Rain

Weather: Afternoon temperatures above 90 wall week; last real rain 6/13.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, lilies, daylily, datura, Spanish broom, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, hollyhock, bouncing Bess, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, brome grass.

Crew was picking peas by hand in large field. Others were selling them in the grocery store parking lot.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, tamarix, cholla, tumble mustard, buffalo gourd, yellow mullein, silver leaf nightshade, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, green-leaf five-eyes, Queen Anne’s lace, Hopi tea, goat’s beard, plains paper flower, flea bane, strap leaf aster, rice grass.

In my yard facing north: Potentilla, Saint John’s wort, golden spur columbine, coral beard tongue, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, anthemis.

Facing east: Snow-in-summer, coral bells, winecup mallow, Maltese cross, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Jupiter’s beard,

Facing south: Dutch clover.

Facing west: Purple and Husker’s beard tongues, lady bells, veronica, purple and blue salvias, catmints, blue flax, Shasta daisy.

In the open: Rugosa roses, buddleia, California poppy, larkspur, bachelor button, white yarrow.

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

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: House finch and other small birds, geckos, cabbage and sulphur butterflies, bumble bees, hornets, ants.

Found a bird’s nest in the apple tree, relatively exposed at the end of a branch. It’s the first I’ve found on my land since I moved here in 1991.

Weekly update: Spring didn’t bode well. We'd had a normal amount of snow and rain in the winter. The winds were delayed, and no rain. Then, some hurricanes formed early off the southwest coast of México, Andreas and Blanca the end of May, Carlos in mid-June.

Plants in the right growth cycle when the rains came down have flourished. Those whose flowering was determined in the previous late summer and fall could only expand what they had.

Daffodils and tulips had few flowers, but the stems were longer. Later, the iris stems were tall, and then the Oriental poppies, columbine and daylilies have produced longer stems than usual.

Other plants whose flowering is usually blighted by the dry spring, have been able to open all their flowers. Cottonwoods produced more cotton. It was possible to walk to the bolls on one tree that had had a branch crash down years ago.

Roses that fail to bloom much early, and then finish their buds in late summer, produced masses of flowers in June.

Plants that had all but disappeared, reappeared. I planted some Siberian iris years ago. They never bloomed, and I though they died out in 2005. When I was weeding in 2012 I started to pull out a grass and realized it was iris leaves. The leaves reappeared this year.

Similarly, the Goodness Grows blue veronica last bloomed in 2012. I found no evidence of it last year, but this year, I found its flowering spikes.

Annuals, of course, have a better chance of exploiting chance moisture than do the shrubs and perennials. Larkspur reseeds itself. It usually gets bout six to ten inches high with a few flowers.

This year, the stems are longer and covered with flowers. It remains to be seen, if they will keep blooming, or if the number of flowers is finite and only the opening dates vary.

More important are the natives that have been able to respond. Cholla cacti have suffered in the dry years and their roots have been attacked, probably by ground squirrels. I thought mine were dying. They aren’t putting out many flowers yet, but they have put out new growth all along their stems.

The most interesting are the plains prairie flowers. Usually, a few grow along the south bank of a road going over a local bridge of Arroyo Seco. This year the bank is covered with yellow flowers.

They’re blooming on the north bank and across the arroyo. The composite Psilostrophe villosa are blooming in a wash by the arroyo in the Arroyo Seco valley.

They’re blooming on the south side of the Pojoaque ridge, and other places along the road to Albuquerque.

They’re a biennial that may become perennial. It’s behaving this year like an annual who’s seeds were germinated in late winter, and have survived to cover the slopes of hills today.

Photographs:
1. Daylilies, 27 June 2015.
2. Bird’s nest in apple tree, 27 June 2015.
3. Oriental poppy with Apache plume, 6 June 2015.
4. Cottonwood, near village farm land, 21 June 2015.
5. Dr. Huey roses, 14 June 2015.
6. Veronica Goodness Grows, 21 June 2015.
7. Larkspur, 22 June 2014.
8. Larkspur a year later, 27 June 2015.
9. Cholla new growth, 14 June 2015.
10. Plains paper flower, Arroyo Seco bank near village, 21 June 2015.
11. Plains paper flower, wash in Arroyo Seco valley, 21 June 2015.
12. Plains paper flower, south side of Pojoaque ridge, 21 June 2015.

Woolly Paper Flower

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, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, yellow evening primroses, datura, Heavenly Blue and ivy-leaf morning glory, bindweed, goats’ head, purple phlox, bouncing Bess, Queen Anne’s lace, stickleaf, spurge, purslane, pigweed, cultivated and native sunflower, Hopi tea, gumweed, goatsbeard, horseweed, wild lettuce, strap and hairy golden aster, woolly paper flower, goldenrod, tahokia daisy, barnyard grass.

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

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

Looking south: Blaze roses, rose of Sharon, bundle flower, sweet pea, reseeded morning glory, zinnia, cosmos; hips forming on rugosa roses.

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, mushrooms.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: African aptenia, asparagus fern.

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

Weather: Typical monsoon weather, cool mornings, warm days, bits of late afternoon rain; last useful rain 8/05/09; 14:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This past week the red snake I think lives in my neighbor’s yard crept onto my front porch railing. People tell me it’s harmless and most likely a western coachwhip, sometimes called a red racer, or a bullsnake.

The only dangerous snakes in New Mexico are the seven varieties of rattlers and the coral snake. Zuñi healers used to mix the taproots of woolly paper flowers with the roots of other plants to form a dressing they applied to rattlesnake bites after they had protected themselves by chewing another plant root and sucked out the poison.

Matilda Coxe Stevenson also found Zuñi men collected ha’tsoliko blossoms for their wives to grind. The man who directed the dancers impersonating the gods mixed the meal with yellow ochre and urine to produce body and mask paints. Although the Keres speakers of Acoma and Laguna and the White Mountain Apache of Arizona also used the yellow composite as a dye, it’s unclear if the ocher was an insufficient yellow for the Zuñi, or if they were adding magical properties.

To the west, the Hopi at Shipaulovi on the Second Mesa in Arizona sought to control the snakes by bringing them into their ceremonial chambers in rituals that showed great knowledge of the ways of the venomous animals. When Elsie Clews Parson was allowed to observe a snake-antelope ceremony in 1892, they casually let the rattlesnakes fall into her lap. She was too distracted to identify the pollen they sprinkled on the reptiles’ heads.

Harold Colton found a different species of paper flower there, Psilostrophe sparsiflora, and that people used it like the Zuñi to strengthen medicine. They also used it in their snake dance ceremonials.

When Stevenson visited San Ildefonso in 1912 she heard two villages propitiated the rattlesnakes by killing sacrificial victims with datura and then letting the animals feast on the bodies. She had heard rumors of such rituals in the past in other pueblos, but such knowledge was kept so secret within the small group of participants that she learned little more.

When William Robbins and his team visited the same area a few years later, no one mentioned the woolly paper flower, even though today a few domes of Psilostrophe tagetina are growing down hill from the road that crosses the village arroyo. The earliest, notched ray flowers have dried tan, but new three and four petaled flowers are opening, held high by their flattened receptacles.

Whenever I find such discrepancies in the reports of wild plants, I wonder how much to attribute to reticence by the Tewa speakers and how much to natural conditions at the time. The butter-yellow perennial grows in Colorado and Nebraska and south through Chihuahua and Coahuila. The current center of diversification in western Texas.

Several research teams have reported it appears with black grama grass on the Jornado plain north of Las Cruces. However, William Dick-Peddie found few of the forbs, that grow on desert grasslands in the southern part of the state, survived in our area where sheep grazed so long.

One can’t know if William Robbins’ team didn’t mention the paper flower because it had died out in the area or if the association of the woolly paper flower with rattlesnakes and rituals hadn’t spread or survived here with the snakes, or it the local people simply professed ignorance. I don’t even know if the plants I see are natives or were introduced when the road was cut through the ridge to the highway that comes up from Arroyo Seco were some plants are blooming on the eastern shoulder.

Notes:
Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Gibbens, Robert P. and Reldon F. Beck. "Changes in Grass Basal Area and Forb Densities over a 64-Year Period on Grassland Types of the Jornada Experimental Range," Journal of Range Management 41:186-192:1988.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including George R. Swank, The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932; Albert B..Reagan, "Plants Used by the White Mountain Apache Indians of Arizona," Wisconsin Archeologist 8:143-61:1929 and Harold S. Colton, Hopi History and Ethnobotany, 1974.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Pueblo Indian Religion, 1939, reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

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

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

_____. "Strange Rites of the Tewa Indians," Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous Collections 63:73-80:1913.

Photograph: Woolly paper flower growing near the village arroyo, 2 August 2009, with both yellow and papery dried ray petals.