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.

Stag Heads

Weather: Four mornings this week the thermometer on my front porch showed temperatures below 32 degrees; it was warmer in the village near the river; some rain yesterday.

What’s blooming in the area: Silver lace vine, sweet pea, chrysanthemums. Leaves on catalpas, grapes, and Maximilian sunflower turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Goat’s head, chamisa, broom senecio, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and purple asters.

In my yard: Winecup mallow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, blanket flower. Leaves on sand cherry and leadwort turning burgundy; rose of Sharon, ladybell, peony and coneflowers leaves going yellow.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches mining the Maximilian sunflower heads, cabbage butterflies, large and small black ants.

Weekly update: Trees of life appear in the Quran and in Revelations, on Indian textiles and Egyptian papyrus. The symbolic representations may have been diffused through trade and other exchanges, but the underlying recognition of trees as a life form different from that of humans was passed from generation to generation by people dependent on plants.

Oliver Rackham thinks that first-hand knowledge began to fade when the enlightenment redefined trees as having life spans like people. Scientists assumed a single set of laws governed creation. They generalized from what was understood. Men began to think of young trees, mature ones, ones with dead limbs that were old and needed to be felled before they died and did damage.

To Rackham, a tree is an self-perpetuating organism composed of roots and leaves connected by the cambium that transfers nutrients between the two through the xylem and the phloem.

In its early years a sapling produces branches to support a canopy at whatever speed the climate and soil allow. Unlike children of poverty, the worse the conditions, the longer a tree’s youth.

When it reaches its optimal height, a tree becomes mature. Every year it abandons the previous year’s wood and begins a new ring. As the girths of the trunk and branches increase, they create greater and greater demands on the chlorophyll factories in the leaf cells. The circumference of cells around the dead wood increase, but the range of the canopy and roots do not.

Eventually, the demands become unsupportable. Roots abandon branches. Bark and sapwood decay, fungi move in. Animals nest in hollows. The tree retrenches. From the roots it creates a new canopy of a size that meets it needs without undue stress. It continues until conditions arise again that make retrenchment necessary.

Trees don’t die. They reinvent themselves every year.

He notes the persistence of bare stag heads above canopies is not universal. Even in England their existence varies by region, not ownership or land use. They rarely are found in old woods. Instead, they live in parks and hedges where they are kept for their beauty or shade.

He also admitted they don’t occur every year, which would be the case if his perpetual motion vision were valid. He thought many stag heads he saw in England were survivors of the droughts of 1911 and 1921. He also thought there were more after the hot, dry summers of the 1990s.

It may not be height that’s the limiting factor, but roots. They can only go so deep before the soil conditions change. Once they reach that layer, they can no longer support the canopy’s natural inclination to expand. Height is the visual signifier for depth.

Tops are damaged by frost, ice, wind, and insects. When that happens, roots send messages and resources to repair the canopy. New leaves and twigs appear from dormant buds.

Roots have problems with drought. When less water comes up, fewer leaves can survive. When leaves can’t be restored, trees wall off unproductive branches.

The retrenchment pattern is the same in all woody plants, but some species perpetuate themselves better than others. Rackham believes the best in England are oaks, sweet chestnuts, ashes, and limes. But, maybe that is not a species imperative, but man’s. Trees categorized as junk are more likely to be cleared.

In this part of New Mexico, stag heads appear in cottonwoods and tamarix, Russian olives and Siberian elms. They don’t endure. Men raised to be good farmers clear dead wood. Good shepherds of the land believe they are helping when they remove exotic species.

People still burn wood to keep warm. Wherever wood is used for fuel, dead branches are harvested. They’re already dry and combustible. Rackham’s parks were the preserves of wealthy men who didn’t worry about trifles like heat.

When coal replaced wood, trees no longer were seen as a resource. Stag heads could survive because there was no incentive for removing them. It was only when congested areas developed where trees had grown that people feared the consequences of storms that broke branches and ripped trees from the ground. An urge to what Rackham calls tidiness took command.

Behind the survival of stag heads, Rackham noted a certain aesthetic preference for the "beauty and mystery of ancient trees," which he dated to the Shakespearean age. It may lie still deeper in the remnants of beliefs held by the Celts with their Druids, by the Norse conquerors with Yggdrasil, the world tree, or even by the followers of the German Georges.

Against those with an awareness of different modes of existence, there always has been the contempt of the simplifiers. Romans destroyed oak forests to suppress rebellion. Bureaucrats, be they insurance agents or utility company maintenance crews chiefs, have no patience with differences that demand understanding. They set rules for how may feet must be cleared, and don’t worry about species.

Trees are cultural constructs, even in the wild. But, within the boundaries of human perception, they live a life apart, a life recorded in the ancient symbols of immortality.

Notes:
Rackham, Oliver. The History of the Countryside (1986).

_____. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976, 1990 revised edition).

_____. Woodlands (2006).

Photographs:
1. Stag heads growing in row of volunteers along a ditch in the village. The ditch, which goes along the edge of city-owned land, is the local equivalent to an English hedgerow. Siberian elms grow between the cottonwoods at lower heights; trees of heaven have been sprouting below.

2. Egyptian tree of life, water color on papyrus, produced for tourist trade in the 1980s. The birds represent the stages of life. From the bottom right corner, going counterclockwise, they are infancy, childhood, and youth. The bird with the spreading wings is an adult. The one facing the other direction is old age. Death is always to the west.

3. Tamarix on edge of flood plain near village arroyo, 14 September 2014. Yellow flowers are áñil del muerto.

4. Pennsylvania Dutch tree of life, water color on paper. My mother did this around 1953. I don’t know if she used a stencil or copied a magazine picture. The Germans also used tulips as symbols of immortality. The reds may be stylized tulips above green hearts.

5. Russian olive near river north of town, 16 October 2014. Yellow leaves are cottonwoods near the Río Grande.

6. Wood pile on main road, 16 October 2014. A small tree or large limb has been hewn, and wood of many diameters cut to length. It might have been a stag head, a small tree that died, or one that sprouted in the wrong place.

7. Neighbor’s woodpile, 16 October 2014. Large pieces of wood have been split into uniform thicknesses and cut to similar lengths.

8. Siberian elm near tamarix above by village arroyo, 14 September 2014.

9. Realistic tree, oil on canvas, by Ruth Penzotti Henderson, late 1950s. Her grandparents were German and Italian immigrants, the last through south America.