Columbian Exchange

Weather: Time to stop watering and let the garden adjust to the realities of nature. Rained before I woke up Tuesday morning and again after I went to bed Tuesday night.

What’s blooming in the area: Datura, morning glories, alfalfa, Maximilian sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, African marigolds, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Bindweed, chamisa, native sunflower, gumweed, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, purple and heath asters; eaves on Virginia creeper turning maroon.

In my yard: Calamintha, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, sweet pea, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragon, marigold.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, goldfinches on Maximilian sunflower heads, geckos, cabbage butterfly, bumble bees on blanket flowers.

Weekly update: Every year around Columbus Day someone in the media does a piece about the effects of the Columbian Exchange on our diet. It usually focuses on the introduction of cattle and wheat into the New World, and the export of potatoes, corn, chocolate, peppers and tomatoes to Europe. It may mention the import of African foods like yams. The fourth leg, the one back to Africa is rarely mentioned. After all, the only people making that trip were slave traders.

One food, however, did make that journey, the parent of the amaranth used as a red dye by the Hopi. Amaranthus cruentus is used as a vegetable in west Africa.

As mentioned in the post for 21 Feb 2010, grain amaranths were one of the five primary foods in Aztec México. However, Spanish ships weren’t much involved in the slave trade, and the crown jealously guarded all other trade within the empire. After Spain took over the throne of Portugal in 1580, Portuguese seaman provided slaves, primarily from Angola and Gabon.

When the Bourbons ascended the throne of Spain, France was given rights to the Caribbean trade in 1703, with a proviso it continue to draw slaves from the Portuguese colonies. In 1716, France eliminated some monopolies, and allowed any ship owner from one of five ports to sell slaves so long as he paid duty in Saint-Domingue.

All this means is that the Mexican amaranth had to travel to Africa through one of the islands where French, Portuguese or English merchants were active. French began infiltrating the western part of Hispaniola in 1625 and formally gained control of Saint-Domingue in 1697. The English took Jamaica in 1655.

I haven’t found anything yet on when and how the red leafed plant moved to the Caribbean islands. It’s found on both Cuba and Hispaniola today, but is considered an introduced species. A different species, Amaranthus viridis, is associated with Jamaica. It may have come from Asia where indentured servants were recruited between 1845 and 1917. There may have been another species before, and the local term for the one may have been transferred to the other.

Ships’ registries were controlled by European treaties. The compositions of their crews were not. Both Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Pio Baroja’s The Restlessness of Shanti Andia limned groups drawn from Europe, Asia, Africa and the New World. Baroja, in particular, described a nineteenth-century slaver under French colors with a Basque captain that sailed between the Caribbean, Africa, the East Indies, and the Philippines.

Any one could have taken seed aboard as food or ballast, then left it in some African port. It’s been mentioned in former French colonies from Senegal south to the British controlled Nigeria, where it’s particularly common in the lowland south. It’s also found today in the former British Ghana, which lies west of one-time French Benin.

Once in Africa, the seed spread from group to group, much like Watermelon had in this country. It was "already present in gardens in some the remotest regions when explorers such as Livingstone, Speke and Grant, Burton, and Schweinfurth arrived."

Gérard Grubben said, it not only was used as a food, but also had been adapted for medical uses. "In Senegal the roots are boiled with honey as a laxative for infants. In Ghana the water of macerated plants is used as a wash to treat pains in the limbs."

Meanwhile, back in the Caribbean African slaves transformed the grain amaranth into a vegetable. They boiled it like any other green to produce callaloo. In Belize, a mixed African, Carib and Arawak community, the Garifuna, use the plant to "build up blood."

Notes: Many writers discussing amaranth in Africa mention many species, and don’t specify which one is found in which country. To complicate matters, amaranths in general, and this one in particular, are being promoted as food with high levels of proteins and minerals in areas where malnutrition is a problem. The initial distribution of Amaranthus cruentus could have been much wider than I’ve indicated, but I restricted myself to sources that were specific.

Watermelon was discussed in the posts for August 23 through September 6 of this year.

Acevedo-Rodriguez, Pedro and Mark T. Strong. "Amaranthus cruentus L.," in Flora of the West Indies, Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History website.

Baroja y Nessi, Pio. Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andía, 1911, translated as The Restlessness of Shanti Andia by Anthony and Elaine Kerrigan, 1962.

Grubben, G. J. H. "Amaranthus cruentus L.," in G. J. H. Grubben and O. A. Denton, Vegetables/Légumes, 2004; quotation on medicinal uses.

Santos, Jeffery. A Study on the Medicinal Usage of Flora and Fauna by Ganifuna Comminity in Belize, no date.

Sauer, Jonathan D. Historical Geography of Crop Plants, 1994; quotation on explorers.

Photographs: Taken in the area on 21 August 2015.

1. Hopi Red Dye amaranth, planted for the first time by someone who nurtures native plants. The remains of a yellow mullein is at the far right in front of the road fence.

2. Hopi Red Dye amaranth, in the place it naturalized for several years; this year they destroyed most of the plants.

3. Love-Lies-Bleeding, planted by someone who has planted the Hopi Red Dye variety for several years; they may have only been able to find the right seed this year. It had both maroon (right) and gold (left) flowers.

Red Amaranth Seeds

Weather: Rain Monday night; last rain 9/22.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, sweet pea, Russian sage, red amaranth, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian sunflowers, pampas grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, Queen Anne’s lace, pigweed, ragweed, chamisa, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, golden hairy, heath and purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, hollyhocks, winecup mallow.

Looking south: Betty Prior and floribunda roses.

Looking west: Catmint, calamintha, David phlox.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Blue salvia, French marigold.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Geckos, small birds, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Whenever I hear people argue there’s no such thing as species alteration, I think how isolated we’ve grown from our agrarian past when peoples’ lives depended on observing plants.

For years anthropologists believed farming had been invented one time in the middle east about ten thousand year ago. They assumed the activity was too complex to have been created more than once. They, of course, were thinking of farming as they knew it, not as it had been.

In 1961, Richard MacNeish reported evidence for separate invention in the Tehuacán valley southeast of Puebla, México. In the Coxcatlán rock shelter his team found seeds for moschata squash and amaranth in strata dating between 4700 and 4300 bc. The National Research Council has identified the last as a form of Amaranthus cruentus.

The red-leaved plant was not native to the area. The dark-seeded annuals descended from Amaranthus hybrida in what is now Guatemala and southern México. The seeds found ready for threshing in Coxcatlán had been selected for their light color.

Given an opportunity, the wind-pollinated cruentus interbreeds with its neighbors. In Guatemala, it mates with its parent hybrida. In México, the plants cross with the local grain amaranth, Amaranth hypochondriacus.

Two thousand years later, a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, recorded the plants important to the Aztecs. He himself probably knew little about farming - he was from a family wealthy enough to send him to the royal university at Salamanca. He transcribed what his informants said without obvious editorial revision.

In the 1570s, natives of the Mexican valley distinguished the types of amaranth in their area by their seeds. Bird amaranth had a white seed. Another had seeds that were red or black. The mirror stone amaranth had glistening black seeds, while those of the one now identified as hypochondriacus were described as becoming like "coarse sand."

The last was the one used to make the blood and dough figures that were distributed during festivals honoring Huitzilopochtli. The Spanish were so horrified by what they saw as a mockery of the Eucharist that they suppressed both the festival and the grain. Soldiers aren’t trained to discriminate between types. They destroyed all cultivated amaranths.

Cruentus survived as a crop in Oaxaca and Guatemala. In 1947, Jonathan Sauer found both dark- and light-seeded varieties. The later were preferred for tortillas, and used "in various other ways, much like maize." The dark seeds were used only for tortillas.

In the late nineteenth century, Jesse Walter Fewkes reported a red-topped amaranth was being used by the Hopi to dye the red flat bread used in kachina rituals. Alfred Whiting said they still were growing red-leaved amaranths in irrigated, raised beds in the 1930s.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson saw Zuñi women tending the annuals in small gardens around their villages in the 1890s. Like the neighboring Hopi, they used it to dye the thin wafer bread used in ceremonies.

The anthropologists didn’t note the seed color. Sauer says morphological features indicate the southwestern red amaranth is a dark-seeded strain of cruentus created by selection.

Selecting seed is time consuming. After World War II, mass marketing made it easy to buy packaged seeds. Then, economies of scale made it less expensive to buy finished products that seeds.

When Sauer returned to Guatemala in 1967, red amaranth no longer was treated as a crop. He still saw plants growing on the edges of milpas and in dooryard gardens. But, they were naturalized plants with dark seeds. No one had kept light-colored ones.

In the 1960s, he says the Hopi were substituting commercial food coloring for ko’mo. The Zuñi no longer were bothering to select the best l’shilowa yäl’tok a seeds. They used reseeded plants that had interbred with a local green amaranth species, Powellii.

As the plants growing in the Española valley this summer show, when plants are neglected, species that have been selected can degenerate. It takes human effort to keep some strains pure. Thousands of years aren’t enough time to stabilize them.

Notes:
Fewkes, J. Walter. "A Contribution to Ethnobotany," American Anthropologist 9:14-21:1896.

MacNeish, Richard Stockton. Tehuacán Archaeological-Botanical Project, Annual Report, 1961. More on his work appears in the post for 21 February 2010.

_____. The Prehistory of the Tehuacán Valley, volume 5, 1972.

National Research Council. Amaranth: Modern Prospects for an Ancient Crop, 1984, edited by F. R. Ruskin.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Sauer, Jonathan D. "Amaranths as Dye Plants among the Pueblo Indians," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6:412-415:1950.

_____. "The Grain Amaranths and Their Relatives: A Revised Taxonomic and Geographic Survey," Missouri Botanical Garden, Annals 54:103-137:1967.

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

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

Photographs:
1. Red amaranth growing near village, 17 August 2012.

2. This year’s offspring of #1, same location, 4 September 2014.

3. Red amaranth seed, purchased from Native Seeds/Search. It appears black when it comes from the package.

4. Unidentified amaranth in Florentine Codex, illustration 963, after Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. His version of the codex was published in three volumes in 1906 and 1907.

5. Red amaranth seed, purchased from Horizon Seeds. One seed is redder than the others. All Sauer and others say is light and dark, but not how light or dark.

6. Red amaranth seed, purchased from All Good Things Organic. The lighter colored seed looks like an unviable one that won’t sprout if its planted.

7. Local green amaranth in my yard, 13 August 2012. The earliest leaves and the stems are reddish.

8. Reseeds from #1, growing behind the 2012 plants; 4 September 2014.

9. Reseeds from #1, growing across drive from 2012 plants; 4 September 2014. Differences in height probably are due to differences in runoff from the road.

10. Red amaranth seeds, purchased from Seeds of Change. Similarities between seeds from different vendors may be inherent in the species, or may be because many seed companies purchase their stock from the same wholesale source.

Hurricanes

Weather: Remnants of hurricane Odile were diverted; instead of water we got cold temperatures Thursday morning; last rain 9/5.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, sweet pea, Russian sage, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, African marigolds from seed, Maximilian and cultivated sunflowers, pampas grass. Pyracantha berries turned orange.

One man reaped his hay this week in four stages. He first drove through to cut stalks. Next he threw the mown stalks into heaped rows. After they dried, he baled them. Finally, three men picked up the bales. One drove the tractor. A second walked beside the flat-bed trailer and handed the bales to the third who stacked them on the trailer floor.

Beyond the walls and fences: Pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, pigweed, ragweed, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, plains paper flowers, áñil del muerto, tahoka daisy, golden hairy, heath and purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, garlic chives, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhocks, winecup mallow.

Looking south: Betty Prior and floribunda roses.

Looking west: Catmint, calamintha, David phlox, purple coneflower.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis, chrysanthemum.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, blue salvia, moss rose, French marigold.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Ground squirrel, geckos, other small birds, bees, grasshoppers, hornets, large and small black ants.

I’ve been cleaning house and finding more than the usual numbers of spider webs. I’ve also found more species than the familiar daddy long-legs. I blamed my negligence for the arachnid diversification until I talked with a friend in Santa Fé. He said he had more spiders his year than usual and more varieties. He attributed them to the warm winter and wet summer.

Weekly update: It’s a commonplace to say what you learn is defined by the questions you ask.

This week I’ve been trying to identify how red amaranth moved from southern México to the Hopi in northeastern Arizona.

Jonathan Sauer reviewed the available literature in 1950. He found only one possible reference: "In the state of Guerrero in Mexico, immature amaranth inflorescences are ground on a metate and the resulting bright red paste is used to color maize dough."

My ignorance of Mexican history and geography is profound. I didn’t know Guerrero lies on the Pacific northwest of Oaxaca or that Acapulco is its main city. My knowledge of Acapulco was limited to celebrity news stories. However, I did notice its location on the southern end of the Mexican land mass coincided with an area where tropical storms have been forming this summer.

For the past several years I’ve been trying to discover where our rain comes from. Last year I realized humidity levels didn’t matter if the moisture was being pulled from local streams, soils and plants. Many rain showers were simply recycling our existing water as the weather was slowly moving it elsewhere.

I thought hurricanes might be the source for the moisture that fueled monsoons. I had a vague sense we sometimes got rain when a tropical storm moved near the mouth of the Río Grande in the Carribean. When I looked at the National Hurricane Center’s website I discovered there are more storms than those in the Atlantic that threaten US cities.

NHC has a separate map for hurricanes in the eastern Pacific. Most of the disturbances this summer originated along Mexico’s western coast between Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta, some a bit farther south, some to the west in the ocean.

I also learned Acapulco had been the port for Spanish trade with the Orient that went through Manilla. It took advantage of the western trade winds used by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Later, in 1565, Alonso de Arellano and Andrés de Urdaneta discovered, to get home, sailors had to sail north to reach the east bound westerlies at 38 degrees north off Japan.

I was aware of the two wind streams in the Atlantic. The trade winds are the ones sailing ships used in the triangular trade that moved slaves from Africa to the Carribean. Then ships moved north along the US coast dropping off slaves and picking up cargoes until they reached New England. They returned to England on the westerlies with raw materials sold in the ports of Bristol and London for cash needed to fund the next slave trip.

Arellano and Urdaneta reasoned winds must behave the same in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. North and south have the same patterns. The equator runs between with no winds. Sailors call the dead area the doldrums. Scientists term it the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

Hurricane formation is a function on the earth’s movements around the sun. After the solstice, the ocean waters heat enough for storms to form. Rotation isn’t possible near the equator, because it doesn’t spin fast enough. The southern boundary for hurricane formation is 310 miles north of the equator. Acapulco is 1,166 miles distant.

The northern boundary for very warm water is the Tropic of Cancer. The northernmost point that has the sun directly overhead on the solstice lies at the 23.5 latitude. Canton, which became the primary export center for China, is at 23 degrees north.

There are, of course, other factor contributing to hurricane formation, but this was enough to explain how hurricanes affect our weather. The Hopi know monsoons come from the southwest, the direction associated with blue corn.

Whether or not the water that moves up through the Gulf of California reaches the Española valley is determined by other wind forces from the north and east which redirect its course. Christina arrived in mid June, Douglas in early July, Marie in late August. Last week the remnants of Norbert were deflected by winds from the east. They flooded Phoenix and Las Vegas when they dumped their water in Arizona and Nevada. This Thursday Odile stayed to the south as cold air moved in from Colorado.

The potential for destructive storms between the solstice and the equinox is the main reason sailing ships using the trade winds could only make the round trip once a year. Winter conditions were the other.

Acapulco, as the port for the Spanish trade with China, would have had good roads to Mexico City. Once communications existed between the two areas, more than trade goods would have moved northeast from Guerrero, even after the Spanish trade ended in 1815. Anything in the market stalls of the capital could move north to the Hopi.

It’s unknown if anything did. I’ve not been able to read Sauer’s original source. Pedro Hendrichs’ book is out of print, but not out of copyright. Google confirmed the words metate, maize and alegría appear on the page cited by Sauer, but wouldn’t let me see them.

Hendrichs identified alegría elsewhere as Amaranthus paniculatus var esp Leucocarpus, a synonym for the Hopi’s Amaranthus cruentus that grew in nearby Oaxaca. The word alegría is more commonly used in México for the Amaranthus hypochondriacus used by the Aztec for ceremonial dough figures. Hendrichs also said "In ancient times, the Indians made idols of the little" paniculatus seeds they offered to the gods. They ate "them after finishing the ceremony."

It’s not obvious Hendrichs identified the plant correctly. He was not a botanist, but the son of a German hardware salesman who sent him to México before World War I to expand his markets. He returned after the war to write ethnographic studies.

This book was about the Río Balsas that flows through Guerrero to empty into the Pacific at Lázaro Cárdenas, some 200 miles north of Acapulco in Michoacán. The 479-mile-long river could have been a separate conduit for seeds to follow to reach Mexico City.

It’s well known that discoveries, whether by the Hopi, sailors or me, involve more than asking the right questions. It also helps to be open to serendipitous happenings. Or, as scientists say one forms hypothesis, but must pay attention to anomalies.

Notes: Much of my information is from Wikipedia.

Hendrichs Pérez, Pedro Rodolfo. Por Tierras Ignotas, volume 1, 1945.

Sauer, Jonathan D. "Amaranths as Dye Plants among the Pueblo Indians," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6:412-415:1950.

Photographs: The daily cloud cycle echoes the effects of the sun’s heat that form hurricanes.  Clouds on Friday, the day after Odile failed to arrive. All were taken looking southwest between two lilacs toward the Jémez in the general area between Los Alamos and Puye Cliffs.

1. 6:30 am. Clouds from night revealed at dawn.

2. 7:29 am. Sun rising, picking out the lime layers in the badlands; clouds dissipating

3. 7:47 am. Night clouds nearly gone.

4. 8:58 am. First clouds of new day are small, isolated puffs of white.

5. 10:01 am. Clouds joined in bands above the Jémez, with new clouds rising behind. Density of lime is fading in the badlands.

6. 10:29 am. Clouds in a denser band with some patterns to them.

7. 12:37 pm. Clouds reaching their densest state. They stay the same until late afternoon.

8. 4:44 pm. Clouds begin moving higher, streaming out overhead.

9. 6:11 pm. Clouds thinning at the south end of the Jémez and developing more to the north.

10. 6:40 pm. Winds developing, clouds thinning.

11. 7:11 pm. Few clouds left as sundown approaches.

12. 7:40 pm. No clouds left.

Red Amaranth

Weather: Hurricane Norbert off the southwest of Baja brought rain Friday.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, datura, morning glories, bouncing Bess, purple garden phlox, sweet pea, Russian sage, zinnias from new seeds and reseeds, cultivated sunflowers.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow evening primrose, purple mat flower, pink and white bindweed, goat’s head, stickleaf, leatherleaf globemallow, pigweed, ragweed, horseweed, Hopi tea, snakeweed broom, broom senecio, native sunflowers, goldenrod, plains paper flowers, áñil del muerto, tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters, black and side oats grama grasses.

In my yard, looking east: Large-flowered soapwort, garlic chives, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhocks, winecup mallow, cut leaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflower heads beginning to bend from weight of seeds.

Looking south: Betty Prior, Fairy, rugosa and miniature roses.

Looking west: Caryopteris, catmint, calamintha, David phlox, ladybells, Mönch aster, purple coneflower.

Looking north: Yellow potentilla, hosta, golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, coreopsis.

In the open, along the drive: Buddleia, white yarrow.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, blue salvia, moss rose, gazania.

Seeds: Larkspur, reseeded Sensation cosmos from last year’s plants, yellow cosmos.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, small birds, bees, grasshoppers, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Some mysteries are never solved.

A few years ago a woman down the road planted some bulbs that erupted after the monsoons came in July of 2010. They reached four feet by the first of August with maroon, begonia-like leaves. I thought she’d ordered something from some mass market catalog that featured South African novelties.

The next year, someone two miles away planted something with similar red leaves between rows of African marigolds in a cutting garden. By the end of September I decided the red heads must be some type of giant celosia instead.

The celosia I know, the plumed variety of Amaranthus argentea sold as a bedding plant, might get a foot high. These were six-feet tall, with spikes like Amaranthus caudatus. However, they didn’t have the hanging habit of love-lies-bleeding.

This year I decided the burgundy-leaved, maroon-flowered giants were a form of the red amaranth grown by the Hopi and Zuñi. They extract a beet-like pigment from the plumes to dye the thin wafer bread distributed by kachina dancers.

The real mystery isn’t the identity of the plant, but how Amaranthus cruentus got into Española area gardens in 2011.

When I was in Santa Fé this week I saw them growing in two yards. I’m told one of the gardeners had purchased it as bedding plant from Agua Fria Nursery in 2012. It naturalized and since has come back from its own seeds.

The seeds themselves are not offered by Lake Valley, the company whose seed is most available here and in Santa Fé. One has to order packets from some small company that specializes in native or heritage plants.

One such company, Seeds of Change, has offered Amaranthus cruentus x Amaranthus powelli as the Hopi Dye Plant. The company was founded in 1989 in Gila, New Mexico, by Gabriel Howearth. The research farm was moved to El Guique, northwest of Española on the road to Ojo Caliente in 1996.

The following year, the company was bought by Mars, Inc. The corporate owner closed local operations in 2010 amid chaos that could have scattered inventories. Employees were abruptly dismissed. Seed crops were abandoned. Headquarters originally were in Santa Fé. They’re now located in Rancho Dominguez, California.

The people with the cutting garden might buy plants from Agua Fria. They maintain their yard and put bedding plants in a whiskey half barrel laid on its side. However, they usually grow petunias that are available everywhere.

It’s more likely they planted seeds. The companion African marigolds usually are grown that way. I wondered for a while if they were cropping the amaranth, perhaps drying the heads and selling them in the Santa Fé farmers’ market as everlastings. They could also have been harvesting the grain or leaves for sale to gourmet cooks.

However, they seem to leave the plants to be killed by the frost. It takes three to five months for the seeds to mature after plants die.

I saw red-topped plants in three other places last year. All were in yards of single-wides in settled locations, not mobile home parks. The one also has a few rose bushes, perhaps selected from the ones imported in mass by the local hardware. Another has morning glories grown from seeds and iris that may have been passed along. While all three trailer dwellers appreciate flowers, none look like they would frequent stores that sold unusual annuals or seeds.

It’s possible one person’s plants came from a neighbor who bought bedding plants or whose ATV, snowmobile or hauling trailer tires picked up seeds around El Guique. Those plants could have gone to seed over the fence. Individuals then might have traded seedlings among themselves last year. Friendship and kinship ties spread over miles in the valley.

No one seems to have planted the amaranth this year. Instead the plants look like they reseeded in dense patches. One even came up on the shoulder opposite one of the trailers.

The cutting garden still has its plants in rows, but it looks like someone may have dug the furrows after the plants emerged. Everywhere, this year, the plants are variable heights and colors.

As for the first plant that had red leaves and plumes, the woman continued to plant it for several years, then stopped. I still have no idea what it was.

[I have since been told this is the castor bean plant, Ricinus communis. It’s in the spurge family.]

Photographs:
1. Red amaranth head, trailer on south side of village, 17 August 2012.

2. Red amaranth plants growing outside fence by road to post office, 5 September 2014. The plant grew here last year, and apparently reseeded. I would guess the sprouts inside the fence were weeded out, but the ones outside left to fend for themselves. With irregular watering, they became deep red and short.

3. Unknown red-leaved plant growing on the main road, 11 September 2010.

4. Red amaranth growing in rows with African marigolds, double-wide on north side of village, 12 October 2013.

5. Plants in the cutting garden shown in #4 killed by frost, 26 November 2011.

6. Morning glories blooming with plants in #1, 17 August 2012.

7. Plant growing on shoulder across the road from south trailer, 4 September 2014.

8. Cutting garden plants from #4 growing this year, 4 September 2014.

9. The red-leaved plants that first piqued my interest, 11 September 2010; same as #3. The fence is about three-feet high.