Shasta Daisy

What’s still green: Arborvitae, juniper and other evergreens, Apache plume, some rose stems, cholla, prickly pear, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, vinca, beardtongues, coral bells, sea pink; snow still covers grape hyacinth, pink and yellow evening primroses, purple aster, cheat grass, bases of needle and June grasses.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, pinks, snow-in-summer, saltbush, winterfat.

What’s yellow: Weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea and aptenia; rochea and Christmas cactus leaves tinged with red.

Animal sightings: The birds that land in the peach don’t chirp or sing; they make clacking noises that sound like two sticks hitting one another.

Weather: Early morning temperature still dropping to mid-teens, but afternoons warming enough to thaw parts of the drive; last snow 12/30/09; 9:50 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Gardeners usually know what they do and why they do it. When they look at the consequences, they’re never sure exactly what happened. Nature has a way of intervening.

I wanted tall white flowers along the west side of the garage and so ordered six Shasta daisy seedlings in 1998 that didn’t survive. I planted six Alaska cultivars in 1999 and added six Exhibitions in 2000. Each started to bloom the following summer, until the grasshoppers found them. By 2003 they appeared to have died out, but one came back the next spring.

Every year since the cycle has been repeated. The one Alaska plant comes up; the grasshoppers eat the flowers before they fully open on stalks that never get more than 6" high. With this year’s atypical weather, the leaves were able to come back in the fall and even started to put out new growth before the snows of December finally collapsed the older leaves.

Luther Burbank knew what he wanted when he bred the Shasta daisy, a daisy that "would be the purest imaginable white in color" And he knew exactly what he did to create that whiteness.

He began growing ox-eye daisies in California and selected the best plants to fertilize with pollen from a Pyrenees flower, Leucanthemum maximum. The result had the grace of the maternal Leucanthemum vulgare, but the large flowers of the father. Still he thought them a bit dingy.

Next he tried adding the pollen from a Portugese daisy he ordered from Germany, Leucanthemum lacustre, but the improvement was minor. Then he tried the pollen from the Japanese Nipponanthemum nipponicum and produced a whiter, larger flower, but lost the leafless stalk he desired. He continued selecting the best of its offspring, until he got the "Shasta hybrids" he sold in 1901 and the Alaska he released in 1904.

What he didn’t know is how it all happened. He’d been inspired by Charles Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and was systematically applying the concept of natural selection with the methods then in use, controlling the pollination between two plants. He began by improving the fruits of members of the rose family like plums and blackberries.

When he began on daisies, all the perennials he used were considered members of the Chrysanthemum genus that had already been much improved. In the 1990's, taxonomists tried to rationalize the composite family into new genuses grouped within tribes and subtribes. They separated the Leucanthemums into what they believed was a monophyletic genus, meaning one that evolved from a common ancestor in Europe, possibly the Mediterranean area. The Japanese plant was redefined as a Nipponanthemum which was "provisionally placed as an aberrant member of subtribe Leucantheminae."

Tyge Böcher and Kai Larsen believe those Leucanthemum species that grow in England and Atlantic Europe tend to have the usual two sets of chromosomes, while those living elsewhere on the continent and in the southern mountains have many more. In fact, the widely distributed vulgare can vary from two to ten chromosomes, while maximum has ten and lacustre has 22. The Japanese plant has the usual two.

Botanists have found no universal rule governing the ability of closely related species to interbreed, but have found the greater the number of chromosome sets, the greater the possible variations, and often the greater the size of the plant, fruit or flowers.

Burbank couldn’t have known this in 1901 when he released Shasta daisies. In 1872, Edmund Russow had observed some rod shaped entities in cells during early mitosis just after the male and female cells had merged that subsequently change shape and then couldn’t be seen with an optical microscope. It wasn’t until Walther Flemming found a way to stain the cells with an aniline dye that chromosomes could be seen easily, but no one understood the significance of what they were seeing until the work of Gregor Mendel was publicized in 1900.

However, by the time Burbank described how he produced the Shasta daisy in 1914 he was aware, at least in general, of Mendel’s work. The 65-year-old man remembered "thousands of seedlings were raised each year for five or six ensuing seasons," the number of generations required by Mendel to assure a given trait will always appear. Without knowing the numbers of chromosomes, he also knew the possible permutations required he plant many more than four seeds.

None of his comments or intentions, of course, have anything to do with why Shasta daisies grow in a massed bed down the road, don’t survive three years for my next door neighbor, and behave like displaced persons in the icy drip line on the west side of my garage. The genes that make the taproot prefer heavy soil or require cold winter temperatures to bloom were outside his interest, but they are the natural forces that ultimately determine if Leucanthemum superbum can grow in this part of northern New Mexico.

Notes:
Böcher, Tyge W. and Kai Larsen. "Cytotaxonomical Studies in the Chrysanthemum Leucanthemum Complex," Watsonia 4:11-16:1958.

Bremer, Kare and Christopher John Humphries. "Generic Monograph of Asteraceae-Anthemideae," The Natural History Museum Bulletin 23:71-177 :1993.

Burbank, Luther, John Whitson, Robert John, and Henry Smith Williams. Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, volume 2, 1914; chapter 1 reprinted as Luther Burbank, The Shasta Daisy: How a Troublesome Weed Was Remade Into a Beautiful Flower, by Athena University Press, 2004.

Darwin, Charles. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1868, revised 1875.

Heide, O. M. "Dual Induction Control of Flowering in Leucanthemum vulgare," Physiologia Plantarum 95:159-165:1995.

Strother, John L. Chromosome counts from entries on Leucanthemum and Nipponanthemum on eFloras’ Flora of North America website.

Photograph: Shasta daisy "Alaska," 10 January 2010.

Leadwort

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush almost gone, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet and white prairie clovers, yellow evening primroses, datura, goats’ head, bouncing Bess, stickleaf, chamisa, winterfat, ragweed, snakeweed, native and farmer’s sunflowers, áñil del muerto, horseweed, wild lettuce, African marigolds, tahokia daisies, purple, heath, strap-leaf and hairy golden asters, pampas grass; canna buds, bittersweet berries; more Virginia creeper turning red.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; leaves on butterfly weed turning yellow, catalpa leaves turning yellow and dropping, sand cherries turning red, seeds on blackberry lily.

Looking east: California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum, garlic chive, Maximilian sunflower; leaves on peony turning color.

Looking south: Rose of Sharon, sweet pea, Crimson Rambler morning glories, zinnia, cosmos; grapes turning red.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Russian sage, catmint, calamintha, David phlox, leadwort, purple ice plant, Silver King artemisia, purple coneflower, Mönch aster; leaves turning orange on skunkbush and white spurge; peach leaves turning yellow and dropping.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum; edible tomatoes.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, bees, wasps, grasshoppers, large black harvester and small dark ants.

Weather: Short bursts of strong winds late some days; rain Thursday; 11:55 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Some flowers are definitely camera shy. Some weigh so little, they never stay still long enough for a camera to capture them. Others reflect so much light they blind the lens. The blues are trickiest of all, because their wiles defeat the camera itself, not just the photographer.

Of all the blue flowers in my garden, leadwort is the hardest to photograph. Early in the morning, when the Chinese natives are in shade, images look like they were taken underwater. By the time the sun reaches the west facing bed, the petals have begun to protect themselves by reflecting light. I was only able to get a clear picture last Sunday when the sky was still bright, but a little rain was falling. Even then the color was wrong.

Unlike the old silver-based film cameras, nothing is constant with a digital device. Then, if a picture was out of focus, the photographer knew he or she hadn’t set the distance parameter, the focal length, properly. With a computer-controlled camera, two parts of a plant the same distance from the lens, will appear in different degrees of detail. The reddish brackets that hold the pinkish tubes of the five-petaled leadwort flowers are always clear.

The same variation occurs with color. When the light is right, the leaves, the stems, the tubes and brackets are reasonably true, but not the petals. The reds, greens, browns and whites are fine. Only the blues are bad.

The chemicals in the plant absorb light both as part of photosynthesis and as the nature of matter. What we see is the light that’s not absorbed. In the case of leadwort, the flower is absorbing the yellow center of the visible light spectrum and ignoring the reds and blues, which the human eye combines into purple. On the other hand, the leaves are rejecting the green, and using the rest of the light to feed themselves

Jeffrey Harborne identified the flower pigment in Ceratostigma plumbaginoides as europinidin, a reddish blue anthocyanin derivative of the bluish purple delphinidin typically found in members of the plumbago family. Later this fall, when the leaves turn a burgundy red, the plant will have produced a cyandin monoside that will reflect light differently. Earlier, when they broke through the ground the second week of May, the new leaves were a shiny green.

Chemists themselves have troubles defining colors precisely. When William Lawrence’s team was testing the anthocyanin pigments in fall leaves, they found a number had one hue when seen in daylight and another when seen in artificial light. The nature of light is not constant from morning to noon, from clear to cloudy, from June to September.

Whenever I try to explain to myself what has happened with my pictures I get tangled in the differences between the reality of the physicist’s linear spectrum that fades into infrared at one end and to ultraviolet at the other, and the vocabulary of the artist’s color wheel which sees purple as the junction between red and blue. When I compare the photograph with the flower I see, it looks like the blue is bad because the red has been lost, only the blue has become lighter, not darker as a consequence.

I finally defined the two colors, the actual flower and its representation in the language of the computer monitor, which sees everything as a mix of red, green, and blue. The one is roughly 130 parts red to 50 parts green to 255 parts blue. The other is 100 parts red to 130 parts green to 245 parts blue. The first formula lacks the depth of the petals, but 255 is the maximum allowed for any color. The second doesn’t capture the sheen or white overtones of the photograph.

My camera uses the established technology that existed when it has introduced in 2005. The light enters through the lens to bounce against a prism that redirects it down to the CCD chip that converts the light into electronic impulses. Thom Hogan indicates such chips are more attuned to the high-energy infrared and somewhat blind to the low-energy blues. Some of the loss of blue, from 255 to 245, may be a consequence of that limitation; some of the loss of red (from 130 to 100) may come from the manufacturer’s attempt to compensate for the infrared sensitivity.

Computer chips only see on and off, which translate into black and white monochromes. The first stage of coloration comes from two layers of filters that sit above the CCD chip. One alternates red and green filters, the other blue and green so every point on the chip has one green filter and one of another color. At this point, the only loss of color comes from the quality of the filters.

The camera then takes the information from the chip and from the filters and combines them, using proprietary algorithms that try to reconstruct the relative importance of the data captured by the two layers. Since engineers know most people are more sensitive to green, than to red or blue, they tend to favor green when the pattern isn’t clear. And so, the amount of green in my picture is increased from 50 to 130, which distorts the flower color.

The variations increase when the image is transferred to a computer monitor or printer, because each piece of equipment has its own way of translating the RGB schema.

I originally asked questions about my camera’s technology so I would have some idea what features I needed if I replaced it. It never occurred to me to alter my garden so only the flowers that could be photographed would be allowed to grow. Nature is still more complex that it’s scientific representation, and flowers can be remembered without mechanical devices.

Leadwort is one of the last perennials to emerge in spring, rising in new places along the soaker hose where its rhizomatous roots have extended themselves. It’ll be one of the more colorful this fall. It’s now been putting out low flowers every few days since the middle of August. I grow it for the pleasures lived and those remembered, not for being recordable.

Notes: Charge-coupled devices (CCD’s) were developed in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at AT&T Bell Labs. The network of filters was patented by Bruce Bayer for Kodak in 1976. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz established humans perceived colors from only three band widths of light; the existence of separate human receptors for red, green and blue (RGB) was finally established in 1983 by Herbert James Ambrose Dartnall, James K. Bowmaker, and John D. Mollon. What I call a part of color, using the language of artists, actually refers to the intensity of the light measured by the physicist.
Hogan, Thom. "How Digital Cameras Work," bythom website, last revised 9 April 2009, provides the clearest explanation for the layman.
Harborne, J. B. "Comparative Biochemistry of the Flavonoids-IV: Correlations Between Chemistry, Pollen Morphology and Systematics in the Family Plumbaginaceae, " Phytochemistry 6:1415-1428:1967.
Lawrence, William John Cooper, James Robert Price, Gertrude Maud Robinson, and Robert Robinson. "A Survey of Anthocyanins. V," Biochemistry 32:1661-1667:1938.
Photograph: Leadwort, taken around 3:30 on 20 September 2009.

Caryopteris 'Longwood Blue'

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, snakeweed, native sunflowers, Hopi tea, gumweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy; trees loaded with apples; some Virginia creeper turning red.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, large-leaved soapwort, garlic chive, cut-leaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflower; buds on sedum.

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, calamintha, lady bells, sea lavender, David phlox, leadplant, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, geckos, hummingbird, bees, monarch type butterfly, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Cool mornings, hot afternoons; last rain 8/14; 13:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Santa Fe Style, with a capital S, prefers flat roofs, stuccoed walls, and blue painted window frames and door jambs to ward off the evil eye.

The theory is that since belief in the ability of someone to induce illness or sudden death in a young child by staring was widespread in the Mediterranean and blue was used by Arabs as protection from evil, the local migrants from Spain would not only have brought those customs with them, but perpetuated them unchanged for 300 years.

In fact, Cleofas Jaramillo remembered around Arroyo Hondo they sometimes protected babies with a bead of jet or coral, while Nasario García recalls a coral necklace. John Campiglio believes people in Mexico still use necklaces or bracelets made from the coral tree.

Most reports of el mal ojo in New Mexico focus on cures that involve eggs, water and religious incantation. Protection takes the form of invoking God when a child is admired or touching the child’s head, perhaps with a wetted finger. Alicia Re Cruz found the same combination of traditions used in Denton, Texas, in 2005 to save a young girl who had recently moved there from the same Zacatecas region that sent so many settlers north to our area before and after the reconquest.

Santa Fe Style has always been about being auténtico not objetivo. Once faded blue trim was de rigueur, then blue or purple flowering plants were necessary compliments, especially if they evoked Zane Grey’s purple sage. And so Russian sage is now blooming everywhere, relieved by an occasional caryopteris shrub.

I admit I have both growing on the west side of the house. As much as I remember, I planted them because the area flat enough there to hold water was so narrow, I thought shrubs might give an illusion of depth. I had already decided everything on that side would come from the blue end of the spectrum. Once the parameters were set, there really was little choice.

Caryopteris has the more complex flower. From a distance, the surface of the greyish shrub is covered with upright clusters of blue-grey flowers. Up close, the balls of color are composed of up to 45 round blue buds that open into four small blue-and-white petals and one taller fringed one. Four darker anthers rise above like so many crisscrossing antennae.

Botanists have more or less agreed Caryopteris is a member of the mint family, not the verbena as they once had thought. They’re still arguing how many species exist in the genus and if they in fact represent one genus with shared DNA or several.

Scientists hope to discover the same kinds of continuities that led some to expect traditions in Santa Fe to remain static remnants of the past. Instead, both nature and folklore are dynamic. Aurelio Espinosa heard they used an egg white in 1910 to detect the presence of the evil eye, while one person told García said it was the yoke in Cañon in the early twentieth century and another said they watched how the egg separated.

In the early 1930's, Arthur Simmonds discovered a new hybrid caryopteris growing in his garden in West Clandon, Surrey, that geneticists have now determined was a natural cross between a mongholica from western China and an incana from eastern Asia. The resulting clandonenisis was fertile, and continues to produce variant seedlings. Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania,.chose one in 1981 to nurture that became the parent of the shrub I bought in 1997.

If people in Santa Fe, who grow Longwood Blue, expect it to remain the neat rounded form shown in the pictures of the Du Pont’s allée, they will need to do more work than I’m willing to do. Farther north it dies back like an herbaceous perennial, but not here.

Each year, when I see the narrow, slightly toothed leaves sheath the empty grey framework of branches, I think about pruning it back. Then the leaves fill the center and new growth reaches up, now four and half feet. This year it’s spread seven feet with some suckers covering areas where other plants have died.

Whenever I walk near where its bee-covered branches intrude into the path, I have to remind myself, plants, like species and cultural traditions, do not have a predetermined final form.

Notes:Campiglio, John P. "Natural Medicine Tradition," 2005 revision available on-line.

Cruz, Alicia Re. "Taquerías, Laundromats and Protestant Churches: Landmarks of Hispanic Barrios in Denton, Texas," Urban Anthropology 34:281-303:2005.

Espinosa, Aurelio M. and J. Manuel Espinosa. The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest: Traditional Spanish Folk, 1990.

García, Nasario. Brujerías: Stories of Witchcraft and the Super-natural in the American Southwest and Beyond, 2007.

Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912.

Jaramillo, Cleofas M. Shadows of the Past, 1941.

Miller, Diana. "Caryopteris," December 2007, Royal Horticultural Society website.

Photograph: Longwood Blue caryopteris with bee, 22 August 2009.

Moss Rose

What’s blooming in the area: Tea roses, Apache plume, butterfly bush, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, leather leaved globemallow, bird of paradise, alfalfa, white sweet clover, Russian sage, milkweed, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and bush morning glory, creeping and climbing bindweed, buffalo gourd, goats’ head, purple phlox, cultivated, farmer’s and native sunflower, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, hairy golden aster, Queen Anne’s lace, tahokia daisy, blue and side oats grama grasses.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Hartweg, zucchini, nasturtium, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum, Parker’s Gold yarrow.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, bouncing Bess, snapdragons, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, pink evening primrose, large-leaved soapwort; buds on garlic chives, cut-leaf coneflower and Maximilian sunflower.

Looking south: Tamarix, Blaze and rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, daylily, bundle flower, sweet pea, zinnia, cosmos.

Looking west: Caryopteris, flax, catmint, lady bells, sea lavender, white spurge, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, purple ice plant, purple coneflower; buds on Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, gecko, bees, hummingbird moths, large black harvester and small dark ants, grasshoppers.

Weather: Storms in the area left rain on Tuesday night, and mediated afternoon temperatures and evaporation levels; last moderate rain 7/22/09; 15:21 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Cactus flowers, which were more plentiful this year than usual, resemble Busby Berkeley film musicals. The central attraction is a single pistol, towering above the ensemble like Carmen Miranda in her biggest hat. Surrounding her is a corps of thin stamens, and beyond them a few ladies, the petals, carrying large fans.

Moss roses are so closely related to cacti that they’re thought to be their immediate ancestors. They have the same flower, only everything is a bit more rococo. The single ovary has at least five stigmas which flare and curl. The petals multiply in groups of five. The anthers are sensitive to touch, so when a premier danseur insect moves among them, they bend in its direction. The prima is usually located off center.

Prickly pear flowers in this area are a lemony yellow, much paler than the moss roses blooming in my garden. The magenta of the chollas is a deeper, richer hue than the roses or pinks. All open mid-morning and close before sunset, eschew clouds and water drops.

A friend of William Hooker, probably John Gillies, told him that on the western bank of the Rio Desaguadero, which borders Mendoza province in the rain shadow on the Argentine Andes, there were so many Portulaca grandiflora plants in the late 1820's they "spread a rich purple hue, here and there marked with spots of orange color."

Some twenty years later, in 1851, Joseph Breck offered rose, scarlet, yellow, and white varieties in Boston. He said some white annuals appeared with pink stripes. How the simple color of the natural population could produce the brilliant shades of the cultivated plants, without benefit of any selective breeding, has puzzled botanists ever since.

Before 1921, Seniitiko Ikeno crossed plants he had selected over several generations for pure color. He believed yellow was primary and that the addition of some factor created orange. Further additions spawned red offspring, and even more of some unknown produced the magenta. He also noticed double flowers were dominant over the singles.

Biochemists have now determined both the cactus and portulaca families contain betalain pigments which are created by DOPA (3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine). When betalamic acid interacts with amino acids it becomes the yellow betaxanthin of the local prickly pear; when it mixes with cyclo-DOPA derivatives it becomes the purple betacyanin of the cholla. Orange results from the presence of both; white has little or no betalain.

Ikeno realized that Portulaca grandiflora did not fit the simple genetic matrix described by Mendel. He believed three factors needed to exist to produce the varieties he observed, an hypothesis Giampiero Franco Trezzini and Jean-Pierre Zÿrd confirmed when they found the biochemical patterns of betalain synthesis were consistent with the existence of three controlling genes.

You have to accept Miranda’s colors to grow moss roses. Most seed companies only offer mixed colors, and most growers put several tiny seeds in each pot. They don’t thin them, both to save labor costs and to make the plants look fuller than they are when they’re sold. No matter what color you see when you buy them in the spring, they will be something else in the summer.

When I bought Sundial F₁ seedlings this spring, they were all apricot. I planted them in an exposed bed where I hoped they would shelter the zinnia seeds. Now both are blooming in gaudy pinks and yellows with the South American natives kneeling in a corps around the taller Mexican pas de quatres, ensembles within an ensemble.

Notes:
John Gillies was a Scotch physician who lived in Mendoza between 1820 and 1828. Hooker, then at Glasgow University, described many of his discoveries according to John Dunne-Brady’s on-line listing of "Eponyms."

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

Hooker, William Jackson. Curtis's Botanical Magazine 56:2885:1829, quoted by Zÿrd and Christinet.

Ikeno, Seniitiko. "Studies on the Genetics of Flower-Colours in Portalaca grandiflora," College of Agriculture, Imperial University of Tokyo Journal 8:93-133:1921.

Trezzini, Giampiero Franco and Jean-Pierre Zÿrd. "Portulaca grandiflora: a Model System for the Study of the Biochemistry and Genetics of Betalain Synthesis," Acta Horta 280:581-585:1990.

Zÿrd, Jean-Pierre and Laurent Christinet. "Betalains," Annual Plant Reviews 14:185-213:2004.

Photograph: Moss roses, 19 July 2009, center of apricot flower has several thin stigmas reaching up like posts holding a ring stone between four and five o’clock from the darker stamens.

Anthemis

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, rock rose, some grasses; forsythia buds greening; first hyacinth bulbs poking through, new Mexican hat and black-eyed Susan leaves. Smell of burning was in the air Saturday morning.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Domestic flock of some dark fowl with small heads and large bodies feeding near the village yesterday; wild birds still making noise in the morning from the river.
Weather: Mornings still cold, afternoons warmer, little water left to frost my windshield. I gave up on local stores and finally ordered a copy of the only almanac that provides useful daylight information, The Old Farmers Almanac, published in Dublin, New Hampshire; there are 11:16 hours of sun today.
Weekly update: I have the luxury of growing plants for strictly aesthetic reasons. When I lived in Michigan, my anthemis Kelway went to seed. I have no idea if I ever saw the same plant two years in a row, but knew I could always expect a great mass of wide yellow flowers in summer. It mattered nought they were "so little stationary" they were a problem for 18th century English plant hunters who depended on them for a living.
When I planted the old world native here two years ago, I hoped the self-fertilizing flowers would reprise their northern wetland behavior and spread a more matte, paler yellow amongst the similarly migrating Mexican hats and coreopsis, blanket and chocolate flowers. Last summer they bloomed for the first time. This winter their flat junipery leaves stayed green under piles of snow dumped from the roof in December, but turned red a few weeks ago when the cold cover disappeared.
Assyrians living under Ashurbanipal between 626 and 608 bc had no such economic freedom. When they saw the yellow composites, they saw a potential dye. This may seem obvious to us today when craftsmen can buy books on local dye plants, but the discovery that fabrics could be colored came long after the invention of textiles, and required someone somewhere to notice that treating yarn with a metal salt changed the fiber so it could accept a water-soluble pigment that wouldn’t wash off or fade.
No one knows where that discovery was made. We have some Chinese written references to dyes in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–711 bc) that suggest gardenia was used for yellow; a scrap of untested red fabric and a water-tight brick floor from Mohenjo Daro (2600-1900 bc) in the Indus valley; some safflower from Tell Hamman et Turkmen (2500 bc) in northern Syria and great deal of connecting open steppe inhabited by tribes that left no written records.
The yellow pigment from safflower was used on mummy wrappings found in the non-royal Tomb of the Two Brothers from the 12th Dynasty of Egypt (1985-1773 bc), but the dye was so heavily applied researchers believed the tinting was done just before the burial when there was no requirement fot it to survive light or water. Even though the madder used for Tutankhamun, who died some centuries later in 1343 bc, had been treated with aluminum and calcium salts, it still wasn’t boil proof.
Once dyers fully realized the importance of mordants, they would have begun experimenting and discovered different techniques and different metals produced different results with the same plant. The knowledge became the family inheritance, protected by secrecy from outsiders, and thus vulnerable to loss when synthetic dyes were substituted in the late 19th century.
A few years ago, a Turkish team interested in reintroducing natural dyes tested crop-grown Anthemis tinctoria with eight mordants and found wool treated before the dye bath turned some shade of solid, deep yellow, while that treated after varied from light yellow to cream and beige. When the mordant was included with the dye, the wool absorbed greenish hues. It’s the brown tones that were used in Azerbaijani rugs; in Turkey the finished yarns were dipped in an alkaline ash solution for a gloss that would have further altered the colors.
Anthemis never became a popular dye: weld was cheaper and more versatile, saffron carried more prestige. When field workers asked people the dyes they remembered, the plant was mentioned only once in the Latium region of Italy, but in Ezurum in eastern Anatolia people knew the colors that came from treating wool with alum, iron sulfate and chrome.
The only other place dyer’s chamomile has been mentioned is Latvia. There at the northern end of that open space traversed by the Indo-Europeans and all the other peoples, goods, and ideas that moved beyond the ken of the classic writers, it was used for the woven sashes used as signifiers of status and luxury.
Notes:
For information on rug dyes, see commercial sites like Seeing Is Dreaming and Azerbaijan Rugs.Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles, 1992, discusses the quality of the evidence from India and the Tomb of the Two Brothers.Campbell Thompson, R. The Assyrian Herbal, 1924, cited by Lise Manniche, An Ancient Egyptian Herbal, 1989.Guarrera, Paolo Maria. "Household Dyeing Plants and Traditional Uses in Some Areas of Italy," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2:9:2006.Kizil, Süleyman, Nuran Kayabsşi, and Neşet Arslan. "Determination of some Agronomical and Dying Properties of Dyer’s Chamomile (Anthemic Tinctoria L.)," Journal of Central European Agriculture 6:403-408:2005.Las Arañas Spinners and Weavers Guild, Inc. Dying with Natural Materials, 2004 edition of Vegetable Dyes of New Mexico, 1970, prepared by Jodie Aves and Janislee Wiese.
Nicholson, Paul T. and Ian Shaw. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, 2000, discusses the quality of the evidence from Syria and Egypt.
Özgökçe, Fevzi and ĪIbrahim Yilmaz. "Dye Plants of East Anatolia Region (Turkey)," Economic Botany 57:454-460:2003.

Pīigozne, Ieva. "Latvian Folk Dress," 2008," available on-line.

Sowerby, James. English Botany, 1790.

Welters, Linda and Īra Kuhn-Bolšaitis. "The Cultural Significance of Belts in Latvian Dress" in Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and Fertility, 1999.

Wu, S. S., and Z. B.Tian. Zhong guo yin ran shi (Chinese History of Dyeing and Weaving), 1986, cited by Yun Ye, Lynn G. Salmon, and Glen R. Cass, "The Ozone Fading of Traditional Chinese Plant Dyes," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 39:245-257:2000.

Photograph: Red and green anthemis leaves protected by dead cherry leaves, taken from above, 21 February 2009.