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.

Chicory

Weather: We’ve been getting rain with nothing in the Caribbean or Pacific to kick up water; apparently, the conditions in the Great Basin that gave us days of temperatures in the 90s also created a vacuum that pulled water up from the southeast; last rain 7/7.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, tall yuccas, lilies, daylily, datura, Spanish broom, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, hollyhock, bouncing Bess, purple garden phlox, squash, farmer’s single sunflowers, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, Shasta daisy, zinnias from seed, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Buffalo gourd, yellow mullein, 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, golden hairy and purple asters.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, potentilla, buddleia, Saint John’s wort, California poppy, snow-in-summer, coral beard tongue, lady bells, Goodness Grows veronica, catmints, blue flax, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, white yarrow.

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

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds, geckos, swallowtail and cabbage butterflies, dragonfly, bumble bees, hornets, ants.

Weekly update: I covet chicory, and fear it.

I love the color. I still remember when I first saw it growing in the ballast along the rail tracks in northern Ohio. Slate blue daisies were stuck on grooved stems as straight as ramrods, and as barren, almost like ornamental keys on a clarinet.

But, much as I’ve considered buying seeds, I remember the basal rosettes resemble those of dandelions. Cichorium intybus might not spread the same way, but I wouldn’t be able to recognize the yellow-flowered monsters until they were in bloom, which is too late. Otherwise, I might pull the desired composite instead. Both have taproots that would leave a milky residue on my hands.

I’ve only seen chicory here along the road that connects Santa Fé with Taos. For a couple years, it was near the Dreamcatcher light, some other time it down by the Knights of Columbus turn. The last few years it sprouted in the gravel mulch in Walgreens’ roadside bed.

This year I found the double rows of squared off petals on the south side of the ridge that separates the Pojoaque valley from Arroyo Seco. It happened to be right at the boundary between white sweet clover uphill and yellow sweet clover below.

Naturally, the flowers were turned from the road and me. They open in mornings, when they follow the sun. They’re usually gone by afternoon.

The plants I’ve seen were almost always solitary, the results of physics shifting loads when vehicles changed speeds, either to climb hills or to stop or start at traffic lights. The dark blue, double coiled stamens and anthers can’t fertilize their own ovaries, so there must be at least two plants for the perennials to reproduce.

Chicory is probably a Mediterranean plant. The Egyptians used it as a food. One of their words for it, tybi, spread east into Persia as hindaba where the white roots were used medicinally. It must have followed the trade routes east. It now grows wild in parts of India as Kásni. In western China it was used by the Uyghurs. Almost all the Asian herbals say it is a cooling plant.

The Egyptians apparently developed a subspecies today called endive. When Pliny was discussing the plant soon after the birth of Christ, he distinguished the cultivated from the wild forms. Edward Sturtevant didn’t believe chicory was much cultivated until the middle ages. He noted Albertus Magnus was the first to mention growing, as distinct from gathering it. He was active in the mid-1200s.

Chicory spread as far north as England, but was primarily cultivated in France and Belgium. Maude Grieve said there was an attempt in 1778 to introduce it as a forage plant - it’s considered more nutritious than alfalfa. However, it wasn’t accepted. It remained a plant of gravel and chalk, especially on the downs of the southeast coast.

Neither the French nor the English were responsible for introducing it into this country, at least into Michigan. Edward Voss says it didn’t appear there until the 1840s, some fifteen years after farm lands in the lower peninsula were opened to settlement. Then, at least where I grew up, farmers were coming from places like Belgium.

During the civil war, it was introduced to New Orleans as an extender for coffee. However, it didn’t settled there either.

Instead, chicory colonized the lands north of the Ohio and east of the Missouri rivers. It also grows in the Pacific coast states. In between, it seems to have put down roots between the ranges of the Rockies. In 1915, it was only reported in Albuquerque, perhaps as a consequence of the railroad. Now it’s found in disconnected parts of the Río Grande valley and in the Four Corners.

Individual wild plants can interbred with cultivated forms, so that many of the naturalized plants show some genetic combination of both. Tomas Zavada’s team found plants gathered along the road side in New Mexico and Nevada showed the greatest genetic diversity.

I always see it blooming in summer. The brown seeds ripen in fall. Françoise Corbineau and Daniel Côme found they had no dormancy period, which means, if conditions were right, they could germinate immediately. Here, that’s after the rains. In Greece, Pliny said it appeared after the Pleiades, which would be the first of May.

Notes:
Corbineau, F. and D. Côme. "Germinability and Quality of Cichorium Intybus L. Seeds," Acta Horticulturae 267, 1989.

Dymock, William. The Vegetable Materia Medica of Western India, 1885; on Kásni.

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal, 1931, edited by Hilda Leyel.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, books 20 and 21, translated by W. H. S. Jones, 1951.

Sturtevant, Edward Lewis. Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919.

Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 3, 1966.

Wang, Quanzhen1 and Jian Cui. "Perspectives and Utilization Technologies of Chicory (Cichorium Intybus L.): a Review," African Journal of Biotechnology 10:1966-1977:2011; on Uyghurs.

Wooton, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Zavada, Tomas, Rondy Malik, Rondy and Kesseli. "Fifty Shapes of Leaf - Origins, Plasticity and Population Structure in Chicory (Cichorium Intybus), a Domesticate Gone Wild," Botanical Society of America, annual meeting, 2013.

Photographs: All taken along route 84 north of Pojoaque, 21 June 2015 around 11:30 am.

Peony

What’s blooming in the area: Late apples, lower branches on snowballs, first pink peony, first bright orange oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, moss phlox, purple salvia, donkey tail spurge; grape leaves killed by cold. There’s a lot of bare stems in rose bushes from winter kill.

Beyond the walls and fences: Fernleaf globemallow, western stickseed, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, rice and cheat grasses; Virginia creeper and tree of heaven leaves killed by snow and subsequent frost; Virginia creeper already recovering.

In my yard: Sour cherry, Siberian pea tree, tulips, iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax; spirea and lilacs were having a wonderful year until the frost killed the flowers; catalpa and black locust leaves destroyed by snow and cold temperatures; sweet alyssum, California and Shirley poppy seeds germinating; leaves emerging on wisteria; flower buds on Persian yellow rose and perky Sue.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, house finches and other small brown birds, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Snow Sunday that turn into ice on plant surfaces before it melted; cold temperatures Tuesday morning formed frost on plants; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:49 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: If peonies didn’t bloom every year in the village I never would have planted them. I associate the large, voluptuous flowers with the humid midwest where a friend of my parents in Michigan had a row growing in the narrow strip between the foundation of the house and the concrete drive that got the runoff from 35" of precipitation a year. Every June we’d admire her border.

Until this year nothing happened to challenge my childhood perceptions. I planted bare roots of Festiva Maxima in the fall of 2003, knowing, in the best of places, the rhizomes would take at least three years to become established. Mine struggled along on an average 10" of natural water a year, supplemented by hoses. They only bloomed in 2006 and 2009, while the ones in the village flowered each year, bathed in the moist air that rises from the river and the ditches.

Mine finally grew dramatically last spring after our unusually wet winter. They were covered with buds that simply stopped developing when conditions suddenly changed the end of May from cool and wet to hot and dry. When they’d bloomed in the past, it’d been the first week of June.

This winter was unusually dry. I expected nothing. After all, the daffodils didn’t bloom. I was surprised when the plants emerged in early April as vigorously as they had last year. I finally realized it was last year’s cold that had been important, not last year’s moisture.

The life of the peony is governed by temperature, not water or sun angles.

After they finish blooming in June, the plants begin developing buds at the bases of their stems that will be next year’s stems and flowers. The existing verdancy doesn’t increase, but continues supporting the underground activity which changes from bud to root formation in late summer. Before the first frost, the current year’s vegetation turns tan and sere.

During winter, the underground buds need more than 900 hours of cool temperatures to produce flowers. Once the quota is filled, nothing more happens until the soil warms in spring. Then the eyes push up red stalks that rise to carry the season’s complement of compound green leaves and terminal round buds. The flowers open soon after, so long as temperatures remain moderate.

I’m sure my perception that peonies require a warm, moist climate can be traced to the fact the plants come from China and entered the midwest after they’d been hybridized by Europeans. Festiva Maxima was released in 1851 by Auguste Miellez, a rose breeder in Esquermes-les-Lille, an area that gets 25" of rain a year and average January temperatures only fall to 32.

Nothing in their early Chinese history would have disabused me of my beliefs. They were first described by Zhang Zhong Jing of Changsha in modern Hunan province and by Hua Tuo of Bozhou in modern Anhui. The first averages 52" of rain a year and a January low of 43 degrees. The other has 31” of annual precipitation and a January average low of 33.

What’s extraordinary about the two men is not that they lived in areas with similar climates, but that they lived at the same time, when the Chinese civilization was first developing as a civilization. For centuries past, peasants had endured the wars between men who were trying to centralize power and those who resisted.

The Han dynasty had been founded by Liu Bang in 202 BC, and been disrupted by wars, before being reestablished by Liu Xiu in 25 AD. There followed years of prosperity, when trade was opened along what would become the Silk Road to the west, and knowledge began to be valued: Hua could study with a man trained in Ayurvedic medicine, while Zhang learned from Zhang Bozu.

When Cai Lui improved the methods for producing paper in 105 AD, he not only freed silk for trade, but also gave the sons of bureaucratic families a way to record their work.

When Hua and Zhang were living late in the dynasty, war fare and epidemics were threatening again. Instead of turning to traditional remedies or superstitions to treat the sick and injured, as people had in the past, the two applied what we recognize today as scientific principals.

Hua grew every plant reputed to be efficacious, and tested them. He found peony plants and flowers to be worthless, until he had a vision of them as a woman. Popular tradition says he’s the one who then discovered the roots were useful for treating gynecological problems.

Zhang classified plants into three groups, those that could be taken in any quantity, those that should be taken carefully and those that were dangerous. He mixed white peony root from the second category with the safer cinnamon, Chinese licorice, and Chinese jujube into a broth to treat fevers.

Chinese medical theory defines diseases as hot (yang) or cold (yin), and prescribes medicines with the opposite attribute to restore balance within the body. The stripped white root of the herbaceous peony is considered cold while the red root still encased in bark is considered cool.

The healing properties of shao yao must already have been known by Zhang’s and Hua’s ancestors because the species isn’t native to either Hunan or Anhui. Paeonia lactiflora grows in the woods and grasslands of the more northern and western provinces and beyond into Mongolia and Siberia where the climate is both colder and dryer. It was deliberately brought to their areas.

My plants have had their requisite period of cold, and now await the opportunity to bloom. Last Sunday night the buds were covered with snow that turned to ice when the sun rose the next morning. Tuesday, temperatures again fell below freezing and frost developed on any warm, organic surface. The spirea and lilac flowers that survived the snow were dead Wednesday afternoon.

The peony buds were still covered by their calyxes, which may have insulated them, but on Wednesday the buds had expanded enough to begin to split that protective coating. Now, I’m reduced to that state before Hua Tuo and Zhang Zhong Jing when men were helpless in the face of fate and could only watch things unfold, unable to influence events in any way.

The peony buds will either open or not. The flowers will either be magnificent or deformed. This will either be the year of the peony or it won’t.

It all depends on tomorrow’s weather in northern New Mexico.

Notes:
Hong, Deyuan, Kai-yu Pan and Nicholas J. Turland. “Paeonia lactiflora Pallas,” efloras Flora of China website.

Hua, Tuo. Texts destroyed.

Rodrigo-Lopez, Maria Jose. Floriculture as a Diversification Option for the Rural Economy of Northern Ireland, 2010.

Zhang, Zhong Jing. Shanghan Zabing Lun; text lost and reconstructed by Wang Shuhe.

Wang, Guangyao. “The History of Chinese Herbal Medicine,” available on line, on Zhang.

Photograph: Festiva Maxima peony about 8:00 AM Monday morning, 2 May 2011, as the snow was turning to ice before melting completely.

Tree of Heaven

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, iris, moss phlox, donkey tail spurge; lawns and hay fields beginning to green near road where water flows from ditches.

Beyond the walls and fences: Choke cherry, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless cryptantha, hoary cress, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, purple mat flower, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grass; buds on Virginia creeper; milkweed and ragweed coming up.

In my yard: Sour cherry, spirea, Siberian pea tree, lilacs, tulips, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, blue flax; buds on snowball, peonies and Bath pinks; tomatillos coming up.

Bedding plants: Pansy, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird and bumble bee on Siberian pea; smaller bees around lilac; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain early Monday and Tuesday mornings, followed by cooler nights and more winds; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There’s something worse than a Siberian elm. Trees of heaven not only produce viable seeds and resprout when pruned like elms, but they also sucker from their roots into copses and exude chemicals that keep other plants from their territory.

The team writing the environmental impact statement for widening the road from Española to Los Alamos on the other side of the river found Alianthus altissima growing around Santa Clara creek and recommended it be eradicated as a class B pest. Siberian elms are only class C nuisances and so not proscribed by the state. They can, however, be destroyed during construction without penalty.

Trees of heaven have gotten started along one of the village ditches at the northern end where water from the Santa Cruz enters the acequias. In one area, they’re competing with Siberian elms between the ditch and the pavement. This past winter both were cut back to keep the narrow road clear, but neither was fazed. One is bright green with new leaves. With last week’s warm weather, the other was beginning to leaf at its branch tips.

Ch’un shu is known in China as the spring tree because it’s one of the last to break dormancy, and thus signifies the end of winter famine. According to Shiu Ying Hu, it was primarily used for cooking fuel. However, the dried bark removed from felled trees could also be sold in markets for medicinal purposes as ch’un-po-pi.

The tree entered the western world under false pretenses. A French Jesuit priest, Pierre d'Incarville, thought he was sending back seeds of the tree the Chinese used to make lacquer. When they germinated in Paris, the saplings were mistaken for sumac, because the long leaves broken into pairs of smaller leaflets were similar.

William Prince introduced it commercially in this country as Sicilian Tanner’s Sumac, after Archibald Thompson sent him plants under that name from his West End nursery outside London. Once Prince realized the confusion and offered it as Chinese Ailanthus in the 1820's, the tree began to sell so well his Flushing nursery had problems meeting the demand because he only had male trees. They’re more floriferous than the females and the taller form was considered more aesthetically pleasing.

The market had already been created in Paris where American visitors saw Grand Vernis du Japon growing along the boulevards, especially on the left bank in the fifth arrondissement of Montparnasse. In those years of early industrial life, when coal was burned to produce steam and heat homes, the air was polluted with soot that killed many species. Insects attacked others. The fact the five-petaled male flowers smelled didn’t matter when horses were used for transport.

By the 1840's, Andrew Jackson Downing, the primary popularizer of romantic landscapes in this country, noted the Celestial Tree was “much planted in the streets and public squares” of New York and Philadelphia and that it was especially picturesque on lawns where “the foliage catches the light well, and contrasts strikingly with that of round-leaved trees.”

The tree grows rapidly its first years, concentrating its efforts on height. After about five years it begins to branch. After ten to twenty years, the females produce seeds. Then, home owners discover the problems with seeds, suckers and the smells they released when gardeners try to remove them. By 1851, Downing had turned against the grey barked tree and was recommending “graceful elms and salubrious maples” for street use.

However, a hundred years later Rosalie Doolittle was still telling Albuquerque gardeners that, despite its “reputation for being untidy,” a tree of heaven was “really attractive when the sprays of pods turn brilliant red and yellow as falls approaches.” Even a few years ago Baker Morrow advised New Mexicans the much maligned tree “can make a very pleasant shade or street tree in the right setting.”

They’re correct the tree is attractive when allowed to grow naturally into a wide, low canopy. Both males and females are covered with yellow-green flowers at their branch tips in late spring. Then, in late summer, pink seed heads appear above the leaves, resembling mimosa from a distance.

In Santa Fe, I’ve seen trees growing in courtyards shading working class homes built in the 1950's. Although they tolerate a wide variety of soils, the strong tap roots prefer the lime rich soil of the area. Unfortunately, they need more water than the arid west provides, a minimum of 14" a year, and so they send out suckers to the water conserving yard walls and foundations. Seeds, and possibly discarded suckers, found their way into the nearby ditch, neglected since it was no longer used for irrigation.

Here, trees of heaven not only are growing along the ditches and road sides, but it looks like the member of the tropical simaroubace family has been planted deliberately by a few people, probably from free suckers. In one place down the road, a mature tree shading a double-wide deflected a flying seed, and now has a Siberian elm sapling amongst its suckers.

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

Downing, Andrew Jackson. A Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1841.

_____. “How to Popularize the Taste for Planting,” The Horiculturalist 7:297-301:1852, quoted by Behula Shah in “The Checkered Career of Alianthus altissima,” Arnoldia 53(3):21-27:1997.

Gannett Fleming West, Inc. NM 30 Improvement Project, Environmental Assessment, January 2011.

Hu, Shiu Ying. “Alianthus,” Arnoldia 39(2):29-50:1979 .

Morrow, Baker H. Best Plants for New Mexico Gardens and Landscapes, 1995.

Murrill, William A. Shade Trees, 1902; on use in Paris.

Prince, W. R. “Introduction of Lombardy Poplar,” The Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser 3:80:1861; on his father’s activities.

Photograph: Tree of heaven leafing along a ditch near the village already colonized by bright green Siberian elms, 24 April 2011.

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.