Russian Thistle

What’s happening: Ice forming on roses in the back drip line; most of the blackberry lily seeds have disappeared.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens, some Apache plume, yuccas, some Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, red hot poker, grape hyacinth, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, sea pink, hollyhock, oriental poppy, blue flax, yellow and pink evening primroses, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tumble mustard, snakeweed, dandelion, anthemis, coreopsis, perky Sue, Shasta daisy, black-eyed Susan, strap leaf aster leaves; June, pampas, brome, cheat and base of needle grasses; rose stems and young chamisa branches.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, buddleia, pinks, snow-in-summer, loco weed, yellow alyssum, stick leaf, western stickseed, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Privet, cholla, prickly pear, small-leaved soapwort, beards tongues, coral bells leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Arborvitae; globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: The night after the snow fell a mouse was on my kitchen counter after I went to bed looking for food.

Weather: First snow Thursday; returned as fog this morning; 9:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Tuesday morning I could smell wood smoke when I walked out to my car. Across the river I could see dark smoke rising from someone burning. I’m not a good enough woodsmen to recognize the burning wood, but I can often tell when some one’s firing Russian thistle.

Most weeds produce a grey-white smoke. When Russian thistles ignite, which they do with a great whoosh, the smoke turns dark, with a touch of fatty yellow. The fumes are so acrid they attack my throat and make it difficult to breathe. My hair reeks until it’s washed.

When it grows in saline environments, Salsola tragus sequesters the salt it absorbs in vacuole sacs in its leaves. When it burns, the sodium is converted to carbonate of soda. If the soil is more normal, the alkaline ashes instead contain a carbonate of potash, itself a form of potassium.

Na₂CO₃, better known as washing soda, is used to bleach linen, for making soap and as the flux is manufacturing glass. The origins of glass making are lost in prehistory: Roman tradition gave credit to the Phoenicians, while the earliest evidence of a fully realized industry has been recovered from iron age Tell Amarna in Egypt dated around 1350 bc. The latter used soda from Lake Natron, while people living along the modern Syrian coast are the ones credited with discovering how to extract the compound from seaside plants.

The Romans mass produced glass, especially in Sidon in modern Lebanon where someone introduced glass blowing during the time of Augustus (31 bc–14 ad). The Romans later took glass making to Valencia and Murcia in Spain, areas conquered by the Umayyads of Syria in 714.

By the time Renaissance industrial demand increased, farmers around Cartagena in Murcia and Alacant on the Valencian coast planted barrilla, which was burned in pits covered with earth where the sodium carbonate had to be broken from the walls with hammers.

The most likely plants used by the Spanish were Salsola soda, Salsola kali, and Salsola sativa, now classed as Halogeton sativus.

The idea of burning the annual chenopods spread north to France where Salsola kali and our Russian thistle, there called soude épineuse or thorny soda, were used to produce blanquette around Montpellier, between Frontignan and Aiguemortes. The plants weren’t seeded like they were in Spain, but were burned in heaps in trenches for 8 or 9 days in late summer. The soda formed an "adhesive, almost vitreous mass" that remained red hot. When the blanquette cooled, it hardened and turned black. Water was then used to extract it from the residue.

The best always came from the Levant and was used to produce the clear cristallo glass made for Venice at Murano. The soda from Spain produced a bluish glass, while that from France was greenish.

The demand for organic sources for glass making declined after Nicolas Leblanc patented a process to produce sodium carbonate from salt, sulfuric acid, limestone and coal in 1791. In 1861, Ernest Solvay substituted ammonia for the acid. Mass production and a taste for large windows followed.

However, the need to burn weeds persisted. People here don’t burn Russian thistles because of some ties to a coastal Spain they never knew, nor have then reinvented something in the face of recurring circumstances. Instead, burning’s a relic from the time before the Phoenicians when the transformative power of fire was culturally important for both pragmatic and philosophical reasons.

Glass is a pyramid of fires. Natural glass is formed when fire heats the underlying sand to produce obsidian. The soda that lowers the melting temperature comes from burning weeds. The lime that stabilizes the soda-silica compound often comes from burning shells or limestone. Man-made glass forms when quartz granules are burned with soda and lime.

Science has demystified fire by calling it heat. Urban life and, more recently, anti-burning ordinances have done much to eliminate fire from our inherited tool kit, but it persists here in the Española valley in the varieties of smoke that greet one in the morning.

Burning is still a primordial ritual that inspires fear when thistles ignite, even if the curiosity to rake through the ashes has been lost.

Notes: Glass color doesn’t come from the soda, but from mineral impurities or additives in the mix.

Chaptal, Jean-Antoine-Claude. "Blanquette" in Chemistry Applied to Arts and Manufactures, volume 2, 1807.

Guibourt, Nicolas Jean Baptiste Gaston. Work near Cherbourg published in Journal de Chimie Medicale in March 1840 and reported as "Analysis of the Ashes of the Salsola tragus" in The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, July 1840.

Kauffman, C. H. "Barilla" in The Dictionary of Merchandise, and Nomenclature in All Languages, 1805.

Nesbitt, Alexander and Henry James Powell. "History of Glass Manufacture" in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, translated by John F. Healy as Natural History: A Selection, 1991.

Photograph: Russian thistle just after it ignited in the gathering mist before the snow, 16 December 2010; winterfat in back is not burning; all the flame and smoke are from a single plant.

Maltese Cross

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, tea roses, Apache plume, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, prickly pear, tall yucca, lilies, fern and leather leaved globemallows, bird of paradise, tumble mustard, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, white sweet and purple clover, licorice, Russian sage, milkweed, oxalis, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, nits and lice, datura, creeping and climbing bindweed, purple mat flower, alfilerillo, wooly plantain, bachelor button, purple coneflower, fleabane, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, hairy golden and strap-leaf spine asters, native dandelion, needle, rice, and brome grasses; goat’s head up; apples visible.

What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Fragrant catalpa, Dr Huey and miniature roses, red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrow; buds on mums.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, California and Shirley poppies, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, cheddar pinks, bouncing Bess, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on tomatillo.
Looking south: Pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, daylily, sweet pea; buds on zinnias; raspberries edible.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, white beardtongue, white spurge, white mullein, perennial four o’clock; buds on Shasta daisy and sea lavender.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.

Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, large black harvester and small dark ants, cricket in well.

Weather: Clouds dropped little rain during the week, but kept the nights warmer so zinnias grew; last useful rain 6/20/09; 15:56 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The Maltese cross blooming outside my porch window is the strongest red in the garden, surpassing even the zinnias of late summer.

The balls of club-footed florets have none of the blue that moderates the red of the roses and hollyhocks, and too little yellow to matter. When I look out in the evening, through the hollyhock stalks dotted with spots of burgundy, they beckon like gems buried in the forest, tease like spots on the wall after pictures have been taken down.

When I see the two-foot high perennial at noon with California poppies, it picks out their golden color without being subsumed. Its color comes entirely from its anthocyanin pigments, not from the light that vitalizes the poppies. Nineteen-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett called them London Pride, and they now grow with yellow heliopsis in her restored garden in South Berwick, Maine.

Such a solid, assured red is rare in nature. The Egyptians knew gold would produce red glass, but it was centuries before Andreas Cassius found a way around 1685 to set the color with tin. Even then the ruby red was a bit blueish.

Iron oxide was more commonly used to produce a dull red, especially in painters’ ochres. When the iron deposit also contained aluminum, the pigment was chemically stable. Otherwise, like many other reds used in house paint and stucco, the color was fugitive and darkened or faded in light as molecules responded to heat.

Madder set with alum was the common British red dye plant imported by the bale through Southampton from Venice or Genoa. Bristol, a port on the west coast of England with a textile industry that dated back to the 1100's, was believed by William Horman to produce the best red fabrics in 1530 because of its water. The river Frome drained the chalk hills of the Cotswolds that would have leached into the water.

It’s ironic that a color so difficult to produce is so disregarded. By the early 1500's, Bristol’s textile trade had been reduced to the cheapest cloths, and Bristol red was worn by the lowest classes. Around 1517, John Skelton described an ales-wife near the royal palace, Nonesuch, wearing a 'kyrtyll' or tunic of 'bristowe read" while a rival poet, Alexander Barclay, distinguished the pleasant, medium Bristol red from London scarlet.

The brilliant red flower apparently reached England sometime after Bristol merchants first tried to exploit the expansion of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman by ignoring the Italian middlemen in the 1540's. John Gerard is the first Englishman we know who grew Lychnis chalcedonica in 1593. He called the member of the carnation family Bristowe Red, Nonesuch, and Campion of Constantinople.

Many assume the common name, Maltese cross, means the plant was introduced during the Crusades. However, the earliest known reference to the flower, transported from the grassland steppes of Russia, Siberia and Mongolia, was made by Ulisse Aldrovandi who established the botanic garden in Bologna in 1570. It’s hard to believe a color this dramatic would not have appeared in some graphic form, a tapestry, a manuscript, a painting, if it were available before. After all, John Parkinson posed with the "glorius flower" in his dictionary of usable plants in 1621.

More likely the common name comes from the shape of the five petals which are forked like the four-armed cross, but it was the color that mattered to the cottagers who named it Scarlet Lightening, the New Englanders who called it London Pride, and to John Gerard who saw Bristol Red. Only specialists grow something for the shape of the petals; my friends would welcome Big Red.

Notes: References are repeated by multiple sources, a number of whom used the Oxford English Dictionary.

Barclay, Alexander. Fourth Eclogue, written between 1509 and 1514.

Gerard, John. Herball or Generale Historie of Plants, 1597.

Horman, William. Vulgaria, 1530.

Parkinson, John. Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, 1629.

Skelton, John. "The Tunnynge of Elynoare Rummynge," written around 1517 and posthumously published in 1550.

Wetzel, Nancy Mayer. "London Pride," 2003, Coe College website, on Jewett.

Photograph: Maltese cross with California poppies and pink evening primroses, 21 June 2009.

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.