Corn Harvest

What’s blooming: Nothing; dead grasses and Russian thistles turning black.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue flax, sea pink, winecup, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, Saint John’s wort, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, June and other grasses; iris, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow and tansy still have some leaves.

What’s gray or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.

What’s red: Raspberry, cholla, privet, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose; Japanese barberry still has some leaves

What’s turning yellow: Apache plume, golden spur columbine.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, rochea.

Animal sightings: Large bird, maybe a duck or grey goose, in hay field in front of the house where chickens had been let loose earlier this year.

Weather: Why does it always rain, snow or sleet on Thanksgiving, as it did this week, when the holiday isn’t tied to any particular lunar or solar event? Congress made it the fourth Thursday of the month in 1941. Now ice forms on the windshield after dawn instead of the dry frost flakes earlier in the week. 8:41 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The problem with growing vegetables is sometimes you succeed. If there’s more than you can eat off the vine, then you must either can, freeze, dry or hope for lots of friends. My bucolic idyl of leaving the surplus for the birds was shattered when hornets arrived to harvest the peaches. Nothing is more unpleasant than removing rotten tomatoes in the spring. If you flirt with farm life, you have to learn it all.

Dehydration was the only preservation method used in this area. Squashes and meat were cut and hung, chiles were strung into ristras, fruits were sliced and laid flat. Corn will cure on the stalk, but was husked, then left to continue drying. The Santa Clara tossed cobs onto their flat roofs or platforms built from cottonwood poles, then stacked them in a storeroom.

Any child knows how to eat dried fruit or jerky. Cooking pinto beans simply takes time. Maíz is another matter, because it’s hard as unpopped corn and takes days to soften in water, or must be ground. Raw corn’s proteins are difficult for humans to digest and lack both niacin and the amino acid tryptophan which the body can use to create the B vitamin. When Zea mays was exported to northern Italy and Africa, pellagra followed; the vitamin deficiency spread in the American south in the early twentieth century when food processing methods changed.

Long before Cortes arrived, the Maya learned the secret of soaking dried kernels in an alkaline hydroxide solution that loosens the outer skin and removes the germ, at the same time it liberates the niacin. They grew it with beans that not only provided ixim’s deep roots with nitrogen but contained the missing amino acids that can combine with those of corn in the body to produce complete proteins. They probably also absorbed calcium that had soaked into rehydrated kernels.

The lowland Maya apparently burned the shell remains of pachychilus snails and used the calcium carbonate ashes in their soaking solutions. The ashes reacted with water to produce the calcium hydroxide that, in turn, interacted with the starches. As cintli moved inland, burned limestone was used instead. A generation after Cortes, the Aztec told Bernardino de Sahagún nextli meant ashes and was combined with water in nexatl. Today, treating corn with wet lime is still called nixtamalization.

The use of ashes followed maize into the eastern woodlands of this country where the potassium hydroxide from wood ashes was substituted. Neighboring English-speaking settlers used their byproduct from manufacturing lye soap with animal fat, hardwood ashes, and boiling water. By the time the USDA was telling women how to can hominy in 1912, Katherine Ola Powell assumed they were using household lye, salty sodium hydroxide, and telling them to leave the flat sweet corn in running water for three or four hours to remove the poison. Later, the University of Georgia extension office suggested baking soda instead, a sodium bicarbonate derivative of lye.

When corn moved into the southwest, early pueblo women ground the dried kernels on portable basalt slabs with carved out depressions. One of the men following Coronado when he visited the seven Zuñi cities of Cibola in 1540 saw mealing troughs made from sandstone slabs divided into three sections. In the first, corn was crushed on a lava or basalt stone into tchu-tsi-kwah-na-we. Next it was ground into sa-k’o-we, a coarse meal then was reground on a sandstone slab for o-lu-tsi-na. By the end of the nineteenth century, Martha Stevenson found two grinding mills, and sometimes a sieve, had replaced the second and third metates.

Frank Cushing saw Zuñi women in the early 1880's chew some of the coarse meal and mix it with the finer flour and water, then leave it to ferment, thereby increasing the niacin and protein content. At that point, they added ground lime and salt to the yeast which then was added to many of their corn dishes. Among the Tewa-speaking Hano of eastern Arizona, Barbara Friere-Marreco saw them add ashes from burned sagebrush. The alkalines not only change the color and taste of tortillas but make the dough more pliable.

Traditional Mexican methods co-existed with ground corn in a variety of foodways that converted what was essentially grass into something palatable and nutritious.. Cushing saw Zuñi women boil dried kernels with ashes for dough or grinding. Friere-Marreco found posole being made by soaking cobs, but the Santa Clara were using lime instead of ashes. She also saw no metates in the newer homes; women used coffee grinders to make the fine flour they mixed with water for atole.

In the same years in Chimayó, maíz was taken to small water-powered mills with horizontal grindstones that also handled wheat and chili, flavoring them all. Posole was made with lime, but all people remember now is that certain women with wood burning stoves made the most wonderful tortillas, "tan sabrosas."

Today, if you go into our local groceries, you can find frozen posole made from corn, water and lime or fécula de maíz made from corn starch ready for atole. You can also find frozen and dried maso for tortillas made from corn treated with lime. Peter Casados sells dried posole, chicos, harina for atole and roasted white corn meal for chaquegüe grown at El Guique, just beyond San Juan. Or, for flaky cornbread, you can buy degerminated American meal that’s been enriched with niacin and other nutrients.

Whenever you hear that simple tale of the feast shared by pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plimoth plantation in 1621 to celebrate the first harvest of wheat and corn, remember Edward Winslow was the one reporting they ate migrating birds and deer. The four women who survived the first year would have known the methods for handling that bounty were a cultural gift more precious than the seed itself.

Notes: Atole is a beverage; posole is similar to hominy; chicos are dried kernels cooked with beans; chaquegüe is a gruel or mush; maso and harina are flours.
Casados, Peter. PO Box 852, San Juan Pueblo, NM 87566.

Castañeda, Pedro de. Relaccion de la Jornada Cibola,1596, translated and reprinted many times.

Cushing, Frank Hamilton. Zuni Breadstuff, 1920.

Nations James D. The Maya Tropical Forest, 2006.

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

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España, c.1577, translated as Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XI - Earthly Things by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 1963.

Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.

United States Department of Agriculture, Home Extension Service. Katherine Ola Powell, Successful Canning and Preserving, 1917.

____, University of Georgia. Elizabeth L. Andress, "Hominy without Lye," 2005.

Winslow, Edward. Letter dated 11 December 1621, originally published in A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 1622; reprinted many times since and available on-line.

Photograph: Chiles abandoned to the elements, 28 November 2008.

Chamisa

What’s blooming in the area: Tea and miniature roses, datura, gladiola, white sweet clover, chamisa, broom senecio, purple asters; cottonwood and milkweed turning yellow, cherries deep red, most Virginia creeper and grape leaves dead.
What’s blooming in my garden: Russian sage, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, Sensation cosmos; leadplant leaves red.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, protected French marigold and gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Green bellied sparrow-like birds in Maximilian seed heads.
Weather: Temperatures were near freezing Monday morning before rains came through on Tuesday, followed by heavy fog on Wednesday and frost everywhere Friday morning. 10:35 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Chamisa is an iconic shrub for Santa Fe’s southwestern romantics. In the late 1940's, Leonora Curtin said it "recalls instantly the all-pervading sense of beauty that one attaches to New Mexico in the early autumn" and that "nothing so characterizes the landscape."
Oddly, while I see it along the road as I drive down the thousand feet from the city, the only place it grows in a dense stand here is the waste land where the Santa Cruz, running from Chimayó and Truches, drains into the Rio Grande. I don’t see it disrupting the prairie grasslands or scrub, nor do I glimpse it amongst the distant juniper.
Like many totemic plants the woody composite is more a keepsake of man’s life on the land than a relic of untouched wilderness. Chrysothamnus is native to the west from northern Mexico to the plains of southern Canada. Sparse nauseosus specimens have lived in such isolation from one another, the species has developed at least 26 recognized varieties that themselves vary so much from location to location that men trying to grow it for its vulcanizable latex during the world wars couldn’t find a single population that was reliable enough from season to season to cultivate.
Our graveolens subspecies thrives along arroyos and alkaline flats in open, sunny areas where its deep taproots can burrow until it locates water. Down the road, a few rabbitbrushes grow some twenty feet above a deep arroyo carved by an acequia that spills water much of the summer.
Another colony is settling the arroyo a half mile south where seed from the self-fertile tubular yellow disc flowers was blown or washed. The shrubs stay in the wet, sandy bottomland where they are creating islands in soil the transitory flowing waters can’t wash away. The contours were especially sharp last Sunday before the afternoon winds had a chance to erase the new erosion from night’s rains.
Ranchers found little use for the narrow-leaved shrub because the latex makes it unpalatable. A decrease in chemicals and an increase in protein make the herbage more edible when temperatures drop in fall and winter and other food becomes unavailable, but not enough for them to encourage it on their lands the other side of the river. The fact rabbits nibble it is no recommendation.
Spanish-speaking settlers gave the fuzz-covered shrub the same name as saltbush and sagebrush, chamizo, a word for brushwood or charred wood, with pejorative connotations of cheapness and poverty. If it ever grew in the area, it’s long been cleared and kept cleared. Not everyone likes the flowers’ strong aroma and protein-rich pollen. The only plants in the village are widely spaced clumps edging a fallow field far from the chapel.
The pueblos didn’t find many more uses for nauseosus . The Zuni used the bigelovii subspecies for baskets, no doubt exploiting the rubber compounds in hakoha luptsine’s twigs. However, the Hopi called our graveolens hanoshivápi because the Tewa-speaking Hano, who abandoned this area after the reconquest, used it for firewood.
The high resin content makes the woody base and annual growth flammable. It not only burns easily in a wildfire but it’s one of the first plants to revive, either from recently buried seed or root buds. While there’s little competition, chamisa can dominate a disturbed area for thirty to fifty years, before it gives way to bunch grasses or conifers.
This past week, as I drove in and out of rain showers, I saw the aging flowers by the roadside and once again pondered the microclimates that control what can grow here, and the people in the pueblos, settlements and enclaves along the highway who decide what will be allowed to survive. Santa Fe sí, Española nada.
Notes: Chamisa does not appear in many on-line Spanish dictionaries. The one appearing under the Oxford imprint defines chamizo as a colloquial term for brushwood or charred log. SpanishDict associates chamizo with a thatched hovel, while Tomasino suggests the related verb, chamuscar, means both to sear and sell cheap.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Chamisa in an arroyo bottom, 12 October 2008, soon after some rain.

Single-seeded Juniper

What’s still green above the snow: Conifers, Apache plume, roses, hollyhock, columbine, rockrose, coral bell, snapdragon, bouncing Bess, blue flax, sweet pea, yuccas, Mount Atlas daisy.
What’s gray or gray-green: Salt bush, winterfat, buddleia, snow-in-summer, pinks.
What’s red: Cholla.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, geranium.
Animal sightings: Rabbit and bird tracks in snow Saturday morning.
Weather: Cold all week; snow Friday evening.
Weekly update: When I was a child trapped in the backseat on my parent’s weekly shopping expeditions, I would pretend I was in a covered wagon moving west and the fallow fields passing the side window were virgin prairie.
Around the same time, Angélico Chávez was driving along the Rio Grande to La Toma trying to recreate the experiences of Juan de Oñate and the Franciscans who came north with him in 1598. He thought the "hunched junipers and piñons" would remind them, not just of their Estremaduran homeland, but of the olive groves of the Holy land.
I was too young to know the Michigan land had changed several times since whites had intruded in the 1830's. He may not have known single-seeded junipers had been encroaching on grasslands since the suppression of wildfires in the 1880's, and were more common when he saw them than they had been during the entrada.
Ecological facts would not have mattered to either of us seeking an imaginative leap into the past through the only thing that remained, the landscape.
Those who only know the juniper from photographs of perfect specimens would not understand the associations made by a Franciscan scholar born in Wagon Mound in 1910. Our native trees are clusters of gray trunks buffeted by high winds into asymmetric stabiles that rarely reach their full 40' height.
Juniper is one of the first plants to come back after fire, and its deep taproot and supporting surface roots have adapted to drought. Even in the best conditions, it only grows about 6" every ten years, a foot every score. While this Pinaceae may bear fruit when it’s ten years old, its best years come when the gray-green evergreen reaches 50 and last another 150 years.
Juniperus monosperma is more than an indicator plant for vegetation at our elevation between 5,000' and 7,500'. For centuries, the dark purple berries were a staple of the pueblo diet, replaced only when other foods became available. Santa Clara used the wood for bows and digging sticks, bound the shredded bark with yucca for torches. Spanish speakers used sabino wood for ceiling lath.
Hu seeped into Santa Clara ritual life where Robbins and Harrington heard juniper branches were substituted for the preferred spruce in dances, while women purified themselves the third day after childbirth with bath water infused by the fleshy, flat leaves.
To the west, Zuñi women drank hot tea of toasted twigs and berries during labor. Spanish-speaking women in northern New Mexico sipped a half-cup each morning during the last month of their pregnancies brewed from the herringboned branch tips.
Now winter has set in, the only green I see from my window is the scrubby juniper where the quail run for shelter. When I walk out, all I see are green bumps on the ranges rippling away from the river and arroyo. Even though I know the trees have probably only grown since the ranch beyond ceased operations, there is still something elemental about the dark dervishes clinging to the earth like Franciscans called to matins by Chávez’s hero, Junípero Serra.Notes:Chávez, Angélico. My Penitente Land, 1974.Cobos, Rubén. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.Curtin, L. S. M. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995Johnson, Kathleen A. "Juniperus monosperma", 2002, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Stevenson, Martha Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.
Photograph: Juniper on the prairie, 22 December 2007.

Datura

What’s blooming in the area: Apache plume, roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, canna, datura, silver-leaf nightshade, bindweed, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, bigleaf globemallow, bouncing Bess, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primrose, toothed spurge, English plantain, pigweed, mullein, heliopsis, broom snakeweed, Tahokia daisy, cultivated and native sunflowers, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, horseweed, goat’s beard, wild lettuce.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, yellow cosmos, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hosta, garlic chives, large-leaf soapwort, Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, scarlet flax, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor buttons, African marigolds.
Looking south: Rose of Sharon, perennial sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, zinnia.
Looking west: Caryopteris, buddleia, Russian sage, catmint, leadplant, flax, David phlox, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Silver King artemisia, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, tomatoes, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, white butterfly, grasshoppers, squash bug, ants, bees.
Weather: Another week when storms passed through to cool the air but kept most of their water; last real rain, 6 August.
Weekly update: Last weekend the local hardware was selling off plants that still hadn’t sold. They probably couldn’t give away the half shelf of impatien seed mats, once dormant bare root Stella de Oro daylilies, or pots of boxwood.
It would be nice to consider impatiens again. Their tropical pastel, flat-faced flowers remain open from the day they’re put in until frost, all day, every day. But that constancy requires a moister environment than we have, so they’re now a memory from time lived in a more temperate clime.
Instead, I accept volunteers that have adapted to my dry air, and mix blue flax that drops by noon with purple ice plants that only open in the heat of the day. Down the road nocturnal white datura flowers are wilting when I drive by in the morning.
Our deep-rooted perennial Datura wrightii is related to Jimpson Weed, but Datura stramonium is an annual with smooth-edged arrowhead leaves. Our nightshade has more triangular leaves with scalloped edges. Ethnobotanists report uses for the first from California, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, while reports for the second are from southeastern tribes.
The Aztec knew the medicinal benefits of their sacred Datura inoxia, but also knew its dangers, that any part would kill. The mixture of tropane alkaloids can freeze the eyes into blindness at the same time they produces visions. The chemicals can alleviate bronchial spasms but also cause respiratory failure, can stimulate or stop the heart.
It’s perilous even to those who know it. The only tribes who distributed it to all adolescent initiates were in California. Farther south, Juan Matus hesitated to reveal it to Carlos Castaneda.
The Hopi limited it to shamans and the Zuni to rain priests who communicated with ancestors who had turned into clouds. Smithsonian researchers found it growing on Santa Clara stream terraces and talus slopes around 1910, but found no one who admitted using it. It’s not clear if that ignorance was universal, or if the select few who might have known the plant wouldn’t say. A Zuni creation tale warns the flowers are all that remain of two teenagers who learned forbidden things, then talked too freely.
Anything that mediates between two worlds, the living and the dead, the pubescent and the adult, is dangerous to the diurnal order. The pentagonal flowers come out with crickets that displace grasshoppers. Their narrow trumpets coexist with coyotes and gophers, long after ants and bees, quail and hummingbirds have gone into hiding. For descendants of medieval Europe, they cohabit with werewolves and witches.
My neighbors exile the rank smell to the boundaries between their land and the potentially threatening public road. But those plants did not just sprout near fences. The 5' bush crammed between a stored trailer and a broken pallet may be the relic of some Castaneda influenced hippie experiment with the unknown, but the 3' mound near the cholla cactus represents someone’s deliberate attempt to domesticate or perpetuate the wild.
As with most courtesans of the night, it’s beautiful in its prime. Just as light fades, the buds burst to release perfume that attracts white-lined sphinx moths. Next to them, impatiens would look tepid. Cultivated ladies and well bred, self-cleaning plants cannot compete with the excitement of the night.
Notes:Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany database includes Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915, and Alfred F. Whiting, Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Datura, 11 August 2007, about 10:00 a.m.

Horseweed

What’s blooming outside: Nothing. Someone in the village pruned his fruit trees; two men down the road were clearing weeds Saturday.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

What’s green and visible in the area: Honeysuckle; needle grass and other unidentified grasses; agave, yucca, yew, juniper, arborvitae, piñon and other pines.

What’s green in my yard: Columbine, rose stems, sweet peas, thrift, rockrose, yellow evening primrose, vinca, tansy, coreopsis, Mount Atlas daisy, horseweed.

What’s gray: Snow-in-summer, pinks, buddleia, Greek yarrow, golden hairy aster, four-winged salt bush.

What’s red: Coral bells, pinks, small flowered soapwort, cholla; white, coral and blue beardtongues.

Animal sightings: More gopher mounds, especially near tree roots.

Weather: By Wednesday, snow was gone from open fields, but survived on walks, drives, and north and west sides of buildings and fences. Ground frozen.

Weekly update: Horseweed is a weed, plain and simple.

Farmers hate it. Seed can sprout anytime after it drops, and it starts blooming here in June. A single plant can produce 200,000 wind-borne achenes and 80% of those can germinate. 91% of those that emerge in the fall survive winter as rough textured basal rosettes. More break ground when temperatures rise in the spring.

Worse, roots release chemicals that inhibit corn growth. Roundup Ready soybean, corn and cotton seeds were released in 1996 and 1997. Farmers tilled their land less often to uproot weeds. Conyza Canadensis plants that resisted the active agent, glyphosate, were reported in 2000, and Darwinian selection has prevailed.

In my yard, the annual’s not particularly noxious, just gawky. The stalks grow anywhere from 1' to 6' high, but the white composite flowers are no more that 1/4" high and never fully open. The fluorescence is so private it might never occur, except for the puffball seed heads.

Horseweed has no nasty thorns or harpooning seeds, and isn’t particularly difficult to pull when the ground is wet in July. The roots don’t usually break and regenerate like dandelions. The taproots are long, but aren’t nearly as entrenched as those of sweet clover.

When I remove them, they release a lemon smell that hints the plant might be good for something. Indeed, limonene from leaves grown commercially in Michigan is used to flavor candy and soft drinks.

Even so, here in the southwest, this North American native has been ignored more than used, perhaps because the leaves are so bitter not even a rabbit will eat them in winter.

The Zuni dried flowers to induce sneezing for sinus and nasal problems. The Ramah and Kayenta Navajo used the stalk or leaves in a lotion for acne. The Kayenta of Arizona also tried hot poultices for prenatal infant infections and earaches, and essayed the plant for stomachaches. The Ramah of McKinley County prescribed a cold infusion for snakebite.

Young Spanish girls in the rio arriba soaked pazotillo leaves in water to lighten their complexions. They probably theorized the aroma of limonene signified it would bleach like the acids in lemons do.

It was the eclectic physicians who determined the tannin that causes the bitterness could staunch bleeding. In 1898, gynecologist Finney Ellingwood recommended an oil made from cinnamon bark, Erigeron Canadensis, as it was then called, and grain alcohol for heavy menses and bleeding from abortions. Scientists have since established that tannin is a polyphenol that binds with proteins to produce clotting.

Such utility does not negate Horseweed’s ugliness. I sympathize with farmers whenever I yank plants or cut stalks. Then I smell the lemon and wonder why someone somewhere isn’t investigating how this insignificant composite can withstand the full chemical force of Monsanto and what that biological mechanism might suggest about disease, survival, and life itself.

Notes:
Curtin, L. S. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished by Western Edge Press of Santa Fe in 1997 with notes by Michael Moore.

Ellingwood, Finley. The American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy, 1919, Hebriette Kress's copy available on-line.

Shaukat, S. Shahid, Nadia Munir and Imran A. Siddiqui. “Allelopathic Responses of Conyza candinsis L.(Cronquist): A Cosmopolitan Weed,” Asian Journal of Plant Sciences 2:1034-1039:2003.

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

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952, cited in the Native American Ethnobotany database.

Wyman, Leland C. and Stuart K. Harris. The Ethnobotany of the Kayenta Navaho. 1951, cited in the Native American Ethnobotany database.

Picture: Horseweed growing under a rugosa rose, 21 January 2007.