Watermelon Origins

Weather: Afternoon temperatures in the high 80s with humidity levels below 10% in Santa Fé and everything in a haze of smoke particles drifting down from the Pacific northwest Thursday and Friday; last useful rain 8/8.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, bird of paradise, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, morning glories, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, annual four o’clock, bouncing Bess, David and purple garden phlox, red amaranth, cultivated sunflowers, coreopsis, blanket flower, yellow yarrow, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Yellow mullein, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bindweed, green-leaf five-eyes, yellow evening primroses, leather leaf globe mallow, green amaranth, pigweed, Hopi tea, plains paper flower, horseweed, wild lettuce, flea bane, gumweed, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy asters; side oats and black grama grasses; Virginia creeper stems turning bright red.

In my yard: Rugosa roses, yellow potentilla, fernbush, caryopteris, garlic chives, California poppy, lady bells, calamintha, larkspur, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, nasturtium, Maximilian sunflowers, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, bachelor button, white yarrow, purple and cut-leaf coneflowers, Mönch aster, yellow and reseeded Sensation cosmos.

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

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds, geckos, cabbage butterflies, grasshoppers, hornets.

Weekly update: Watermelons evolved in Africa and were brought to this country by slaves. That’s the standard Black and Anglo-American history of Citrullus lanatus. It’s quite true, but has little to do with Native Americans or New Mexico.

When Juan de Oñate came up the Río Grande to San Juan in 1598, the pueblos already were growing "beans, corns, and squashes, melons and rich sloes of Castile and grapes in quantity through the desert." At that time, the only African slave anyone had seen was a Moor, Esteban, who accompanied Marcos de Niza. The Zuñi had dispatched him in 1539 before he left any seed.

When Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet were exploring the Mississippi river in 1673, they visited the Illinois at modern-day Peoria. They were growing " beans and melons, which are Excellent, especially those that have red seeds."

When the two Frenchmen reached the Arkansas river, they could go no farther south. Slave traders in Charleston had armed eastern bands, who were taking captives along the Mississippi drainage to sell to sugar plantations in Barbados. The sugar boom didn’t occur until the 1680s. The English hadn’t yet developed strong trade relations with Africa.

The band they met was so terrorized by the Cherokee they didn’t dare leave its village. The Quapaw subsisted on corn, with some occasional dog’s meat. Marquette noted, "we ate no other fruit there than watermelons."

If you accept the standard origin tale for watermelon, it’s not only a surprise the fruit preceded European explorers into the interior, but it’s also unexpected that Oñate’s chronicler recognized melons when he saw them and had a word to describe them, melón. Similarly, Marquette knew a watermelon when he saw it, even though the French didn’t import slaves into Illinois country until 1719.

The Citrullus genus evolved in southern Africa as a dryland plant. Four primary species are recognized today; many other variants are found in southern Africa. The citron of the Kalahari desert was grown as a water source in the dry period or dried, then cooked. The colocynth from north African deserts was used medicinally and for the oil extracted from its seeds. Egusi seeds were eaten in west Africa. This was the only one grown in an area affected by slave raids.

The sweet melon has a much smaller genome than the others, suggesting it was selected from a single population when it was domesticated in northeastern Africa. Sweetness is a recessive gene. This is the one known from 4,500-year-old Egyptian tombs.

Moors took the fruit to al-’Andalus where ‘Arib ibn Sa‘d reported dulla‘ growing in 961. In Sevilla in 1158, Ibn al-Awwam reported two types of watermelons. One had a red seed, the other was black. It sounds like they had imported the oily, medicinal variety from north Africa and the sweet melon from northeast Africa. The later, battikh sindi, became sandía.

The Spanish apparently took them everywhere. The official chronicler for the Council of the Indies wrote "pumpkins and melons were picked twenty-eight days after the seeds were sown" along the coast of what’s now Panama. The maturity date’s unlikely, but, if nothing else, his 1630 comments signified intent.

Once the Spanish began shipping silver back to Europe, they needed to protect the route along the Florida coast from privateers. In 1566, they built a fort at Santa Elena, now Port Royale, South Carolina. Jeanette Thurber Connor found evidence "maize, pumpkins and watermelons" were growing on the island in 1576.

Twenty some years later, the Guale destroyed the Franciscan mission there. The same year, 1597, a Spanish soldier noted the Tama up the Ocmulgee river in modern Georgia were growing "watermelons and other fruits."

Watermelons spread north in Europe. Harry Paris and his colleagues found the earliest manuscript with an accurate image was produced in Salerno, Italy, around 1300. The fruit appeared in a Lombard document around 1385.

They didn’t appear in northern France until 1430, by which time they were being depicted as a commercial crop in northern Italy. The botanists noted only the citron could be grown in the north. Before modern breeding, the dessert melon wouldn’t thrive or ripen there.

John Gerard described sugar melons in England in 1597, but was only able to grow citrons. The latter were boiled, and kept for some time. They must have diffused from the nobility because the engineer who laid out Charlestown said, they were "abounding in Massachusetts in 1629."

Thirty-five years later, John Josselyn noted local New England tribes were growing water-mellon and that it was a "rare cooler of Feavers, and excellent against the stone." From that one would guess they were growing a medicinal variety.

If one were going to guess the source of the seeds planted by Sioux-speaking Quapaw met by Père Marquette, one would suspect the Spanish in Florida. In the twentieth century, the Cherokee were using "seed tea for kidney trouble." The Sioux-speaking Illinois could have obtained English or Spanish seeds. The Iroquois, who harassed both Illinois and New England, mentioned a "decoction of roots and seeds" for "urine stoppage" in the 1970s.

Notes: The citron or tsamma watermelon is Citrullus lanatus citroides; colocynth is Citrullus colocynthis, egusi is Citrullus lanatus mucosospermus, and the common supermarket melon is Citrullus lanatus lanatus.

‘Arib ibn Sa‘d. Kitab al-Anwa’, translated as The Calendar of Cordoba for the year 961; quotation from Miquel Forcada, "Calendar of Córdoba," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson.

Blake, Leonard W. "Early Acceptance of Watermelon by Indians of the United States," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 1:193-199:1981.

Connor, J. T. Colonial Records of Spanish Florida, volume 1, 1925, quoted by Blake. She cites a "farmer named Juan Serrano."

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597, cited by Paris, 2013.

Hamel, Paul B. and Mary U. Chiltoskey. Cherokee Plants and Their Uses, 1975.

Herrick, James William. Iroquois Medical Botany, 1977, quoted by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Ibn al-Awwam. Kitab al-Filaha, late 1100's, 1864 French translation by Jean Jacques Clement-Mullet translated by Blake.

Josselyn, John. An Account of Two Voyages to New England, 1865 edition.

Marquette, Jacques. Journal included in Claude Dablon’s "Le Premier Voÿage Qu’a Fait Le P. Marquette vers le Nouveau Mexique," translated by Reuben Gold Thwaites in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, volume 59, 1899.

Martyr d’Anghiera, Peter. De Orbe Novo, 1530, quoted by William W. Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain, 2004.

Paris, Harry S. "Origin and Emergence of the Sweet Dessert Watermelon, Citrullus lanatus," Annals of Botany 116:133-148:2015.

_____, Marie-Christine Daunay, and Jules Janick. Medieval Iconography of Watermelons in Mediterranean Europe, Annals of Botany 112:867-879:2013

Salas, Gaspar de. Testigo, 1597, in Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Documentos Históricos de la Florida y la Luisiana, 1912; he used sandías.

Sturtevant, Edward Lewis. Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919; quotes Master Graves. Alexander Young identified him as Thomas Graves in Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts, volume 3, 1846.

Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez de. Historia de la Nueva México, 1610, translated and edited by Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodrígue and Joseph P. Sánchez, 1992. He used the two-syllable melón instead of the three syllable sandía when he wrote his chronicle in verse. It’s a matter of interpretation: did he mean other kinds of melons or was he exercising poetic licence for watermelons?

Photographs: Taken 21 August 2015 in one yard near the village. #1 is round and may be a seedless melon. They require a pollinator variety be planted, which may be #2. The first has the more desirable location.

Sweet Corn

Weather: Power outage early yesterday, rain after dark, then snow that’s accumulated on every leaf blade and horizontal stem.

What’s still green: Juniper, piñon, and other evergreens, yuccas; leaves on grape hyacinth, Japanese honeysuckle, vinca, sweet pea, golden-spur columbine, beards tongues, winecup mallow, alfilerillo; needle, June, pampas, and other grasses.

What’s gray: Winterfat, snow-in-summer; four-wing salt bushes are gray-green; buddleia, pinks and catmint leaves are blue gray.

What’s reddened: Cholla, twigs on peach, apricot and apple; purple aster leaves darkening.

What’s yellowed: Young stems on globe willow; leaves on fernbush yellowing; some arborvitae have browned.

What’s blooming indoors: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, small birds.

Weekly update: Sweetness is a recessive trait in Zea mays. Because plants do not reproduce easily when the two genes that control sugar are recessive (su), Paul Mangelsdorf believed all sweet corns were derived from the Chullpi strain in Peru and Bolivia. He noted the early archaeological remains of corn - and corn with its large cobs leaves lots of debris - showed evidence immature cobs and stalks had been chewed for their sugar.

Like Maíz de Ocho, sweet corn traveled from the southwest to the Mandan and Hidatsas of the upper Missouri, then skipped to the Iroquois. One would guess they obtained it during one of their forays in the west. It was growing along the Susquehanna in 1779 when John Sullivan and James Clinton destroyed forty Iroquois villages they believed were aligned with the British.

Richard Bagnal took some ears back to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Plymotheus was growing it in 1822. The latter wrote, sweet corn "assimilated to the common corn," but he had discovered seed from suckers would breed true. He noted that, over time, the original crimson cob that had stained table linens disappeared.

Bagnal wasn’t the only source for native sweet corn. George Carter talked to a man named Hubbard at Harvard who said his family had been growing a yellow sweet corn since they received some from natives in the 1600s.

However, he was the most important. Following Plymotheus instructions, Gideon Smith described crossing Tuscarora and Sioux in Baltimore to produce Smith’s Early White, a large-grained white sweet corn he described in 1838. He mentioned he was able to restore the red cobs, but "got rid" of it because "it stained the lips and fingers while eating it."

Noyes Darling of New Haven, Connecticut, began experiments with an early yellow flint and a white sweet corn to produce Darling’s Early sweet corn in 1844. At the same time, Augustus Russell Pope was crossing a southern white corn with a northern early sweet corn in Somerville, Massachusetts, to produce Old Colony in 1845. Nathan Stowell of Burlington, New Jersey, crossed a northern sugary corn with Memomony, a soft field corn, to create Stowell’s Sweet Corn in 1850.

White sweet corn remained the snob’s choice until Atlee Burpee introduced Golden Bantam in his 1902 catalog as a cannable sweet corn that tasted better than existing varieties of white corn. He’d obtained his seed stock from a strain William Chambers developed in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Before he died, Chambers had been controlling the pollination of his ears and selecting the best.

Since, botanists have learned more about the genetic structure of corn to produce F₁ hybrids that maintain their sweetness after they’ve been picked. John Laughnan introduced the first, Illini Chief, in 1961 from a cross between Golden Cross Bantam and Iochief. Since it was difficult to reproduce, Illinois Foundation Seeds introduced Illini Xtra Sweet in 1968. J. Hove had created a triple cross. The kernels contain so little starch they shrivel when they dry.

Notes:
Carter, George F. "Sweet Corn among the Indians," Geographical Review 38:206-221:1948.

Giles, Dorothy. Singing Valleys: The Story of Corn, 1940, on Chambers. All I’ve found on Chambers is he lived in Greenfield on land he acquired in 1870 that had been a hatter’s shop on the stage road.

Larson, Debra Levey. "Supersweet Sweet Corn: 50 Years in the Making," University of Illinois press release, 7 August 2003.

Mangelsdorf, Paul C. Corn: It’s Origin, Evolution, and Improvement, 1974.

Parker, Arthur C. Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants, 1910.

Plymotheus. Letter to the editor, New England Farmer, 7 September 1822; I haven’t see any further identification of him. Bagnal was probably the one who lived in Plymouth from 1753 to 1809.

Singleton, W. Ralph. "Noyes Darling, First Maize Breeder," The Journal of Heredity 35:265-267:1944, reprints Darling’s "Indian Corn - New Variety," Cultivator, 18 November 1845.

Smith, Gideon B. Albany Cultivator, 1838.

Photographs:
1. Canned Golden Sweet F₁ hybrid corn, Charter Research, Twin Falls, Idaho, released in 1975.

2. Canned white sweet corn. This was the preferred type over Thanksgiving in the local grocery store.

3. Silver Queen sweet corn, developed by Harvey Mauth for Rogers Brothers Seed Company of Idaho and released in 1955.

4. Golden Bantam sweet corn.

5. Xtra Sweet F₁ hybrid corn, derived from Illini Xtrasweet, bred by J. Hove and released by Illinois Foundation Seeds, 1968. Shriveled kernels.

Field Corn

Weather: Gentle rains Wednesday and Thursday, followed by morning mists rising from the river Friday and Saturday.

What’s still green: Juniper, piñon, and other evergreens, yuccas; leaves on grape hyacinth, bearded iris, Japanese honeysuckle, vinca, sweet pea, violet, golden-spur columbine, beards tongues, winecup mallow, alfilerillo; needle, June, pampas, and other grasses.

What’s gray: Winterfat, snow-in-summer; four-wing salt bushes are gray-green; buddleia, pinks and catmint leaves are blue gray.

What’s reddened: Cholla, twigs on peach and apricot; purple aster leaves darkening.

What’s yellowed: Young stems on globe willow; leaves on fernbush yellowing; some arborvitae have browned.

What’s blooming indoors: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

Weekly update: Anthropologist, botanists, and politicians ask different questions about the origins of corn. The first want to know who did it, where they lived, and when. Botanists insist on understanding the whats and hows, the probabilities of hybridization. Nationalists only ask that their people be given credit as the first; their offspring want the royalties.

The rest of us have simpler questions. How do I grow it? When do I eat? From that perspective, the many pueblo varieties of corn fall into two types: flour and sweet.

The Hopi planted sweet corn over four days during the waxing moon of April in secluded niches and harvested it in July. Much was roasted and eaten when it was picked. Since it’s prone to mold, the remaining kernels were removed and dried for use as a sweetener.

Dietary corn was planted in fields from mid-May to late June. Crow-wing indicated in 1920 each clan was assigned a week to plant, but individuals could plant when they chose. The four-day sowings staggered tasseling dates so neighboring patches of wind-born pollen could not fertilize each other. Unlike sweet corn, it was gathered after it dried in September and October. The ears were stored and the kernels removed when needed for grinding or boiling.

This flint corn derived from one of the primary races of maize that developed in Mexico. Chapalote came from intermediate altitudes of Sonora and Chihuahua. This is the form found in the Tehuacán valley and the one found in Bat Cave in the Mogollon Mountains of Catron County from around 2000 bc. The shell or pericarp was brown, and could be popped on the cob.

The corn found in the strata of Bat Cave underwent a major change around 500 bc when varieties appeared that had been crossed with teosinte, the closest relative of maize. Since teosinte grows around corn fields in México, it’s assumed the hybrids came from there. One distinguishing feature is the pericarp may come in many colors. Another is that teosinte may introduce mutations that become permanent.

Maíz de Ocho appeared around 700 in western México. The eight-row variety spread into the southwest, then north to Colorado and east along the Arkansas River. From there the variety moved into lower elevations following cold soils and short growing seasons north up the Missouri river after the year 1000. From there the corn moved east along the southern Great Lakes to the Iroquois and New England. The kernels were easier to grind, the yields higher than their predecessors, and the plants could handle both drought and cold.

In 1851, Lewis Henry Morgan said the Iroquois planted a white flint corn that ripened first. They soaked it in wood ash lye for hominy. The second to ripen was a soft red they picked green and charred over pits to dry. Last to ripen was the white they used for flour.

They stripped some ears and braided the still attached husks into clusters that could be hung to dry and store. Other corn, including the charred red, was buried in grass-lined pits. Neither Morgan nor Arthur Parker gave an explanation. Centuries earlier, Jesuits had reported their bark-roofed long houses were flammable. Buried corn would survive catastrophe.

The eight-rowed corn became the ancestor of modern field corn. In the middle 1840s, near Peoria, Illinois, Robert Reid planted some reddish corn he’d obtained from Gordon Hopkins before he moved west from Brown County, Ohio, on the Ohio river east of Cincinnati. Hopkins’ family says it had been in their family since 1765 when men migrated into the Shenandoah valley from Baltimore.

The gourd-seed variety only grows well from Virginia south. When it failed to germinate in the prairie environment, Reid filled the spaces in his field with leftover yellow seed he got from neighbors. The New England corn crossed the southern variety. His son, James, worked to improve it by selecting out the red. Reid’s Yellow Dent became famous when it won first prize at Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

Feed corns are softer than southwestern flints, whose kernels are surrounded by hard starch layers. In field corn the hard starch migrates to the sides, leaving a softer starch in the center that shrinks to produce the identifying top dent. One of its advantages was animals could chew it without having it ground. It also was more prone to diseases and predators. Breeders had to reintroduce resistence to store and export it.

Notes:
Crow-wing. A Pueblo Indian Journal 1920-1921, edited by Elsie Clews Parsons, 1925.

Galinat, W. C. and J. H. Gunnerson. "Spread of Eight-Rowed Maize from the Prehistoric Southwest," Harvard University Botanical Museum Leaflets 20:117-160:1963.

Giles, Dorothy. Singing Valleys: The Story of Corn, 1940, on Reid.

Jesuits. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, 1898.

Mangelsdorf, Paul C. Corn: It’s Origin, Evolution, and Improvement, 1974.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. League of the Ho-de’-no-sau-nee or Iroquois, 1851.

Parker, Arthur C. Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants, 1910.

Stephen, Alexander. Notebooks, 1882-1894, edited as Hopi Journal, 1936, by Elsie Clews Parsons, on Hopi planting times.

Wallace, Henry A. and William L. Brown. Corn and Its Early Fathers, 1988 revised edition, on Reid.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.

Photographs:
1. Gila Pima A’al Hu:ñ flint corn, Gila River Reservation, Arizona, Native Seeds Search, Tucson. The low, hot lands of the Pima and Papago in southern and central Arizona were a separate diffusion route for maize into the southwest. Rounded top.

2. Río Grande Blue flour corn, Native Seeds Search; from a mix of blue corn varieties from Río Grande pueblos. Rounded top.

3. Reid’s Yellow Dent corn. The red survives in streaks. Depression in top.

4. Southern corns have a different lineage and probably moved north along the lowland coast of México through areas like Tramaulipas to the southern Mississippi valley. Hickory King, southern dent corn for hominy; grown in 1880 by A. O. King of Hickory, Virginia, from an ear he received from friend; marketed by Burpee in 1885 as having a large grain and small cob. Depression in top.

5. McCormack’s Blue Giant dent corn, developed by Jeff McCormack from Hickory King and an unknown blue dent; released in 1994 by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Mineral, Virginia. Depression in top.

Asparagus

Weather: Summer high temperatures arrived just before the solstice; last rain 5/13/12; 14:33 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, Japanese honey suckle, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, Spanish broom, red yucca, red hot poker, daylily, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, scabiosa, larkspur, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, brome grass; one-inch green apples visible in orchards.

We've moved into the season of bright orange daylilies and trumpet creepers that require little care; the roses only remain where they get extra attention.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, showy milkweed, leatherleaf globemallow, mullein, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, stick leaf, yellow, scarlet bee blossom, velvetweed, white and pink bindweeds, scurf peas, bush morning glory, silver leaf nightshade, buffalo gourd, Indian paintbrush next to chamisa, horse tail, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, Hopi tea, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, fleabane, green Mexican hat, golden hairy asters, native dandelion, needle and rice grasses.

In my yard, looking east: Snow-in-summer, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, white and creeping baby’s breath, coral beardtongue, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, tomatillo; first ripe raspberries, but many drying from heat.

Looking west: Trumpet and oriental lilies, blue flax, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, Romanian sage, Johnson’s Blue geranium, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, white mullein, perennial four o’clock, ladybells, Shasta daisy, Mönch asters; buds on sea lavender, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, squash, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Mexican hat; buds on chrysanthemum; fruit ripened on sand cherry.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, moss rose, snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, cabbage butterflies, ladybugs, bumble bees and other small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Asparagus is a most unusual vegetable. The member of the lily family quite naturally behaves more like a bulb than an annual green.

It grows easily from seed, but seedlings take three years to mature enough for sprouts to be harvested. Many gardeners buy year-old crowns. Once established, individual plants can last more than ten years and a bed more than twenty.

At the end of the spring cutting season you have to let the plants produce their tall, ferny branches with scale like leaves which, like tulips and daffodils, store the nutrients for next year’s crop in their underlying mass of matted roots.

The plants are either male or female. Both are edible, but the females also produce green berries which turn red later in the summer.

The seedlings go wild, and can become a nuisance in commercial beds. The Rutgers Asparagus Breeding Program has developed F₁ hybrids like Jersey Knight which produce only male plants. These don’t waste energy with seed production in summer, and so the next year’s sprouts are more desired by gourmets.

While garden guides tell you anyone can grow asparagus - you only need to add lots of organic matter to your soil - most are trying to turn the improbable into the possible. Yahya ibn al Awam warned in the late 1100’s that it was “very fond of damp places.”

When I was growing up in southern Michigan, I became aware different parts of the state grew different plants. It was partly latitude, but mainly the consequence of glaciers. The southern part where I lived was good for the usual farm crops like wheat and corn, and had supported hard wood forests.

In the more glaciated north, the soils were thinner and the primary trees were white pine. Within that area there was a section between Grand Rapids and Traverse City where land just in from Lake Michigan produced good cherries and peaches because of moisture and other ecological conditions fostered by the lake. It was within one small area of the cherry belt, an area in Oceana County around Hart, where people grew asparagus for canners.

When I see asparagus growing near the village, what surprises me isn’t that it’s gone wild - it’s naturalized in most parts of the country. What surprises me is that people got asparagus to grow in the first place.

According to al Awam, Asparagus officinalis was grown in Spain for the dried roots which were used to “banish all taint from rank meat.” William Dunmire says the plant was taken to México, but there’s no evidence it ever reached this part of the empire.

The French who came with La Salle to settle around Matagora Bay on the Texas gulf coast however did plant asparagus in 1685. The plants survived longer than they did, and were recognized in their abandoned gardens by the Spanish in 1689.

Dunmire says the French who later settled New Orleans also grew the vegetable. The native Americans who are reported to have eaten asparagus were either ones associated with the French - the Iroquois - or from the southeastern part of the county - the Cherokee.

Asparagus probably came into New Mexico with either settlers descended from the French or with Presbyterian missionaries and others from New England. It wasn’t the sort of plant to appeal to cattle raising Texans who took land east of the Sangre de Cristo.

But, it definitely has naturalized here. One plant I noticed last summer is growing so close to the steel farm fence along an alfalfa field the farmer would have to dig it out - reapers and snow plows won’t dislodge it. Another colony is growing just beyond the end of a ditch along the farm road.


In 1912, Smithsonian researchers found the plant was known to local Tewa speakers, but not generally used by them. In the 1930’s, students of Edward Castetter discovered Isleta was eating wild plants in the area south of Albuquerque.

Later, Leonora Curtin was told espárrago berries were mixed with ground leaves of yerba del sapo to treat stomach problems. Ambrosia concertiflora was considered a female plant and used by men, while Ambrosia acanthicarpa was considered the male plant appropriate for use by women who did not add berries.

The gender association may be one reason local Spanish speaking men used the berries for stomach problems. The other may be that asparagus often affects the smell of urine and that may have suggested a use for the stomach.

The forms of ragweed mentioned by Curtin grow along a diagonal running southwest from Colfax County, but not in Rio Arriba county. Colfax County was the site of the Maxwell land grant owned by Charles Beaubien, a French Canadian fur trader who settled in Taos.

The local plants probably came with irrigation waters moving in the Santa Cruz river from Chimayó. Presbyterian missionaries introduced many vegetables there. Since, of course, artists and others from places like Santa Fé have settled along the river. Any could be the source of the local plants which, most likely, are a form of Mary Washington, the descendent of selections made by Jesse Norton in Massachusetts after the rust fungus, Puccinia asparagi, decimated the beds in that state in the 1890’s.

Notes:
Castettler, Edward F. Uncultivated Native Plants Used as Sources of Food, 1935, draws on work done by his graduate students, including Volney H. Jones, The Ethnobotany of the Isleta Indians, 1931.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Dunmire, William W. Gardens of New Spain, 2004.

Ibn al Awam, Yahya. Kitab al Felaha, late 1100's, translated as A Moorish Calendar by Philip Lord, 1979.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Arthur Caswell Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants, 1910 and Paul B. Hamel and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History, 1975.

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

Photographs:
1. Asparagus growing along the farm road, 18 June 2012.

2. Base of asparagus stems growing along the farm road, 18 June 2012, with remains of previous years’ growth. The scales are the leaves.

3. Asparagus in winter along the orchard road, 18 January 2012.

4. The same asparagus plant last summer, 10 July 2011.

Dandelion

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, plum, bradford pear, white fence rows, purple-leafed flowering trees, first lilac, tulips, yellow iris, tansy and purple mustard, shepherd’s purse, hoary cress, stickseed whitebristle, alfilerillo, dandelion, native dandelion, downy chess grass.

What’s blooming in my yard: Peach, cherry, sand cherry, Siberian pea shrub, forsythia, grape hyacinth, hyacinth, daffodil, moss phlox, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on spirea, Bath pinks, and coral bells.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium, coral honeysuckle.

What’s reviving in the area: Cottonwood leaves are beginning to fill the gaps between the bright green Siberian elms; leaves appearing on apricot, Russian olive, and Virginia creeper; sideoats gamma greening. Saturday men were burning weeds on the local chapel grounds; another crew was clearing and burning trash near the wide arroyo; several men were checking their dikes while their fields were flooding.

What’s reviving in my yard: Anthemis and coreopsis came up from seed; globeflower, baptista, Maximilian sunflower, chocolate and blanket flowers emerged; leaves appeared on tamarix; leaf buds showing on locust and rose of Sharon.

Animal sightings: Gopher attacked Maximilian sunflowers a few days after they emerged; large bumble bee on Siberian peas; black butterfly with white edges on its wings; horses were grazing near main road; turkeys were in a field near the orchards.

Weather: Waxing moon. Strong winds all week destroyed leaves on several newly planted roses; Russian thistle tumbleweeds collected on fences. Heavy clouds formed many days; yesterday they finally dropped less water than the winds had taken.

Weekly update: Dandelions are fabled forces of nature.

Years ago I read they weren’t widespread until the automobile. That urban legend assumes some mythic, prelapsarian world before European plants invaded, and blames technology for the despoliation.

In fact, John Josselyn saw the flowers in New England in the 1660's, centuries before Henry Ford. At that time, Nicholas Culpepper tells us, the French and Dutch on the continent were eating the leaves in the early spring while the English were using the taproot to treat urinary problems.

Its most common use as a diuretic entered European medicine through Córdova where a convert, Arib ibn Sa’d, included it in his gynecological treatise of 965. However, seeds winnowed from puffballs probably weren’t brought by the conquistadores: Hernández Bermejo and León note bitter greens like dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), chicory (Cichorium intybus), and comfrey (Symphytum officinale) disappeared from horticultural Spain with the reconquest.

When the milky-stemmed perennial appeared on Spanish lands in northern New Mexico, the settlers called it chicória (chicory) and consueldo (comfrey). Apparently all the colonists retained from their Iberian past were some words and a recognition the three species belonged to the same epistemological category.

They treated the actual plant as a curiosity to be tested until its utility could be discerned. None of the uses mentioned by Curtin were common in contemporary herbals. Those who talked to her in the late 1940's boiled and fermented flowers to treat heart problems and pickled the leaves to purify blood. They used the flowers to dye deer skins.

Local Tewa speakers also regarded k‘ot‘awo as a new discovery to be absorbed into traditional categories. In 1916, the Santa Clara were mixing dried leaves with dough for bad bruises. At San Ildefonso, ground leaves were made into a paste applied to broken bones. Both pueblos bound fresh leaves in bandages around fractures.

They may have borrowed the idea of a dandelion poultice from the Navaho with whom they had equivocal relations. The Ramah of McKinley County applied it to swellings. The only other tribes Moerman mentions who used dandelions as a plaster were the Iroquois, another Athabaskan speaking tribe, and the Aleut who share Alaska with Athabaskan speakers.

On the other hand, the Athabaskan speaking Apache who moved to the Mescalero reserve in Otero County from farther east were able to observe others who knew the traditional plant, probably whites. They adopted it to strengthen their drinks.

Even now, long after the Smithsonian visited the Espanola valley, dandelions are still regarded as a novelty. A few years ago my western neighbor put in a sod lawn. When the yellow flowers appeared, I assumed he would exterminate them at once. Instead, with none of the received wisdom of suburbanites, he let them be for several months.

The next year, the hollow stemmed composites were growing next to my garage on his side. Since then, they’ve spread to the tiles to the south of the garage and the drip line in back.

The history of the dandelion remains a series of dots - Arib ibn Sa’d, 965; New England, 1663; Santa Clara, 1916; my neighbor’s lawn, 1990's - with no connecting lines. Folk wisdom fills the gaps, whether it be a new use or a new origination tale.

Notes:
Arib ibn Sa’d. Khalq al-janin, 964-65, cited by Hernández Bermejo and León.

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's, 1826 edition republished in 1981.

Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Hernández Bermejo, J. E. and J. León. Neglected Crops: 1492 from a Different Perspective, 1994, chapter on Spain on internet.

Josselyn, John. Cited by Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 1986.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database includes Meredith Jean Black, Algonquin Ethnobotany: An Interpretation of Aboriginal Adaptation in South Western Quebec, 1980; Edward F. Castetter and M. E. Opler, Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest III. The Ethnobiology of the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache, 1936; James William Herrick, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1977; G. Warren Smith, "Arctic Pharmacognosia," Arctic 26:324-333:1973, and Paul A..Vestal, The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952.

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

Photograph: Dandelion, 15 April 2007, just before the flowers were torn off.