Petunia

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, sweet peas, datura, daylily, purple phlox, mullein, bindweed, white sweet clover, goatshead, velvetweed, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, tumble mustard, heliopsis, chrysanthemum, Tahokia daisy, farm and native sunflower, golden hairy aster, goldenrod, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, horseweed, wild lettuce, corn, beans; red showing on apples. Áñil del muerto cut down at house with sheep; English plantain cut down across drive.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan.

Looking east: Small and large-leaf soapworts, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, pink bachelor button; one pink is back.

Looking south: Tamarix, bundle flower, morning glory, tomatilla, cosmos, zinnia.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomatoes.

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, grasshoppers, crickets, ants, bees, dragonfly; hummingbird moths on large-leaf soapwort; whatever quail and yellow-bellied birds eat near my fence must be available now.

Weather: Hot days, cool mornings, rain late in week.

Weekly update: Petunias exist for one simple reason. They bloom. Any where, any time, all summer, they bloom.

They were bred to bloom. The first hybrid appeared in England in 1834, the year after sheet glass was introduced. They were grown in the new hothouses, then transferred to massed beds whose primary appeal was color.

They may have been smelly and sticky. They may have gotten scraggly as terminal flowers continued on longer and longer stems. No one cared, if there were enough of them, and they kept producing bright funnels of five-petaled flowers.

The first petunias I bought in Michigan in 1986 were Cascades that boasted large red flowers all summer. Alas, Pan American was replacing them with Supercascades that not only did not bloom, but died when they were transplanted.

Stokes told its growers it was offering Supercascades because they flowered three days earlier. When energy costs increased in the 1970's, three days meant three fewer days of warm water, heated air, artificial light, and fans.

The first petunias I had that succeeded in New Mexico were California Giants, sold by Burpee in 1998 as an experiment with heritage bedding plants. Theodosia Burr Shepard had developed them around 1900 in Ventura, California. They got leggy by the end of the summer, but they lived to bloom. Burpee didn’t repeat the offer.

I bought fewer plants, and each year what I did buy died. Last year, I found a better place to grow the ornamental nightshades, a more sheltered location with a little less sun. They survived between iris and hollyhocks near a retaining wall, but weren’t particularly prolific.

This year I discovered Easy Wave Cherry in a Santa Fe store. They aren’t the real Wave that sends out legions of emissaries, but a modification which is "earlier to flower under short daylight," produces "more flowers in the paks during spring sales" and has a more domesticated habit.

In fact, they may have been remaindered seed or a rival’s, since Kirin Agribio discontinued cherry in 2003, and resellers stopped offering it last year. My grower may have been using up left over seed or left over labels.

I’ll never know if they are what Daigaku Takeshita intended when he crossed petunia x hybrida with wild species. They don’t ramble like The Wave. Their rangy bare stems have been climbing instead, bearing small flowers since the middle of June.

It’s something to remember, three glorious petunias in twenty some years, each blooming oblivious to its obsolescence. But, oh to have had more from Shepard and Takeshita and others who know petunias are meant to bloom - not just in packs in spring - but all summer, in the garden.

Notes:
Hobhouse, Penelope. Gardening Through the Ages, 1992.

Stokes Seeds Inc. Growers Guide, 1989, 2006 and 2007.

Photograph: Petunias sold as Easy Wave Cherry, near retaining wall with hollyhocks and iris, 15 July 2007.

Squash

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, rose of Sharon, sweet peas, Russian sage, datura, purple phlox, bindweed, white sweet clover, white evening primrose, English plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, bachelor button, zinnia, Tahokia daisy, first sunflowers, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, horseweed, wild lettuce; catalpa pods; corn, tomatoes, chili, onions, squash and other foot high green crops in vegetable patches that are not identifiable from road; local produce stand advertising cherries and peas.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, squash, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.
Looking east: Small and large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies.
Looking south: Tamarix, morning glory, daylily, tomatilla, cosmos
Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, white spurge, caryopteris, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Monch aster, purple coneflower.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomatoes.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Gecko, pair of quail, smaller green hummingbirds, group of yellow-bellied birds, bees, hummingbird moths, ants, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets, squash bug, black widow spiders, Japanese beetles on yellow evening primrose plants, insects too small to name; gopher destroyed roots of baptista and two hollyhocks.
Weather: Hot, but some rain Thursday after midnight; mornings cool; plants still dying along the road, but established trees and shrubs growing.
Weekly update: My squash is producing its first flowers, all males. Luckily, they are the reason I put in seeds. If I depended on the females to bear fruit, I’d starve.
Every time I came home this summer to leaves wilted in the heat, I wondered if they would get this far and pondered the fragility of agricultural life in this corner of the world where people stopped putting in corn a few years ago when it was so dry and, before that, a neighbor told me the only thing grasshoppers weren’t eating were his tomatoes and cucumbers. Corn plots are back this year, but not my neighbor’s front garden.
Times have been hard before. During the depression, frost habitually killed half the peach crop in Santa Cruz, and apricots survived one year in four. In Chimayó, the wheat harvest of 1934 wasn’t sufficient to provide seed for the next year, and they never attempted beans or squash because of the "bug pest."
Farther back, when Francisco Dominguez visited the area in 1776, locusts had been ravaging crops for five years. At San Ildefonso, those who searched for wild food found little, and their neighbors were chary of charity or trade. He reported they had become "cautious" and fear had "hardened their hearts."
Nothing is as stark as the prehistoric Guaje ruin on the Pajarito plateau where the elements uncovered bones that were thin and porous from chronic malnutrition and calcium deficiency.
People didn’t leave here in the 1930's because they discovered cash would stave off starvation if they changed their diet. With the great drought between 1276 and 1299, Anasazi abandoned dryland farming in the highlands east of the continental divide for irrigated crops along rivers.
Who knows what drove the ancients to experiment with plants. The earliest remains of domesticated Cucurbita pepo have been found in a cave in Oaxaca from some ten thousand years ago, four millennia before corn appeared there. Then it was prized for its seeds which contain lutein, carotene and beta carotene; the edible layer evolved later.
Squash, including pumpkins, was important to the pueblo peoples who abandoned the Colorado and Pajarito plateaus. To the west the Hopi roasted the seeds, sliced the meat to dry for winter, and used the blossoms for soup. Here, the Santa Clara boiled or baked the mesocarp in a bread oven.
Cucurbis became more than food; they became a symbol for how people ward off hunger. Families to the west clustered themselves into matrilineal organizations, including the Acoma and Hopi pumpkin clans. Along the rio arriba, the Tewa formed two groups, the summer squash people, who governed during the growing season when fish could be eaten and wild foods gathered, and the winter turquoise people, who ruled when families lived on stored foods and hunted big game.
Squash is also more than dinner to people whose Spanish-speaking parents were the ones who first entered the cash economy offered by the national laboratory. They may not grow it much themselves, but they remember the taste of calabaza. It’s one of the few words that cannot be translated any more than can the pleasant childhood associations of life free of worry.
Notes:Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Smith, Bruce D. "The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago," Science 276:932-934:1997.
Stuart, David E. "Cliff Palaces and Kivas: From Mesa Verdeto Bandelier," Glimpses of the Ancient Southwest, 1985.
US Dept of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany database.

Photograph: Male squash blossoms, 8 July 2007.

Bouncing Bess

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, sweet peas, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, larkspur, purple phlox, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, yellow and white sweet clover, velvetweed, yellow evening primrose, wooly plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, purple coneflower, bachelor button, zinnia, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, horseweed, wild lettuce, onions and squash. Apricots fallen near village. Two men were hoeing a corn field early Thursday morning.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemums.

Looking east: Floribunda rose, coral bells, small and large-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum from seed, thrift, pink salvia, veronica, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies.

Looking south: Tamarix, rugosa rose, morning glory, daylily, tomatilla, cosmos.

Looking west: Lilies, flax, catmint, white spurge, purple ice plant, ladybells, sea lavender, Shasta daisy, Monch aster; buds on caryopteris.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; first cherry tomatoes turning red.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, quail, gecko, squash bug, dragon fly, large moths, grasshoppers, crickets; ants climbed stems for seed pods; bees on catmint and Shirley poppies; gopher killed large hollyhock.

Weather: Hot; storm blew through Wednesday, but left neither water nor cool air; trees, grasses and some plants browning; last rain June 27.

Weekly update: With summer heat comes flowers that persist on roadside shade and moisture Down the road, Bouncing Bess grows along walls and fences, much as it did when I lived in Wyandotte County, Ohio.

When I was driving to Upper Sandusky in the 1970's, I wondered how a European native cultivated by bronze age lake people migrated to marginal prairie lands in the midwest. It’s not ubiquitous like Queen Anne’s lace or goldenrod. Someone needs to plant it before its stolonous roots can spread through the damp soil to form long, sinuous colonies.

It could have been something simple. The leaves and roots contain saponins that lather when shaken in water. Claire Haughton suggests bargemen’s wives planted soapwort along canal banks to provide cleansers when they passed through. Today, Saponaria officinalis grows where the Ohio and Erie canal connected Cleveland to Akron.

Possibly German immigrants spread the perennial beyond the Appalachians for medicinal purposes: in the 1650's, Nicholas Culpeper reported they were using it for gonorrhea. Pennsylvania brewers exploited it as a foaming agent. In 1876, Severin Bechler, a native of Baden, arrived in Upper Sandusky from Delphos to the west to open a brewery.

Anyone could have encouraged the two foot plants that resembled pink sweet peas scrambling up both banks of drainage ditches near the road to Upper, but they were in a stretch with German barns and a Brethren church. In 1845, about a sixth of the testaments distributed by the county Bible society were Deutsche.

When I see it growing here I marvel again that it could skip the arid plains and even higher mountains to grow along a fence in front of a fallow garden. It’s unlikely anyone bought it. When I wanted the plant, the only mail order nursery I found happened to be about fifteen miles from Delphos.

It might have arrived with any of the attempts to improve the value of sheep, especially after wool supplanted mutton in the cash economy during the civil war. The Greeks used struthium to prepare yarn for dye. Fullers used the herb to shrink fabrics to make them more airtight. Textile mills planted latherwort along race banks to decontaminate fabrics before sending them to stamping plants.

In the 1940's, Curtin heard the plant called julián in Chimayó, while it was called clavelina elsewhere in the rio arriba. Julio was the local word for loom rollers; clavelina the Spanish term for pinks, another member of the carnation family. The Spanish call this plant saponella.

Any industrial or domestic uses had long been forgotten. Cattle had replaced sheep. Cheap, uniform, commercial yarns had displaced local ones when the railroads made them available. It never entered the curanderas’ pharmacopeia.

Curtin found people kept the five-petaled cymes in bowls to ward off flies. And they still keep them. Yesterday, the smooth, simple stems grew along three drives in Chimayó, and beside the road in front of another two homesteads. Here in the valley, people prefer the roadside where the sun faded flowers graced two places on the main road, one near the orchards, and three on the back road of the village.

Some say its called Bouncing Bess for the barmaids or Bouncing Bett for washerwomen or kiss-me-at the-gate for where it naturalizes. Others rule it an invasive weed. Me, I call it a welcome sight on a hot day, even if the stands degenerate when old blossoms cling while new shoots bloom

Notes:
Cobos, Rubén Cobos. A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish, 1983.

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.

Cuyhahoga Valley National Park. “Control Plan for Alien Plant Species - May 1990,” available on-line.

Haughton, Claire Shaver. Green Immigrants, 1978.

Leggett, Conaway & Co. The History of Wyandot County Ohio, 1884.

Sigerist, Henry E. A History of Medicine, 1951, reference to lake people from Christopher Hobbs, “The History of Western Herbalism, “1998, available on-line.

Photograph: Bouncing Bess, about three miles down the road, 7 July 2007.

Cholla Cactus

What’s blooming in the area: Roses, cholla, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, sweet peas, lilies, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, velvetweed, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, squash, pink and white bindweed, wooly plantain, toothed spurge, Queen Anne’s lace, yellow sweet clover, purple coneflower, áñil del muerto, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion; apples visible from road.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, butterfly weed, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, first chrysanthemums; sour cherries more edible.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, sweet alyssum from seed, pink salvia, veronica, larkspur, winecup, hollyhock, sidalcea, California and Shirley poppies, Mount Atlas daisy.

Looking south: Tamarix, daylily, cosmos from last year’s seed, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses; fruit on raspberry and tomatilla.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, purple ice plant, sea lavender; buds on ladybells and Monch asters.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Good sized yellow-bellied raucous bird on utility pole; humming bird; white, gray and black-with-yellow butterflies; bees, ladybug, crickets, ants; grasshoppers eating hollyhocks and buddleias; gopher active in neighbor’s garden.

Weather: Hot days cooling off later despite afternoon clouds and winds; rain Wednesday.

Weekly update: The cholla going out of bloom in empty fields stand as reminders of some time before. But when, I wonder, was that before.

Certainly before people settled the area where I live. Only one grows near a village road, and groups are scattered along the ridge to the Española highway. Across the arroyo more survive in a vacant field and a house once had a yard filled, but recent owners tore them out for their dogs.

There are no more cactuses for another mile and a half, then they appear in empty fields and isolated plants bloom in yards, two just beyond fences. I have two, my uphill neighbor has one. Between us and that last vacant land, another has surrounded a 3' shrub with protective rocks in the drive and a nearby neighbor has one by a fence with yucca.

They weren’t always here. In the Cenozoic, this area of alluvial Santa Fe deposits was tilted, the Rockies lifted and a rift opened. In those long eons, some 30 million years ago, the Cactaceae broke away from their portulaca cousins in northern South America, then began moving north.

With the ice age came waters from the north that eroded land and filled the trench to form the Rio Grande. The Jemez volcano collapsed, but not before spewing ash. Ours is the resulting dissected bench land that supports black grama and four-winged saltbush that coexist with Opuntia imbricata elsewhere. There could be no cactuses here before.

Sometime between the great glaciers and 1500 years ago, people in the dry valleys of Mexico, who knew more about wresting an existence from recalcitrant plants than our ancestors, began nurturing wild foods, including agave and opuntia. Pollen from cane cholla has been found in a pithouse near Petroglyphs National Monument in Bernalillo county from a time before pottery and corn.

Perhaps they came here with the Anasazi; pueblos to the south mention cholla more than local ones. Lucile Housley believes its existence near Jemez Pueblo, higher than its normal range, is because humans took it there. Several have suggested they need some active agent to move them any distance from where the fruits and broken branches fall.

Some say they are invaders who’ve encroached on the pure grass lands grazed by cattle after the Denver and Rio Grande created markets for cattle and lightening found less to burn. Others, that they are part of the black grama prairie we’ve lost and disappeared when stockmen burned the spines to feed their animals in bad years.

On the other side of the river, on pueblo and ranch lands where cattle still wander, they are simply there - part of the nondescript scrub blazoned, this time of year, by glints of magenta when tepals catch the light. You no more can see their swollen brush skeletons from the highway than you can know when they came in that far time before.

Notes:Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

Flannery, Kent.V. "Los Orígenes de la Agricultura en México: Las Teorías y Las Evidencias" in T. Rojas & W. T. Sanders, Historia de la Agricultura. Epoca prehispánica. Siglo XVI. México, 1985, cited by Marco Antonio Anaya-Pérez, "History of the Use of Opuntia as Forage in Mexico," available on-line.

Hershkovitz, Mark A. and Elizabeth A. Zimmer. "On the Evolutionary Origins of the Cacti," Taxon 46:217-232:1997.

Housley, Lucile Kempers. Opuntia imbricata Distribution on Old Jemez Indian Habitation Sites, 1974, cited by Dunmire and Tierney.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany on-line database.

Photograph: Cholla cactus, 30 June 2007.

Blanket Flower

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, roses, cholla, prickly pear, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, lilies, Russian sage, datura, bigleaf globemallow, velvetweed, purple mat flower, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, English and wooly plantain, locoweed, yellow sweet clover, goats head, Shasta daisy, golden hairy aster, paper flower, goatsbeard, native dandelion; white seeds floated through; harpoon needle grass and halberd downy chess and three-awn grass seeds attached themselves to everything that passed.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature roses, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, veronica, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, California and Shirley poppies.

Looking south: Tamarix, sweet pea, daylily, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian and purple salvia, purple and white beardtongues, purple ice plant, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender; buds on Monch asters and purple coneflowers.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; plants beginning to grow and put out more flowers.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird on coral beardtongue, geckos, bees, ants, grasshoppers, squash bug, small tan moth; white, yellow with black, and black with yellow butterflies; small, indistinguishable insects.

Weather: Hot days, evening winds, cool mornings; some days the air held fumes; some plants dying that were encouraged by wet spring but are not near water or have weak roots; others spurting with heat; last rain June 11.

Weekly update: Thursday marked mid-summer’s eve and the last of the rose-hued flowers of spring are blooming. If there are to be more flowers this summer, they must be the yellow composites of the American prairie.

Retail nurseries know this and plantsmen continually watch for tamer possibilities for small gardens and decks. It’s been years since they first introduced blanket flowers that formed low mounds skimmed by large flowers. Ernst Benary began marketing the latest, Arizona Sun, in 2005.

These tetraploid Gaillardia x grandifloras resulted from crosses between perennial arista and annual pulchella. The first, native to the northern plains, has single terminal flowers on hairy stalks that flop in good soil and long-lived taproots. The second, recognized by the western Keres speakers of Cibola county, has a longer blooming season.

Now breeders are eliminating the garish orange-red petals with yellow notched tips. Last year, Georg Uebelhart released Amber Wheels, a muted yellow aristata selection with a milk chocolate core. Rosemary Hardy patented a pastel child of Dazzler as Oranges and Lemons in 2004.

Last summer my neighbor bought some Arizona Sun and Amber Wheels. She set them more than a foot apart, which emphasized their contained habit. As summer stretched into the cool autumn and she continued feeding them, the plants doubled in size, the spaces between them shrank, and the mounds collapsed into shapeless jumbles of recumbent stems. I almost liked what they became.

Then, miraculously, they put out new leaves the end of March I was so impressed by their hardiness, I bought some special varieties myself. The existing buds on the Oranges and Lemons opened, then no more. Nothing yet from Arizona Sun. I still don’t like them very much.

When I first considered blanket flowers in 1996, the only potted variety available was Goblin, promoted as an 8"-12" dwarf. It lasted a few years, then died out. Allan Armitage blames that on the pulchella heritage. It’s one of the few plants I didn’t regret losing. It was a matter of proportions. The flowers were too large for the compact plant, and looked freakish.

Since I couldn’t buy simple, full-sized Gaillardia like my mother grew, I resorted to seeds sold as aristata. Instead of disciplined hemispheres, I whelped scraggly single stems that behaved like biennials and were probably grandiflora hybrids. If there were too many of them, the consistent shading from red to yellow seemed mechanized and strident.

I have a hard time recalling why I’m growing something that doesn't look good as a specimen or in clusters, in its native coloring or disguised for subdued suburbs. But this summer I remember. After last year’s wet summer nurtured seed and this year’s wet fostered seedlings, I have a bed filled with coreopsis, golden-spur columbine and blacked-eyed Susans, each in a self-selected area. Scattered between are blanket flowers.

Unlike roses and azaleas that need a background of green, blanket flowers require more color, dense color, denser that a single plant, denser than it can amass by itself. When it’s growing among the coreopsis, the edges diffuse into the surrounding yellows, leaving shadows. Like a baritone among the tenors or the drum below the fifes, the sheer vitality of the burnt orange transfigures the monolith yellows.

Notes: Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Hardy, Rosemary. Patent application for "Gaillardia Plant Named ‘Oranges and Lemons’," 2004.

Swank, George R. The Ethnobotany of the Acoma and Laguna Indians, 1932, cited in Dan Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany on-line database.

Vickerman, Larry, collector of seed that became Amber Wheels. "A Better Gaillardia," available on-line.

Photograph: Blanket flower and coreopsis grown from seed, 10 June 2007.

Floribunda

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, hybrid roses, cholla, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, daylily, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, velvetweed, purple mat flower, amaranth, milkweed, tumble mustard, pink and white bindweed, English and wooly plantain, locoweed, yellow sweet clover, golden hairy aster, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native and common dandelion, grama grasses; goatshead and prostate knotweed showed up; corn and sunflowers growing; rice grass releasing seeds; needle grass seeds becoming a nuisance.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed; sour cherries turning red

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, hollyhock, California and shirley poppies, Kellerer yarrow.

Looking south: Iris, sweet pea, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian salvia, purple and white beardtongues, purple ice plant, sea lavender, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird at coral beardtongue, bumble bees on blue ones; smaller bees on coreopsis, blanket flowers and catmint; ants on peach; aphids on roses; black butterfly on thrift seed ball; small grasshoppers bouncing everywhere; young male rabbit in drive.

Weather: Attempted showers during week, temperatures warmer; high winds yesterday, but little water reached the ground; strong manure smells along back road of village.

Weekly update: Roses are ablaze in the village, both pastel and florescent. Once again, I’m envious.

When I told a friend last year that my last tea rose from the year before had been killed by spring winds, he said, "oh, my wife, doesn’t plant stuff like that; she only uses xeroscapic plants." Apart from aesthetics and snobbery, her preference is probably derived from the perception that roses, especially those descended from the first Chinese teas, are too tender to survive without pampering.

As soon as roses entered the China trade in 1752, men studied them in their gardens. Around 1802, John Champneys discovered Rosa chinensis had yoked itself with Rosa moschata on his Charleston area plantation. His neighbor, Philippe Noisette, experimented with the seedlings, and sent his fledglings to his brother in Paris, whose nursery introduced the first tender Noisette in 1814.

Rose multiflora arrived in Europe from the newly opened Japan in 1860. Scmitt tried it with different hybrids before releasing Aglaia in 1896 from a Noisette. He sold the yellow rambler through the Rhineland’s Peter Lambert, who promoted an Aglaia seedling as Trier in 1904.

Wilhelm Kordes opened his nursery in Holstein in 1887, and soon after sold Lambert’s roses. His son, Wilhelm II, united Trier with a polyantha to produce a hybrid musk. While invigorating the Mediterranean moschata, he fortuitously intensified the multiflora heritage because polyanthas had evolved from Jean-Baptiste Guillot’s attempts to combine the flower clusters of multiflora with the repeat blooming and bush habit of chinensis.

Meanwhile, Svend Poulsen was commingling polyanthas with hybrid teas to increase flower size. When Jackson and Perkins hired the son of a French cotton mill owner to establish their breeding program in 1930, Jean Henri Nicolas not only extended the Dane’s experiments with polyanthas, which he called floribundas, but also negotiated exclusive marketing rights for Kordes roses in this country.

His assistant, Eugene Boerner, had become a close friend of Wilhelm II by the time he removed 10,000 seedlings from Europe in 1939. Later, Bourner crossed a Kordes tea rose, Crimson Glory, with a Kordes floribunda, Pinocchio, to beget Fashion in 1949. In 1952, he marketed one of Fashion’s children as Ma Perkins. A Ma Perkins scion was introduced as Gene Boerner in 1968, two years after his death.

The only rose I have that has survived drought, cold winters, high winds and grasshoppers is a coral pink Fashion I bought in 2000. The only rose I added last spring that’s blooming is a pale pink Gene Boerner. Both are large flowered, clustered headed floribundas.

Apparently, I owe my ability to grow my own roses to one Wisconsin born grandson of Saxon immigrants who absorbed continental breeding ideas. When Americans encountered Rosa multiflora in 1866, they saw utilitarian graft stock for the preferred tenderer roses.

In the 1930's, the government promoted multiflora for erosion control, because it grows on bad soils, including claypan, sand and gravel, to naturalize by seeds, suckers and rooted branches. More importantly, it tolerates dry conditions.

Fortunately, germplasm, even in the most refined tea, diffuses men’s ideas of the possible so that when I go to the local store to buy cheap roses, it offers floribundas, polyanthas and climbers amongst the hybrid teas because they all bear large bright flowers in black pots. I’m anxious to know if the ones that survive this year, if any, are the ones with the indefatigable multiflora ancestors, or if the floribunda is yet one more chimera in my quest for roses on my windswept prairie.

Photograph: Gene Boerner, floribunda rose, 10 June 2007.

Golden Spur Columbine

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, four-winged saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, locoweed, oxalis, yellow sweet clover, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, velvetweed, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, bindweed, wooly plantain, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native dandelion, Apache plume, pink shrub, tea and other hybrid roses; rice and black grama grass. Needle grass seeds are beginning to stick to pant legs, three awn grass seeds beginning to work loose; pink evening primroses back in yard where Japanese beetles decimated them in 2003. One farmer is letting bales of hale cure in his field.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, catchfly, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; buds on bouncing Bess, Shirley poppy and hollyhock.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea, iris, rugosa, floribunda and Blaze roses; buds on daylily.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, purple and white beardtongues, Valerie Finnis artemisia; buds on lilies, sea lavender and Rumanian salvia.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold; buds on acorn squash.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, gecko, bees on baptista and catmint, white butterfly on snapdragons, grasshoppers, ants, stink bugs.

Weather: Warming days and cold nights; rain last Sunday and yesterday; high winds Wednesday knocked fruit off peach, broke branches on locust and deflowered shrubs and trees.

Weekly update: My golden spur columbine is as much a wildflower as the novel Ramona is a realistic description of Indian life.

It’s not that they didn’t begin life as wildflowers and history, but that over time they changed into garden plants and a romanticized view of the past. When Henry King filmed Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel in 1936, he cast Loretta Young as the half-breed girl and Don Ameche as the Indian. It would have been impossible to do otherwise with a story of white reactions to miscegenation.

If my plants were still the species, the two seedlings I bought in 1997 would have died by now. Instead, they fill an area 5' by 8'. Two years ago, the grasshoppers left mere stubs that didn’t bloom last year. But now, they’re back.

Golden columbines have been slowing disappearing since the Pleistocine. Today, they grow in moist canyons east of the Continental Divide, usually in areas with igneous rock. Mine grow in sand and clay derived from volcanic ash in an area with morning and late afternoon shade.

Large-winged hawkmoths, with tongues that reach through the flower to the nectar in the spurs, are the species’ most important pollinator. The only sphingids I’ve noticed here were hummingbird moths in 2000 and 2001 in other parts of the yard. So far as I know, I’ve never seen a white-lined sphinx which feeds on columbine and is reported in Rio Arriba county.

The male anthers in the species mature earlier than the female organs, so they can only produce seed when moths transfer pollen from one flower to another. Then, the seed germinates best when air temperatures are between 77 in the day and 68 at night.

My flowers still have the adaptations for the moths: the long tails, the open petals that don’t close at night and face every direction to ensure an insect moves from one to another. However, commercial breeders like Keift Bloemzaden could not have afforded to perpetuate such idiosyncratic reproductive requirements.

Even though found primarily in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and Mexico, seeds from the Colorado exclave are probably the ones used by early breeders. Silver mining that began near Georgetown in 1864 attracted the Union Pacific. Transportation, in turn, brought cultured tourists. Harvard botanist Asa Gray visited the area in 1872, when Charles Parry named a mountain for him. A year later, Gray officially described Aquilegia chrysantha.

A mere five years later, Jackson went to Colorado Springs looking for a clean air for her lungs. On her carriage rides into the Cheyenne mountains, she saw the columbines in ravines and had heard their Latin name.

Since European columbines were known to interbreed, plantsmen in eastern America and Europe would have been eager to experiment. Robert Nold believes most of the commercially available flowers today are "Yellow Queen" or one of its descendants.

Anything that can crossbreed or reproduce like my columbines is free to become a wildflower again. Jackson’s allusions to such variability of the species are still too controversial to admit historic re-enactments on her novel. At most, if anyone dared film Ramona today, Hispanic and Indian actors would be hired.

Notes:Gray, Asa. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Proceedings 8:621:1873, cited by Nold.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. "The Procession of Flowers in Colorado," Bits of Travel at Home, 1878.

_____. Ramona, 1884.

Nold, Robert. Columbines: Aquilegia, Paraquilegia, and Semiaquilegia, 2003.

Opler, Paul A., Harry Pavulaan, Ray E. Stanford, and Michael Pogue, Butterflies and Moths of North America, 2006, database available on-line.

Photograph: Golden spur columbine, 3 June 2007.

Bearded Iris

What’s blooming in the area: Russian olive, catalpa, white locust, locoweed, oxalis, yellow sweet clover, four-winged saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red hot poker, short yucca, datura, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, purple salvia, white evening primrose, scarlet beeblossom, purple mat flower, tumble mustard, bindweed, wooly plantain, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native and common dandelion, Apache plume, pink shrub, tea and other hybrid roses, rice, needle, and three awn grass; first batch of hay cut and baled.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Miniature rose, iris, golden spur columbine, hartwegii, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis; buds on coral beardtongue; nasturtium seeds emerge.

Looking east: Dr. Huey rose, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort peaked, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; one budded hollyhock reaches above my shoulder; squash seeds have first leaves.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea; rugosa and floribunda roses; buds on Blaze and daylily; raspberry forming fruit.

Looking west: Flax, catmint, baptista, purple beardtongue; buds on sea lavender, Valerie Finnis artemisia and Husker beardtongue.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold, sweet 100 tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium; buds on coral honeysuckle.
Animal sightings: Quail, hummingbird, small insects hovered around flowers at dusk and dawn; bees in beauty bush in afternoons; grasshoppers getting to be a problem; horse was eating a volunteer cottonwood in field last Sunday.
Weather: Temperatures warmed, and some weak plants died; whatever rain was in the area dropped only enough water to pattern sidewalks and feed air roots and thorns. Last actual rain, May 25.

Weekly update: My bearded iris taunt me with how little I know about how they are bred and mass produced.

Normally, I would only care if I heard something unethical was being done, like overharvesting from the wild. But, in 1996, I bought some Superstition rhizomes from a mass market catalog that were dark indigo in the shade and luminescent in the sun in the spring. The year after the petals were greenish brown.

My curiosity was quite natural. I wanted to know if my plants were diseased. I moved them to an isolated area where the color was less discordant and they’ve colonized the slope. This year the flowers were more coffee than dirty brass.

Now I have another puzzle. A white iris started blooming across the ditch from them last Saturday. These are the first flowers since the sword-shaped leaves showed in the area a few years ago.

The plant should be the untrue child of a nearby cheap yellow hybrid, but more likely is the offspring of my only surviving white iris, an Immortality growing some 25' to the northeast behind a spirea, which normally is upwind.

Long ago, nature advertized it would inbreed Iridaceae species and permit recessive traits like white coloring to self-select until stable varieties emerged. J. C. Wister determined Iris germanica, my bearded iris, developed from natural matings between blue Iris pallida and yellow Iris variegata. The bluish-white Iris florentina is now recognized as a spontaneous creation of germanica.

It took a Cambridge biologist to make the next logical step: Around 1889, Michael Foster began experimenting with pollen from new species discovered by the expanding British Empire Over time, shorter bearded iris and remontants appeared, as well as more varied colors. Now, Richard Ernst at Cooley’s Gardens is asking Oregon State molecular biologists to go farther, and introduce genes from different genera into Iris germanica.

All of which may explain my white iris. Lloyd Zurbrigg released it in 1982 as a descendant of Gibson Girl, a two-season pink iris introduced by Jim Gibson in 1946. He, in turn, was inspired by Hans Sass who experimented with dwarf species to produce shorter stalks for Nebraska winds and, incidentally, developed the reblooming purple Autumn King in 1924. Sometime during those years when ideas were diffusing from scientists and techniques were spreading among breeders, the innovation of florentina was duplicated.

I still don’t know what transformed my fifteen Superstition into greenish brown interlopers, but I can sympathize with growers who were testing new techniques to mass produce the 1977 cultivar from Schreiner’s Gardens. After all, I’ve just spotted another unexpected set of leaves, and have to wait at least three years to see if they represent another discardable experiment by nature or something nearer Immortality.

If anyone does know what methods grower used that would cause an advertised iris to metamorphose into something else, please let me know.

Notes:
Oregon State University and Cooley’s Gardens. Zoran Jeknic, Richard C. Ernst and Tony H. H. Chen, Iris Transformation Method, patent granted 2002.

Wister, John C. The Iris, 1927, cited by Flora of North America Association. "Iris germanica Linnaeus."

Photograph: White iris, probably Immortality, 28 May 2007 around 6:15 am.

Black Locust

What’s blooming in the area: Purple and white locusts, locoweed, oxalis, tamarix, snowball, privet peaked, silver lace vine, red hot poker, short yucca with stiff leaves peaked, Joseph’s coat, Austrian copper, pink shrub, Dr. Huey, miniature, tea and other hybrid roses, Apache plume, skunkbush, four-winged saltbush, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, purple beardtongue, purple salvia, white evening primrose, purple mat flower, bindweed, wooly plantain, blanket flower, goatsbeard, hawkweed, native and common dandelion, rice, redtop and three awn grass; tumble mustard near 5' where sunflowers grew several years ago; long needle grass seeds are reflecting light into sheets of white; downy chess turning brown, buffalo gourd and milkweed visible from road; daylilies have buds.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Lady Banks rose, golden spur columbine, perky Sue, fern-leaf yarrow; buds on hartwegi, coreopsis, chocolate flower.

Looking east: Coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, last year’s snapdragons, pink salvia, rockrose, winecup, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; buds on hollyhock; zinnia and sweet alyssum seed sprouting.

Looking south: Weigela, beauty bush, spirea has few flowers left, raspberry; rugosa rose; buds on floribundas and Blaze; glads, cosmos and bundle flower broke ground.

Looking west: Iris, flax, catmint, baptista; buds on sea lavender and Valerie Finnis artemisia; perennial four o’clock emerged.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium; buds on coral honeysuckle.

Animal sightings: Red-throated bird was calling from utility line after Wednesday’s rain; large yellow and black butterfly (or moth) landed with open wings on beauty bush; large bumble bee at top of locust; grasshoppers, mosquitoes and crickets have been hatching; large black ants were stealing zinnia seeds Sunday.

Weather: Full moon; stormy weather most of week, with real rain Friday; sandwiched between the cloudy, windy afternoons was our first summery weather which killed two roses with weak roots. Horseweed seeds no doubt are ready to sprout where I pulled plants from wet ground yesterday.

Weekly update: When I got out of my car Monday evening, I discovered my black locust was blooming.

My exhilaration didn’t just come from the contrast with the temporarily still weather. When I saw trees covered with white clusters in the village last weekend, I told myself this was another year when my only reward would be that my tree had survived the frost.

I planted the bare root sapling in 2000. It first bloomed in 2004, when it was about six years old, which is about when the species begins to bear seeds. The next year, I thought I’d killed the shallow roots when I dug a hole for another shrub, and the leaves died. Last year, the leaves emerged around April 15, and were killed by frost a week later. No more flowers. This year it waited until May 2, and still the leaves were blasted May 9.

I can’t say my tree is beautiful. The frost apparently killed the potential blossoms near the canopy base. At the top, some branches had shot up, and destroyed the general symmetry. They are the ones now weighed by heavy racemes that toss in the wind like camels’ heads.

It’s another plant so sensitive to temperature that every ten feet of altitude translate into flowers a day later. I don’t know if that’s why it leafs and blooms from the bottom, or why the top branches were saved by their height, or even if that’s why my tree is slower than the ones in the village.

I certainly don’t understand how nature can produce a tree that so consistently gets its timing wrong. Even in its native range, the zone 6 Appalachians and Ozarks, George R. Trimble says Robinia pseudoacacia is highly susceptible to frost damage. Outside the range in England, Allan Mitchell complains black locusts bloom less often than not.

Even though nature guarantees the large florets will attract bees, even to the heights, it doesn’t rely on seeds for reproduction. This locust only produces a good crop about half the time. Instead, trees expand through root suckers into copses.

Worse than suckers, thorns and blighted springs, Mitchell grumbles he’s left with a graceless, brittle tree in summer. In Albuquerque, Rosa Doolittle warns it’s scraggy in winter, and the pods, when they do appear, are a nuisance.

If master gardeners disdain it, nature has found other admirers. Its Leguminosae roots support bacteria which divert nitrogen from the air into the soil. It’s so effective, other species, including catalpa, grow better when they can take advantage of its largesse. Coal land owners use it to reclaim stripe mines, and, in Europe, trees have colonized large areas reduced to rubble by war.

People in the village grow it anyway. A few have purple cultivars, but most have tucked the white species into a fence row where it fertilizes its neighbors without defiling the area near the house. We’ve all learned, beauty comes with imperfections and compensations.

Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1967.

Huntley, J. C. "Black Locust," in Russell M. Burns and Barbara H. Honkala, Silvics of North America, 1990.

Mitchell, Alan. The Gardener’s Book of Trees, 1981.

Trimble, George R. Summaries of Some Silvical Characteristics of Several Appalachian Hardwood Trees, 1975, cited by Huntley.

Photograph: Black Locust, 26 May 2007.

Snowball

What’s blooming in the area: Purple and white locusts, tamarix, snowball, privet, yucca, Austrian copper, Persian yellow, and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, skunkbush, golden spur columbine, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, white evening primrose, purple mat flower, stickseed whitebristle, oxalis, bindweed, native and common dandelion, goatsbeard, tansy, tumble and purple mustard; rice, needle, downy chess, and three awn grass; June grass going to seed; lambs quarter and áñil del muerto sprouting.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Lady Banks rose and perky Sue; buds on fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, chocolate flower.

Looking east: Coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, creeping baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, rockrose, winecup, Mount Atlas daisy, Kellerer yarrow; buds on pink salvia and hollyhock; Siberian pea has pods.

Looking south: Spirea, beauty bush, raspberry; buds on floribundas.

Looking west: Iris and flax; buds on sea lavender, baptista, catmint, purple beardstongue.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunia, Dahlberg daisy, marigold.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium; buds on coral honeysuckle.

Animal sightings: Green bird with dark, long wing stripes in peach; humming bird, gecko, ladybugs under peach, bumblebee on pinks, darning needle, small butterfly, big black ants, small grasshoppers; sheep returned down the road.

Weather: Waxing moon, last frost May 7; lightening, clouds and winds every afternoon; rain and hail Wednesday, rain Thursday, spatters other days.

Weekly update: My favorite snowball is blooming.

Alas, it’s not in my yard, but in the village. It was taller several years ago, with rangy branches that flung its Christmas ornaments. Then someone decided it needed pruning. Last year, there were few flowers. This spring it looked like a pollarded trunk. Now, despite it all, its remaining 8' are covered with tightly corseted white clusters.
I wish I knew exactly what type Viburnum it is. When I look in mass market mail order catalogs, I see snowballs without definition and I see all kinds with specific names that don’t look like anything I want. In the area, 15 shrubs have slightly smaller heads than my favorite, and 10 have much smaller heads or more obvious horizontal layers. Most seem to have three-lobed leaves.

I feel like the people in Waverly, Alabama who walked into Greene Hill Nursery when they heard it carried traditional shrubs, and backed out exclaiming "No, no, no. We want the old snowball bush."

Steve Thomas finally satisfied them with Chinese Snowball (Viburnum macrocephalum), which Robert Fortune had shipped to England in 1846, shortly after Britain forced China to open some ports to its trade. It has serrated, oval leaves and 5" trusses.

It fell from trade favor because it’s not comfortable beyond zone 6 and its cuttings don’t like immediate transplanting. Japanese Snowball ( Viburnum plicatum tomentosum.), introduced a half century after Carl Peter Thunberg described it in a Kyushu garden in 1794, was a good substitute with 4" heads, ovate leaves, and a tolerance for zone 5.

What others are growing here could be anything. In 1995, one local hardware was selling Viburnum opulus ‘Roseum’ as Snowball Bush. In 1996 and 1998, it sold something described as Viburnum Snowball. Since 2003, it’s carried Viburnum plicatum, which it calls Japanese Snowball, even though it has maple leaves. The other hardware is offering the European lobed-leafed Eastern Snowball this year.

Last year I renounced local shrubs that couldn’t survive a summer, and ordered something called White Snowball from a midwestern nursery that sells bare root, field grown plants. It provided no identification, but the tripartite leaves tell me it’s probably the sterile opulus exported to England before 1597 as Gheldersche Roosen.

In the wild, all three Viburnum have flat round cymes, with larger, sterile flowers on their perimeters that attract insects to the smaller, bisexual flowers. Growers in China and Holland apparently found ways to encourage the asexual florets at the expense of the others, until the dominant large flowers morphed into spheres.

I’ll probably wait several years to discover if my blooms are acceptable. More likely, I’ll back away muttering "No, no, no. I wanted the bush in the village."

Notes:
Coats, Alice M. Garden Shrubs and their Histories, 1964; reprinted 1992 with notes by John L. Creech.

Thomas, Steven, Greene Hill Nursery. Incident described in Steve Bender and Felder Rushing, Passalong Plants, 1993.

Yang, Qin-er, Michael Donoghue, Shiro Kobayashi, Hideaki Ohba, and Stephen Smith. "Caprifoliaceae," draft for Flora of China.

Photograph: Area snowball, 19 May, 2007, probably Viburnum opulus ‘Roseum.’

Lilac

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, snowball, yucca, Austrian Copper and pink shrub roses, golden spur columbine, fern-leaf globemallow, white evening primrose, stickseed whitebristle, oxalis, bindweed, native and common dandelion, goatsbeard, hoary cress; tansy, tumble and purple mustard; rice, needle, downy chess, and three awn grass; June grass going to seed.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Perky Sue; buds on fern-leaf yarrow and blanket flower; butterfly weed emerged; fruit developing on sour cherry.

Looking east: Siberian pea shrub, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on peony, pink salvia, creeping baby’s breath, Kellerer yarrow; last year’s sunflowers coming up.

Looking south: Spirea, lilac; buds on beauty bush.

Looking west: Tulip, iris, flax; buds on sea lavender; fruit forming on peach.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, Dahlberg daisy.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium

Animal sightings: Rabbit prospecting; ladybug, bumblebee on pinks, large black butterfly, darning needles.

Weather: New moon; cold temperatures killed leaves on locust Tuesday; rain mid-week, but winds returned even on hot afternoons.

Weekly update: Lilacs like a cold spring, or so I was told by neighbors when I lived in Wyandotte County, Ohio, the year newly flushed flowers filled the town with their fragrance.

This apparently is more than folk wisdom. Remains of common lilac’s progenitor appear in Hungarian fossils from the tertiary, and, according to Kim and Jansen, the shrub probably evolved 12 million years ago when ice-caps were developing. Glaciers may have isolated it from its Oleaceae peers in Asia.

Joseph Caprio determined common lilacs still need 1049 hours between 37 and 48 degrees to set their buds. Those minimum 44 days represent a few more chilling units than apples require, which may explain why they emerged about four days after the orchards this year.

Temperature is such a strong factor governing Syringa vulgaris that scientists have been using it to evaluate the effects of changes in climatic conditions. When they were establishing a baseline, Caprio’s colleagues discovered lilacs were unfolding an average 7.5 days earlier in the western United States in 1994 than in 1957. Peter Marra’s team found the date for bud burst was 3 days earlier for every degree of increased average temperature in the east between 1961 and 2000.

This year, we had a snowy winter, followed by warm temperatures in mid-March. My first florets opened April 25. I planted the shrub in 1997 and it first blossomed two years later. The earliest date the racemes appeared was last year on April 21; the latest was in 1999 on May 10. A twenty day fluctuation is not unusual.

Lilacs may demand cold weather, but they did not like last weekend’s cold winds and frosty mornings. My lilac was in full fluorescence Friday, but has had only scattered, four-petaled trumpets since. Towards town Monday, there was only one white lilac left with much color. Revenants of light lavender remained in 15 yards; some white sprays remained in two places and two people had dark purple heads.

The affinity between lilacs and cold is obviously conditional. Last year a man down the road watered his shrubs when morning temperatures were still low enough to freeze. This year, those are the only shrubs I don’t see with even a hint of leaves. I don’t know if the iced branches, the prior year’s grasshoppers, or something else killed them, but established lilacs don’t die willingly: they might have lived another hundred years and pirouetted through most of them.

Notes:
Caprio, Joseph M. "Flowering Dates, Potential Evapotranspiration and Water Use Efficiency of Syringa vulgaris L. at Different Elevations in the Western United States of America," Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 63:55-71:1993.

Cayan, Daniel R., Susan A. Kammerdiener, Michael D. Dettinger, Joseph M. Caprio, and David H. Peterson. "Changes in the Onset of Spring in the Western United States," American Meterological Society Bulletin 82:399-415:2001.

Kim, Ki-Joong and Robert K. Jansen. "A Chloroplast DNA Phylogeny of Lilacs (Syringa, Oleaceae): Plastome Groups Show a Strong Correlation with Crossing Groups," American Journal of Botany 85:1338-1351:1998.

Marra, Peter P., Charles M. Francis, Robert S. Mulvihill and Frank R. Moore, "The Influence of Climate on the Timing and Rate of Spring Bird Migration," Oecologia 142:307-315:2005.

Photograph: Common lilac, 12 May 2007, after cold temperatures killed most of the flowers.

Coral Bells

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, yucca, stickseed whitebristle, oxalis, bindweed, dandelion, goatsbeard, hoary cress; tansy, tumble and purple mustard; June, rice, downy chess, and three awn grass; buds on snowball and fern leaf globe mallow; catalpa, locust, wisteria, Rose of Sharon and grapes leafing out. One local hardware has number of varieties of tomato and pepper plants.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Yellow alyssum; buds on Perky Sue and fern-leaf yarrow.

Looking east: Siberian pea shrub, moss phlox, coral bells, small-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on thrift, pinks, peony, and Keller yarrow; tomatilla coming up.

Looking south: Spirea, lilac; morning glory and cosmos volunteers emerging. Winds killed another hybrid tea.

Looking west: Grape hyacinth, tulip, iris, flax.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium, honeysuckle.

Animal sightings: Quail, humming birds, orange and small brown butterflies, ladybug, orange winged flying grasshopper, stinkbugs, ants.

Weather: Waning moon; strong winds all week disbursed Siberian elm and dandelion seeds; nourishing rains Tuesday and Wednesday, no doubt, planted them well. Pigweed metamorphosed from seedlings into plants Wednesday night, and Russian thistle germinated. Frost on my car this morning.

Weekly update: My coral bells are blooming, a profound vermillion. Last year the Bressingham Hybrids didn’t bother.

They did well enough when I planted them in 1997, spreading in a bed that gets shade, variable water, and strong winds. Then heath asters insinuated themselves and smothered the evergreen plants in the winter of 2003. I moved the asters, but could do little about the ensuing drought and grasshopper invasion.

I probably attempted coral bells because outlanders still confuse New Mexico with northern México. Once one person confused the abbreviations NM and NMex, the origins of the plant were repeated by others who didn’t question the published word and sought order in contradictory sources.

Heuchera sanguinea entered the botanical dictionary when Frederick Adolphus Wislizenus got himself incarcerated in a silver town in the opening skirmishes of the Mexican-American War. He had migrated to this country after one of the many failed revolutions in Frankfurt and gravitated towards St. Louis where another refugee, George Englemann, had settled.

Both had trained in science and medicine. When Englemann arrived in Philadelphia in 1832, he called on Thomas Nuttall, then moved to the entrepot for the west, and established collegial contact with botanist Asa Gray at Harvard.

Wislizenus was more restless, and, clinging to a different university tradition, periodically disappeared on long country hikes. In 1846, he joined Albert Speyer, a gun runner headed for México from Santa Fé. Stephen Kearney watched them; the Mexicans arrested them, but let him wander the 6,512' high foothills of the Sierra Madre Occidental outside Cusihuiriachuc where he collected plants.

A few years later, Charles Wright, another protégé of Gray, went to newly opened Texas to collect plants, then apparently followed one of the trails from El Paso to Nogales pass through northern Chihuahua and Sonora. He found Wislizenus’ coral bells growing in Santa Cruz, a settlement at the head of the Santa Cruz river valley on the other side of the continental divide.

The perennials have since been found in the southern counties of Arizona and up the eastern border with New Mexico where silver was mined.

Precious metal production declined in México after the expulsion of the Spanish. Juan Porfirio Díaz solicited foreign investment in Chihuahua in 1880, and V. T. Hoskins believes Heuchera sanguinea was introduced into this country two years later.

Revolutionary discontent with Profirio Díaz’s dictatorship culminated in martial law in Cusihuiriachuc in 1886. The next year, yet another Gray protégé, Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, saw the plant growing on La Bufo hill there above the mines.

In the meantime coral bells traveled to England as an alpine where William Robinson suggested only cross-breeding and selection had made the new arrival "tractable" enough for the garden, and thought maybe more work was needed before it would become hardy enough to survive there.

Sometime after French imperialism was stalled in 1862 at Puebla on cinco de Mayo, Victor Lemoine began experimenting. He not only crossbred different Heuchera species, but successfully mixed genera within the Saxifrage family to produce what he called Heuchera x brizoides in 1912.

Bailey later found the taxon used for Heuchera lithophila and Alan Bloom apparently adapted it for his Bressingham hybrids in the early 1950's. Now it’s used as a generic identifier for any cross between sanguinea, micrantha, americana, bracteata and whatever else will cooperate.

My coral bells may have nothing to do with New Mexico, may, in fact, not even have much Heuchera sanguinea blood left after their sojourn among the Anglo-Saxons. But whatever they are, their destiny has been inextricably bound with that of what became a Yankee financed Hispanic settled state.

Back in Chihuahua, a Canadian company, Dia Bras Exploration, bought the Cusihuiriachuc mining district last year. It remains to be seen if it and NAFTA can resuscitate the moribund mines as successfully as nature has revived my lobe-leaved plants.

Notes:
Bailey, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1934.

Hoskins, T. H. "Choice Herbaceous Plants," Garden and Forest, June 29, 1892.

Kearney, Thomas Henry and Robert Hibbs Peebles. Arizona Flora, second edition, 1961.

Pringle, Cyrus Guernsey. Notes on Heuchera sanguinea, Garden and Forest, May 23, 1888.

Robinson, William. The English Flower Garden, 1883; 1933 edition reprinted by Sagapress, Inc., 1984.

Wislizenus, Frederick Adolphus. A Memoir of a Tour to Northern Mexico, Connected with Col. Doniphan's Expedition, in 1846 and 1847, 1848, with section on plants by George Engelmann.

Wright, Charles. Plantae Wrightianae, 1853, edited by Asa Gray.

Photograph: Bressingham Hybrid coral bells, 29 April 2007, with columbine leaves in background.

Mustards

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, iris, flax, tansy and purple mustard, shepherd’s purse, hoary cress, stickseed whitebristle, oxalis, dandelion, downy chess and three awn grass; buds on fern leaf globe mallow; Siberian elm dropping seeds. Woman was putting in her vegetable garden yesterday near the orchards.

What’s blooming in my yard: Cherry, Siberian pea shrub, lilac, first spirea, grape hyacinth, hyacinth, tulip, daffodil, moss phlox, coral bells, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on thrift, pinks, and perky Sue.

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

What’s reviving in the area: Grape leaves emerging at hacienda down the road.

What’s reviving in my yard: Jupiter’s beard, leadplant, tomatilla, gayfeather, coneflowers emerging; leaf buds on rose of Sharon and catalpa.

Animal sightings: Long thin bird with long thin beak; full-sized flying grasshoppers and a few baby grasshoppers; ants.

Weather: Full moon; windy afternoons; some rain Tuesday.

Weekly update: They say Germans always settled on limestone soil in Pennsylvania and the restless Scot Irish left them what good land they had; others joke their Norwegian ancestors in Wisconsin found farms as bad as they had left, when they could have gone to California.

How did they manage that? Explorers and pioneers looked for familiar vegetation to tell them what virgin land might support. Coronado told Charles V he saw “grass like that of Castile” on the way to Cibola in 1540; he didn’t need to mention horses, cattle, or sheep.

Farmers use the white-flowered shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa-pastorisas) blooming in my neighbor’s drive as a sign that soil is salty. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer says the appearance of this and other members of the mustard family (Brassicaceae) also implies crust formation and hard pan that result from the loss of friable loam from overgrazing and poor farming methods.

Tumble mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum) is a more familiar token of range abuse. At the moment it’s still a thistle-like rosette in my neighbor’s drive, but it will soon bolt to produce clear yellow four-petaled flowers. While it tends to hug roadsides, there’s one area near the orchards that’s covered each spring. I don’t know if its presence simply reflects the current neglect of that lot, or if it hints at some earlier use, say as a corn field.

Indicator plants can reveal the history of agriculture itself. Young and Clements observed that while purple mustard (Chorispora tenella) has been in this country since at least 1929, it’s only become a nuisance in the Great Basin in the past ten years, with most of the growth since 2002.

The most likely reason is that farmers have been doing less tilling and harrowing since herbicides became available. By the time they apply the chemicals, the winter annual has already produced the next batch of seed and inhibited the alfalfa or winter wheat.

So far, purple mustard is only a haze in a few places in town and outside the orchard fences. It probably represents nothing more than people’s tolerance for whatever grows in the public domain so long as it doesn’t get tall like the sunflowers that are mown down in late summer.

Native tansy mustard (Descurainia pinnata) is the species most eager to take over my yard. Dunmire and Tierney suggest it can be used to locate prehistoric settlement sites, for it grows near remains of the Anasazi who lived west of the Rio Grande between Bernalillo and Cochiti between 1300 and 1500. Because it can survive heavy soils, they’ve found it colonizes decaying adobe mortar and plaster. When the dull yellow flowers and spiky seed ladders appear in bottom lands, they believe they connote the presence of ancient garden plots.

When I first heard the term indicator plant, I thought I could find plants that would grow in my garden by extrapolating from volunteers in the same family. With so many mustards blooming in the spring, I felt sure yellow alyssum and candytuft would grow. I was wrong. Only one Alyssum saxatile survived.

It could be all these mustards signify is the current interregnum when flowering fruit trees in the rose family are passing and hybrid teas have yet to appear.

Notes:Coronado, Francisco Vasquez de. Report, republished 1896 by George P. Winship as The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542, cited by Robert D. Baker, Robert S. Maxwell, Victor H. Treat and Henry Dethloff, Timeless Heritage: A History of the Forest Service in the Southwest, 1988, and by Samuel Woodworth Cozzens, Explorations and Adventures in Arizona and New Mexico, 1988.

Dunmire, William W. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.

Pfeiffer, Ehrenfried E. Weeds and What They Tell, 1950's, kept in print by Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association.

Young, James and Darin Clements. “Blue Mustard in Cheatgrass Communities,” Society for Range Management Proceedings. 58:261-262:2006.

Photograph: Tansy and purple mustards near post office, 21 April 2006, with dandelions; plants since removed, but seeds left behind.

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.