique," translated by Reuben Gold Thwaites in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, volume 59, 1899.

Martyr d’Anghiera, Peter. De Orbe Novo, 1530, quoted by William W. Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain, 2004.

Paris, Harry S. "Origin and Emergence of the Sweet Dessert Watermelon, Citrullus lanatus," Annals of Botany 116:133-148:2015.

_____, Marie-Christine Daunay, and Jules Janick. Medieval Iconography of Watermelons in Mediterranean Europe, Annals of Botany 112:867-879:2013

Salas, Gaspar de. Testigo, 1597, in Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Documentos Históricos de la Florida y la Luisiana, 1912; he used sandías.

Sturtevant, Edward Lewis. Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919; quotes Master Graves. Alexander Young identified him as Thomas Graves in Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts, volume 3, 1846.

Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez de. Historia de la Nueva México, 1610, translated and edited by Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodrígue and Joseph P. Sánchez, 1992. He used the two-syllable melón instead of the three syllable sandía when he wrote his chronicle in verse. It’s a matter of interpretation: did he mean other kinds of melons or was he exercising poetic licence for watermelons?

Photographs: Taken 21 August 2015 in one yard near the village. #1 is round and may be a seedless melon. They require a pollinator variety be planted, which may be #2. The first has the more desirable location.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Green-Leaf Five-Eyes


Weather: Afternoon temperatures in the high 80's with teasing clouds; last rain 8/8.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, David and purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Buffalo gourd, yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, green-leaf five-eyes, white prairie and yellow evening primroses, Queen Anne’s lace, Hopi tea, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy and purple asters; ring muhly, side oats and black grama grasses.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, fernbush, Saint John’s wort, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, blue flax, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, nasturtium, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, white yarrow, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, yellow and reseeded Sensation cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, moss roses, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Goldfinch, geckos, ants.


Weekly update: Green flower I called it when I first saw it, and green flower I call it still. It’s formal name, Chamaesaracha coronopus, is a nearly unpronounceable Latinized portmanteau of a Greek adjective (chamae) and a Spanish surname (Isidoro Saracha). Its common name is too cumbersome to remember: green leaf five eyes is supposed to distinguish it from silver leaf nightshade, as if one would confuse this with something with lavender flowers on foot high stalks.

Flowers aren’t supposed to be a pale lime green, so others see more expected colors. Beth Kinsey sees "pale yellowish green." Michael Nee sees " dirty - or green-white." Nathaniel Britton saw "white or ochroleucous," which Wiktionary translates as "yellowish-white; having a faint tint of dingy yellow." In New Mexico, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley saw something "ochroleucous, often purple tinged."

Most botanist are too busy looking at the form of the hairs to see the flowers. They’re still debating if the specimens collected in Texas and Mexico are the same species as the ones found in New Mexico. They compromise by describing it as variable.


The plant grows so low to the ground, you actually only see the flower if you squat or kneel. The petals on the ones in my driveway are creamy white with two darker stripes down the centers. Before it opens the bud only shows the mauve bands.


The only people who seem to have actually looked are the Kayenta Navajo near Monument Valley in northeastern Arizona. They call it frog tobacco or cricket’s emetic. Louisa Wade Wetherill indicated they associated it with Coyote who gave "his tobacco" to Frog as "hush money" after Frog saw Coyote "steal the Water Monster’s baby."

Tobacco and green flower are both in the nightshade family. It has the same protruding yellow stamens coming from five-sided cups. Their Solanaceae relationship is obscured by the central ring of white ruffles.


The Kayenta used it as one of the plants they ground into water and dropped on heated stones in the Fumigant-Boiling ceremony to cure head aches or eye problems. Wetherill said they also used it for drowning and swellings.


The association with water seems odd, since it’s a dry southwestern plant. It ranges from western Texas through most of New Mexico into Arizona and down into Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, and San Luis Potosí.

However, most say it grows on clay soils. In my yard, it grows in gravel. The perennial first appeared in my drive in 1996, and a few small plants have bloomed near there every year. In 2012, the man who worked on regrading my drive, brought in new gravel. The plant appeared in many more locations in 2013 and spread into a bed. I’m not sure if they were new seeds, or if he had dispersed what existed and broken the yellow seed pods so they could germinate.


The narrow, scalloped leaf fingers spread out to cross one another in mats during the summer that trap moisture underneath. In late October, they turn a more lemon green that continues to generate heat. When snow covered the drive in November of 2013, they were green islands in grey pebbles. The leaves finally turned brown in winter, when their sharpened edges hugged leaves to protect their roots.


Usually green flower begins blooming in late May and continues until the cold of autumn. This year they have not been as vigorous. I suspect that, while they are arid plants, they don’t much like excessive heat. Early in the season, they open in the morning, and usually are closed by noon. With the changing the sun angles on late summer, they stay open after noon.  They shut at night.

After about a week of afternoon highs in the low 90s in late June, some began to die back. The leaves of another high country plant, golden spur columbine, began turning yellow at the same time. The columbine leaves died, and the roots are only now putting out replacements as seedlings germinate. The green flowers persisted but much diminished.

It may be too insignificant for most to notice. The plants only get about 3" high. But, and this is important in this part of the country where goat’s heads thrive, the green mats are harmless.


Notes: Isidoro Saracha was an eighteenth century botanist and pharmacist. Casimiro Gomez Ortega named a Peruvian genus for him. The name was then used with chamae to describe another low growing genus.


Britton, Nathaniel and Addison Brown. An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions, Volume 3, 1913.

Kinsey, T. Beth. Southeastern Arizona Wildflowers and Plants, Firefly Forest website.

Nee, Michael H. "Solanaceae Nightshade Family," University of California, Jepson Herberia website.

Wetherill, Louisa Wade. Collection described and annotated in Leland C. Wyman and Stuart K. Harris, The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho, 1951.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Wyman, Leland C. and Flora L. Bailey. "Two Examples of Navaho Physiotherapy," American Anthropologist 46:329-337:1944; has more on fumigant boiling, but does not list the plants used.


Photographs: Green leaf five eyes growing in gravel in my driveway.
1. Flower, 16 August 2015.
2. Blooming mat, 21 September 2013.
3. Stem and pod, 16 August 2015.
4. Flower, bud, and leaves, 2 May 2013.
5. Flower profile, 16 August 2015.
6. Leaves in summer, 26 July 2008.
7. Leaves in fall, 10 November 2011.
8. Leaves in snow, 23 November 2013.
9. Leaves in winter, 21 December 2012.
10. New growth, 5 April 2013.

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Mushrooms


Weather: Fine grained rain Friday night and Saturday. This morning a great wall of mist was rising from the river higher than the badlands. It looked flat, gray, and solid the entire length of the river and the full extent of the arroyo. Los Alamos, up on the mesas was reporting fair weather at the time.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Trees of heaven, buffalo gourd, yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, green-leaf five-eyes, white prairie and yellow evening primroses, Queen Anne’s lace, Hopi tea, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy and purple asters, ring muhly grass; green amaranth coming up.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, fernbush, Saint John’s wort, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, blue flax, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, nasturtium, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, white yarrow, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, reseeded Sensation and yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, moss roses, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, small birds, geckos, ants.


Weekly update: Mushrooms have three habits. When I was a child they had beige stems rising from cupcake collars that sported peaked caps. They were spongy to touch, but if you looked underneath you saw radiating partitions under the caps that held the spores that functioned as seeds.

I don’t remember ever pulling one out to look at the roots, perhaps because they don’t have roots. Instead, thin threads anchor them to the ground.


When I was in graduate school in the late 1960s, I remember hearing those threads in fact were vast underground networks of "white mycelia combined with black shoelace-like rhizomorphs" that expanded and connected. Sporadically a mushroom was pushed above, but all the mushrooms in the area were clones of one another.

Catherine Parks said, "if you could take away the soil and look at it, it's just one big heap of fungus with all of these filaments that go out under the surface."

Foresters discovered an Armillaria ostoyae in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon that covered 2,200 acres of land. Another in the Strawberry Mountains of southwest Washington undergird 1,500 acres. Near Crystal Falls in Michigan, a 37 acre Armillaria gallica was discovered in 1992.

Based on its extent, mycologists estimated the Oregon fungus was at least 2,400 years old. The one in Michigan could be more than 1,500 years old.

Mushrooms aren’t actually plants, but a kingdom apart from both plants and animals. They don’t produce their own food through photosynthesis but draw their nutrients from organic material in the soil.

The Armillarias are more parasitic than most mushrooms. Foresters believe they are the source of diseases that kill firs and Douglas spruces. For ecologists, they are a tool used by nature to create and maintain a particular type of landscape. They don’t injure western larches and ponderosa pines. They bring order into an environments that otherwise might descend into chaotic arenas of Spencerian competition.


Down here in the valley, mushrooms are rare specimens that emerge from spores dropped from the Jémez. They tend to appear in the shade in rainy periods, but rarely in the same place. The most common one a few years ago was a grey sphere that eventually split open to reveal a rust brown interior.


Often you don’t see mushrooms here until they’ve died.


I saw one this year that looked like a piece of old hose sticking out of the ground.


A few weeks later another emerged as a tall, fat, grooved stem with a clinging honeycombed cap of black.

This mushroom, in fact, may not be from the Jémez. It’s emerged near an apricot that was planted in 2013. It could be a spore it picked up when it was growing in Oklahoma. A few years before that, someone was working in the area with a backhoe that had been in the Tusas mountains. The one that looks like a muffin could also have been released by that operator.

Since I was a child I developed an allergy to penicillin and an absolute aversion to fungus of any type. I won’t touch mushrooms now. That makes it a bit difficult to identify them, but there is a good website, Mushroom Observer. You just need to enter "Jemez" and "Species Lists" in the search criteria to see photographs of New Mexico mushrooms contributed by amateur naturalists.

Notes:
Parks, Catherine. Quoted in Sherri Richardson Dodge, "An Even More Humongous Fungus," 24 July 2000 press release from the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. She’s also the source for other quotes.

Rensberger, Boyce. "Underground Goliath; Michigan Mushroom Over 1,500 Years Old," The Washington Post, 2 April 1992.

Spencer, Herbert. Converted Darwin’s natural selection into "survival of the fittest" in Principles of Biology of 1864. He later expanded it into a dystopian description of human social behavior described as social Darwinism.


Photographs:
1. Mushrooms under an apricot, 25 July 2015.

2. Mushroom growing in the flood plain of the arroyo, 21 September 2013.

3. Mushroom that appeared in my newly graveled driveway 15 May 2013. The gravel came from Velarde and a quarry northwest of town; the backhoe that spread it had been in the northern part of the state the week before.

4. The gray puffin headed mushroom that appeared everywhere in 2010 and 2011. This one was in the prairie on 8 November 2011.

5. The same type mushroom growing on the prairie, 1 August 2010.

6. Mushroom seen on the prairie, 28 June 2009.

7. A earlier specimen of the mushroom seen in #1; this one was found 16 June 2015.

8. Mushroom pushing up between tiles around the house on 6 August 2008. It never fully emerged.

Sunday, August 02, 2015

Plains Coreopsis


Weather: Great amounts of rain have been forecast, but all we got this wee was clouds and moisture laden air that kept soil water from evaporating; last rain 7/29.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, fernbush, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, purple garden phlox, red amaranth, farmer’s single sunflowers, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Trees of heaven, buffalo gourd, yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, green-leaf five-eyes, white prairie and yellow evening primroses, Queen Anne’s lace, Hopi tea, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, strap leaf, golden hairy and purple asters, ring muhly grass.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, Saint John’s wort, California poppy, snow-in-summer, coral beard tongue, lady bells, catmints, calamintha, blue flax, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, white yarrow, purple coneflower, Mönch aster, reseeded Sensation cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, pansy, moss roses, marigold, gazania.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, chickadee, and other small birds, geckos, bumble and small bees, hornets, ants; mosquitoes have hatched.


Weekly update: Mail order companies like to send free samples, although the last successful product promotion was the Delicious apple in 1895.

Wildseed Farms, of Fredericksburg, Texas, sends a seed mix, which I dutifully plant, usually with no results. The exception was 2012 when some plains coreopsis sprouted under a leaky hose connection. That wasn’t where I planted the seed. I assume it washed down the hose line.

I bought some seeds the next year and planted them in the same place. Only a few germinated. I tried again last year in a different location. Nothing. This year, with all the late spring rain, last year’s seed not only germinated, but the flowers have varied in coloring.


Coreopsis tinctoria was identified by Thomas Nuttall in 1819 in Arkansas Territory. The fibrous roots grow along the Missouri and both sides of the Mississippi south of their confluence near Saint Louis. In New Mexico, Augustus Fendler saw the yellow and mahogany notched flowers east of the Mora river, "between Coon Creek and Pawnee Fork in shallow hollows in the prairies, said to have been made by the buffaloes in wallowing."

Buffalos did roll, but wallows tended to be natural depressions that collected water and were enlarged by the animals. No doubt their shaggy coats collected seeds, which could have been deposited along the waterways west of the Mississippi.

Plains coreopsis also appears in clusters of contiguous counties that are separated from one another. One rather suspects seeds were purchased, and when found useful were passed from gardener to gardener.

Nuttall told members of the National Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia that "it promises to become the favorite of every garden where it is introduced." He also mentioned it produced a yellow dye. By mid-century, Joseph Breck called it a "a well-known hardy annual." In 1851 the Bostonian offered two varieties, one an ornamental, the other listed as Dyeing Calliopsis.


In New Mexico, Paul Standley discovered the composite near Shiprock on the Navajo reserve early in the twentieth century. Matilda Coxe Stevenson said, "this plant was introduced among the Zuñi many years go by the Navajo for making into a beverage." The Ramah Navajo were using a cold infusion to treat infections caused by lightning, especially enlarged abdomens, in the early 1950s.

Both groups incorporated it into their ritual lives. Navajo administered it during the Waterway Chant, a subgroup within the Shooting chants. Among the Zuñi, it was "drunk by women desiring girl babies." The Zuñi also used kia’naitu flowers with other florets to dye yarn a deep red.

The flowers are delicate when they bob over the tops of over plants. It’s not surprising the seeds spread to Europe and Japan. In China it’s grown as a cut flower and has naturalized in moist sandy or clay soils.

What is surprising is that it reached the Uyghur living in the far northwest Kunlun mountains. They used it in a tea to treat high blood pressure and diarrhea. Chinese scientist have tested the plant and discovered the link was the red pigments that made it a natural antioxidant.


Notes: For more on the promotion of the Delicious apple, see the post on "Orchards" for 14 August 2012.

Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden, 1851, reprinted by OPUS Publications, 1988.

Gray, Asa. "Plantae Fendleriane Novi-Mexicane," American Academy, Memoirs 4:1-116:1849.

Li, Ning, et alia. "Anti-Neuroinflammatory and NQO1 Inducing Activity of Natural Phytochemicals from Coreopsis tinctoria," Journal of Functional Foods 17:837-846:2015.

Li, Yali, et alia. "Flavonoids from Coreopsis tinctoria Adjust Lipid Metabolism in Hyperlipidemia Animals by Down-regulating Adipose Differentiation-related Protein. Lipids in Health and Disease 13:193:2014.

Missouri Botanical Garden and Harvard University Herbarium eFloras project. Flora of China website entry for Coreopsis tinctoria.

Nuttall, Thomas. "A Description of Some New Species of Plants Recently Introduced into the Gardens of Philadelphia from the Arkansas Territory," Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Journal 2:114-138:1821.

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

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

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Wyman, Leland C. "Navajo Ceremonial System" in Alfonso Ortiz, Handbook of North American Indians, volume 10, 1983.

Yao, Xincheng, et alia. "Comparative Study on the Antioxidant Activities of Extracts of Coreopsis tinctoria Flowering Tops from Kunlun Mountains, Xinjiang, North-Western China," Natural Product Research 17 March 2015.


Photographs: Plains coreopsis in my yard.
1. Where it planted itself, 16 July 2012.
2. Flower and bud, dark area smaller than normal, 16 July 2015.
3. Red flower, 24 July 2015.
4. Seed capsules, 24 July 2015.
5. Close-up of flower with normal color pattern, 24 July 2015.
6. Leaves disappear and the base, and persist on the stems, 24 July 2015.