What’s blooming in the area: Tea, miniature and shrub roses; Apache plume, tamarix, prickly pear, cholla, four-wing saltbush, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, daylily, fern-leaf globemallow, alfalfa, loco weed, oxalis, tumble mustard, velvetweed, white evening primrose, Indian paintbrush, bush morning glory, bindweed, milkweed, goat’s head, goat’s beard, hawkweed, plains paper flower, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, native dandelion; brome, three-awn, sacaton and rice grass.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Catalpa, Dr. Huey rose, red hot poker, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, butterfly weed, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, hollyhock, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on sidalcea.
Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses; spirea, beauty bush, sweet pea.
Looking west: Purple and white beardtongues, Rumanian sage, catmint; buds on sea lavender and ladybells.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Woodpecker on utility pole, quail, hummingbird, hummingbird moth on bouncing Bess, grasshoppers, ants, bees, earthworms.
Weather: Hot and windy; last rain 6/5/08; 15:57 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Rock roses are what I call a weekend plant. When I leave in the morning, dozens of teardrop buds are nodding along the sides of short stalks rising from foot high plants. When I return, the crinkled petals are gone. I rarely see those petals opened flat to expose yellow stamens to insects in the heat of the day.
Lamb Nurseries convinced me I should try them when they called sunrose "one of the finest evergreen rock plants" that was "excellent on dry banks" and "very hardy." Their last catalog listed 17 varieties in as many shades ranging from orange and apricot through yellow to corals, pinks, and watermelon. When I saw them in a local store, the inch-wide five-petaled flowers recalled moss roses.
The English were much taken with the unpredictable color in the twenty chromosome Helianthemum nummularium. In the 1920's their largest nursery, Norcutt, was introducing stable pinks, primroses, and whites. More hybrids have been produced, partly from crossing the yellow species with other members of the Cistaceae, including the white apenninum and yellow-orange croceum.
It’s taken some years for the cinnamon branches to spread four feet. I bought eight hybrid varieties in 1997, but only a few endured the extremes of both summer and winter. In 1999, I bought more Rose Glory, the one trailing groundcover that had survived. That winter the store’s demonstration planting died while my two lived on.
At the time I assumed I had simply found the sole variety that would grow in this part of the rio arriba. After all, Alan Armitage had found only one variety, Mutabile, would survive the humid climate, clay soils and poor drainage of the Georgia piedmont. Cheryll Greenwood Kinsey continually failed with Henfield Brilliant in Washington before she bought another variety and tried it in a different location.
Since the species thrives on limestone grasslands along the Mediterranean, north to the Baltic and into England, I suspect the problem is less the weather than the species’ adaptation to poor soils. Like many woody plants, rock rose roots attract fungi that provide it with water and minerals in exchange for carbon. These ectomycorrhizal fungi thrive in the upper layers of the soil and are destroyed when the ground is turned over, which of course all good gardeners do. By the time the organisms have recovered the plants are dead.
This is one time my laziness has been rewarded. When I established my beds I already knew the wind was a dangerous foe, so I leveled the land, and added layers of manure, fertilizer, sawdust and mulch. I didn’t spade them in, but added regular soil and heavy sand on top. Now, when I put in new plants I only dig a hole large enough to accommodate the root ball. It’s not the best technique for container grown herbaceous perennials, but it seems to have worked for one cultivar of a woody subshrub.
It actually took less time for the product of sophisticated breeders to become established than it took its species ancestor to recover on abandoned farm fields some twenty miles from the Languedoc coast. There, ecologists found common rock roses reappeared about sixty years after the field was abandoned, and then only after the bunch grasses.
A spreading plant covered with flowers that tolerates poor overgrazed soils and thrives in the south of France where summer droughts are followed by fall monsoons and frequent winter frosts ought to grow here. Too bad it has my work schedule: the Cistaceae blooms when the photosynthesis factory cells are running and rests when the shade returns. Fortunately, it takes no breaks during the month it blooms, so I can see it on my holidays. Then, while I continue my daily commute the rest of the summer, it preens its narrow, dark-green leaves to persist through winter.
Notes:
Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.
Garnier, Eric, Astrid Bellman, Marie-Laure Navas, Catherine Roumet and Gérard Laurent. "The Leaf-Height-Seed Ecology Strategy Scheme as Applied to Species from a Mediterranean Old-Field Succession," International Conference on Mediterranean Ecosystems, Proceedings, 2004.
Kinsey, Cheryll Greenwood. "Sunrose," available on-line.
Lamb Nurseries catalog, 1996.
Photograph: Rock rose, 21 June 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea, miniature and shrub roses; Apache plume, locust, catalpa, four-wing saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, daylily, hollyhock, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, loco weed, sweet pea, oxalis, tumble mustard, nits-and-lice, velvetweed, white evening primrose, scarlet bee blossom, milkweed, bindweed, goat’s beard, hawkweed, May daisy, plains paper flower, Hopi tea, spine and hairy golden asters, common and native dandelions; brome, three-awn, sacaton and rice grass; buffalo gourd up; cottonwood fluff in the air.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Dr. Huey and Persian yellow roses, iris, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, perky Sue, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, Jupiter’s beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy.
Looking south: Blaze, pasture, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses; spirea, raspberry, beauty bush.
Looking west: Purple and white beardtongues, catmint; buds on sea lavender, ladybells and Rumanian sage.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Ants, aphids, moths, even smaller grasshoppers
Weather: Unwatered ground bleaching into sand; last rain 6/5/08; 15:56 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Local farmers have been cutting hay for the past week or so. The fields will soon go dormant, but they’ll get at least one more crop this fall when temperatures cool again.
When I mentioned this to a friend from Santa Fe, he remembered the beauty of alfalfa fields in bloom when he was driving through Colorado. I suddenly realized that while I’d always been told people here grew alfalfa and my friend assumed hay meant alfalfa, that’s not what’s being cut.
Medicago sativa is a legume with triplets of oval leaves that looks like young sweet clover from a distance; this is a grass. Alfalfa has purple flowers; this has tiny, 3/8" long narrow yellow flowers with darker anthers that hang from the spikelets. The one looks blue green from the road; this was bright green when it revived in spring, and still wears a yellowish inflection. The county extension agent, Tony Valdez, says most of it is smooth brome, a native of the steppes that stretch from the Carpathian Basin to Siberia.
It’s easy to understand why I would get it wrong, to say my eyes saw what my ears heard. But why would a local man with roots deep in the valley tell me he was surrounded by alfalfa farmers when most of the fields I see in the area by the village where he lives are abandoned or brome?
It could be a plumber my age has no more ties to farming than I had as a child. It’s also possible alfalfa was growing when he first looked. There still is one field down the road and escaped plants bloom elsewhere along the shoulder. While alfalfa can grow in pure stands, experts recommend mixing Bromus inermis with legumes or other grasses to prevent it from choking when its rhizomatous roots become too dense. The two perennials may have coexisted until grasshopper depredations favored the one.
Like most of us he may continue to see what he remembers until change is too stark to dismiss. Pigweed is now tall enough to be mistaken for alfalfa, and many mow it down in the fall when it turns brown. Fallow fields, pasture, and grass hay look alike from a distance.
The failure to see what’s growing may also reflect a romantic assumption that when an insulated area changed with World War II, the old ways froze. In fact, the farmers down the road are modern enough to adopt a Hungarian selection that has been promoted by the agriculture department since 1942 to restore rangelands destroyed by dust bowl droughts in the 1930's.
Even in the depression, when traditional farmers were growing alfalfa, they were adapting new ideas. The Interior Department observed some 300 acres growing in the area surrounding Santa Cruz and believed it was used to improve chili lands, rather than feed domestic livestock.
At the time, government agents complained many didn’t bother to level the fields they watered from local ditches. As a result, water didn’t flow evenly to crops and often formed destructive sheets. The men down the road from me didn’t buy or inherit flat lands; they worked to make them even below dike walls of dirt before they installed pumps to pull water up from the aquifer.
One man weathered by age still lets the water spill directly into his field from some dozen wells; the younger men have recently invested in large diameter pipe segments with imbedded spouts that spread the water across the high end, but still depend on flooding to cover the fields. Their techniques are modernized versions of traditional acequias.
In the depression fields were seldom more than the few acres that survived the subdivisions of generations and were worked with hand tools. Long ago farmers bought tractors, but the ones I follow down the road are small because the fields are still relatively small. Men who grew up when land was divided by death now sell sections farthest from their wells for ready cash. They are reproducing their traditional patchwork landscape on land that was not farmed when they were children, this time with brome grass scattered between new homes.
It is the persistence of these familiar patterns that obscures the substitution of plants and technology from those of us who look but do not see.
Notes:
US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.Valdez, Tony. Rio Arriba County extension agent, email, 9 June 2008.
Photograph: Smooth brome grass blooming near the orchards, 7 June 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea, miniature and shrub roses; Apache plume, locust, catalpa, four-wing saltbush, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, sweet pea, oxalis, tumble mustard, white evening primrose, scarlet bee blossom, bindweed, tahokia daisy, goat’s beard, hawkweed, plains paper flower, spine and hairy golden asters, common and native dandelions; brome, three-awn, sacaton and rice grass; western stickseed and needle grass releasing seeds. First hay cut, first buds on daylilies.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Dr. Huey and Persian yellow roses; black locust, iris, golden spur columbine, hartweig, perky Sue, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis; buds on butterfly weed, anthemis and Mexican hat; zucchini and nasturtium seeds up.
Looking east: Jupiter’s beard, Maltese cross, oriental poppy, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on coral beardtongue and bouncing Bess.
Looking south: Blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses; spirea, raspberry, beauty bush; bud clusters on red grapes.
Looking west: Purple beardtongue, catmint; buds on sea lavender and Rumanian sage; daffodil leaves turning yellow; perennial four o’clock up.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy; grasshoppers eaten French marigold leaves.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Hummingbird, yellow bellied bird with black and white under wings, geckos, cabbage and sulphur butterflies, moths, bumble bees, flies, grasshoppers, black ants, aphids.
Weather: Rain with thunder and lightening Thursday, winds all week, daily temperature range rising from 40-80 to 50-90. 15:52 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: No one plants a garden to save money. William Alexander figured when he spread the costs for creating his vegetable bed over twenty years and added the current year’s expenses, his Brandywine tomatoes cost him $64 a piece. He saw no way to invoice the groundhog for its share.
I finally got an oriental poppy to bloom. I figure I spent $350 over the past fourteen years to get that first flower. My price includes seeds from at least four countries bought from seven retail seedsmen, potted plants grown by at least three wholesalers sold through five outlets in three cities, seedlings ordered from three out-of-state nurseries, and bare roots from another three. No payment from the rabbit.
I didn’t average $25 a year. Every fall when nothing succeeded I’d swear I’d never do that again. Then when the catalogs arrived, I’d be tempted to splurge. Most years, I controlled my impulses until I saw seeds in the store and think, it’s only .89. Of course that was 1995; this year the same seeds were 1.59.
I could usually rationalize my previous failures had been caused by weather, and hope the coming spring would be different. Poppy seeds are so tiny, they blow away, and can’t be covered with anything heavy because they need light to germinate.
Each year I’d be tempted again when I saw the actual plants on the shelves. It wasn’t my self-control that saved me, but the fact that most years the stores didn’t carry the tall, brilliant oranges. Instead, they sold pink Victoria Louise and white Royal Wedding, or, once in a while, deep red Beauty of Livermore. A few years ago, they tried the better behaved dwarfs, Pizzicato and Allegro.
The difficulty with getting poppies established is that the deep, branching taproots don’t like to be transplanted. The ones grown in pots are still too small to adapt when they’re sold in late spring, just before they go dormant for the heat of summer. Unfortunately, I usually made matters worse when I exposed them by removing potting soil that won’t absorb water in my ground.
After a few years of abstinence, I’d think maybe this year, this 1997, this 200, maybe I’ll get lucky, maybe we’ll have a normal summer, maybe a cold enough winter. In the fall, more remorse.
Until 2006 when something did survive, even if it has turned out to be pink with black blotches and slightly ruffled petals. The flower lasted little more than a day before a petal fell off exposing the collapsing purple stamens that surrounded a green pistol that had a purple ovary forming on top. Then came the wind, leaving two buds to open.
If this were Papaver somniferum, I would now be excited because I could soon slit the pod to stimulate the formation of the chemicals that are refined into opium and recoup some of my losses. But Papaver orientale has different alkaloids, which may not even be in my plants. It probably only carries the species name by courtesy, since the 28 light-orange chromosomes have been crossed with the 14 from their dark-red bracteatum cousin since the 1880's to get those unwanted colors.
If my neighbors weren’t growing bright scarlet flowers that shimmer from a distance, my quest for flowers that mesmerize when the sun filters through their petals should be dismissed as an addiction. However, since I began at least three people have succeeded with plants that taunt me with my failure.
When I moved here, one yard down the road was a solid mass of burnt orange. In January of 2005 someone cleared out the thistle leaves and replaced them with gravel and bare dirt. Poppies are stronger than that. They can survive mountain grassland droughts in western Asia to live a hundred years. The root of an established plant can regenerate from a fragment left in the ground. Those four-petaled chalices are slowly come back, hiding under daylily leaves.
Some would say $350 is cheap for a plant the lives to be a hundred. Of course, they’re thinking of mature trees and including the backhoe operator. I’d never risk that kind of money on a single plant in this environment. I’m much too rational. I may be impulsive but I’m not foolish.
Notes: Alexander, William. The $64 Tomato, 2006.
Photograph: Oriental poppy, 5 June 2008; pod forming at lower left.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses of all kinds including Austrian copper, yellow Persian, pink shrubs, teas and miniatures; Apache plume, Russian olive, locusts, catalpa, four-wing saltbush, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, oxalis, tumble mustard, Jupiter’s beard, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; native sunflowers coming up; milkweed visible. More people are preparing their vegetable gardens.
In my yard: Rugosa rose, spirea, beauty bush, snowball, iris, flax, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, golden spur columbine, pink evening primrose, hartweig, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue, chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, purple beardtongue, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, anthemis, blanket flower, coreopsis, and Mexican hat; zinnia seeds coming up.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, French marigold.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Geckos, hummingbirds, ants, grasshoppers, small moths; bees on beauty bush; bumble bee on pinks; rabbit in upper neighbor’s yard; four cows brought into pasture in the village.
Weather: Winds whipped themselves into such a frenzy Wednesday they produced a funnel cloud near White Rock. When I heard the weather bureau warnings, I wondered how the topography would channel its northeast path. I drove home an hour or so later with the sun shining and the roads dry until I crossed the ridge into my valley where the edges of the road were wet to my house and the sand was gone that had been covering my seeds. Last rain 5/28/08. 15:45 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: When Linnaeus used Latin to name plants in 1753 he was affirming a belief in the possibility of a set of values shared across cultures and continents.
Roman Catholic missionaries sent to China in the late nineteenth century still believed they could safely explore unknown manifestations of God and report them back to their peers in France and Italy. By 1901, so many had explored and steamships had become so efficient Ludwig Diels could publish a survey of central Chinese flora that included Paul Graebner’s description of a Shaanxi shrub with leaves and new growth that look like honeysuckle on gray-brown branches with shredding bark that Giuseppe Giraldi had only seen bearing seed in the early 1890's.
Reports of exotic new species had already aroused the commercial instincts of nurseryman Harry Veitch. In 1900, he sent Ernest Wilson to western Hubei to meet a customs official, Augustine Henry, who had been asking people to bring him samples of local plants he feared would be lost to deforestation. Veitch’s Coomb Wood nursery planted seeds Wilson collected in the area and was rewarded when one lined it branches with clusters of pale-pink tubular flowers in 1910.
No one had noticed when Graebner named that particular plant for a fellow Berlin botanist, Richard Kolkwitz, that he was confirming Latin no longer was a spoken language. The anachronistic mix of syllables from people who’d fought in antiquity didn’t bother the British upper classes who used their classical educations to separate themselves from the rising masses. Leonard Messel, the son of Berlin-born banker Ludwig Messel, won the Royal Horticultural Society Award of Merit in 1923 for a Kolkwitzia amabilis grown from a Veitch cutting.
When Kolkwitzia was introduced into the United States after World War I, it was renamed beauty bush because, in our xenophobic climate where nothing could have a German name and anything even slightly Slavic was disdained, the idea of universal culture was rejected. No one complained about a stereotypic pop culture rendition of pidgin Chinese. When I bought my container grown cutting in Albuquerque in 1997, the store label didn’t even include the Latin name.
The Caprifoliaceae were popular in suburban gardens between the wars, but fell into disfavor in the 1950's. Alan Summers believes when nurseries began growing stock in containers, the cuttings didn’t flourish enough to attract buyers. I suspect in the age of Joseph McCarthy anything with wanton form and profligate blooming habits that could not be pruned into conformity was distrusted.
The idea of universal culture has been in retreat ever since. Now environmentalists want to root out any plants in the wild that were not there in some prelapsarian age. When Reinhard Böcker and Monika Dirk studied germination patterns of potential invaders in Baden-Württemberg, they discovered Kolkwitzia seeds do better on limestone debris and pebbles than on standard soil, sand or loess.
Nature, of course, doesn’t know the difference between Anglo and Hispanic culture, doesn’t recognize the difference between Latin and Chinese. She created one Kolkwitzia species, perhaps when she was experimenting with plastid inheritance through both male and female cells. No more were seen in the wild until 1980 when the Sino-American Botanical Expedition went looking. Not enough is known about the protected rare shrub to determine if it failed to spread over a wide area or is now only a remnant of its former self. All the seedlings and cuttings grown in this country come from a cutting brought by Wilson from Veitch’s specimen in 1907 and planted by Jackson Dawson at the Arnold Arboretum.
Here in New Mexico my Kolkwitzia thrives on limey soil where weiglia dies back from grasshoppers, rose roots are devoured by gophers, and many woody shrubs can’t handle the daily temperature extremes. Linnaeus was right that a worldly nature requires a universal language to identify plants that can grow in both the upper Rio Grande below the Gorge bridge and near the headwaters of the Yangtze beyond the Three Gorges.
Notes:
Reinhard Böcker and Monika Dirk. "Distribution and Spreading of Alien Trees in South Western Germany and Contributions of Germination Biology," in U. Starfinger, K. Edwards, I. Kowarik, and M. Williamson, Plant Invasions: Ecological Mechanisms and Human Responses, 1998.
Diels, Ludwig. "Die Flora von Central-China. Nach der Verhandenon Literatur und Neu Mitegeieilten Orignal Materiale," Botanische Jahrbücher für Systematik, Pflanzengeschichte und Pflanzengeographie 29:169-659:1901.
Hu, Yingchun, Quan Zhang, Guangyuan Rao, and Sodmergen. "Occurrence of Plastids in the Sperm Cells of Caprifoliaceae: Biparental Plastid Inheritance in Angiosperms Is Unilaterally Derived from Maternal Inheritance" Plant Cell Physiology, 2008.
Summers, Alan. "Kolkwitzia Amabilis 'Pink Cloud'," Carroll Gardens web-site.
Photograph: Beauty bush, 31 May 2008, with Jemez Mountains and badlands in back.
What’s blooming in the area: Roses of all kinds including Austrian copper, yellow Persian, pink shrubs, teas and miniatures; Apache plume, Russian olive, four-wing saltbush, yucca, red hot poker, oriental poppy, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, oxalis, nits-and-lice, tumble mustard, hoary cress, Jupiter’s beard, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; lamb’s quarter germinated.
In my yard: Spirea, beauty bush, snowball, iris, flax, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, golden spur columbine, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue, chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, purple beardtongue, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, anthemis, blanket flower, coreopsis, and Mexican hat.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, French marigold, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Pair of small hummingbirds; too many ants and baby grasshoppers.
Weather: Hot, dry, windy days were replaced by cold, wet, windy ones; even so, parts of my front yard were still completely dry yesterday. Last rain 5/23/08. 15:35 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: The demand for wildflowers like perky Sue is greater than the inventory of mass producible varieties. When I bought two pots in Santa Fe in 1998, they were named Hymenoxys argenta. The rabbit ate them.
When I tried seven in 2001 the same store offered Hymenoxys scaposa. When I added five more in 2003, two were actually giant perky Sues labeled as Hymenoxys acaulis. I now have five of the first with narrow, dark-green leaves and one of the second with lance-shaped, grayer leaves. They haven’t all survived, haven’t gone to seed, haven’t naturalized. At best, two have expanded from their crowns.
I look at the yellow composites rising on bare stems from shrubby hummocks of wintergreen leaves, and wonder why they haven’t done as well as the neglected argenta plants growing in the gopher riddled median on the approach into Santa Fe.
Good Calvinist that I am, I always assume plant failure is my fault. Then, after I buy perennials year after year and treat them with different watering and transplanting techniques, I turn on the purveyors. After all, argenta is promoted for gardens in Arizona, scaposa by those in Texas and the Sandias, and acaulis for Colorado. The species whose thick taproot was converted to chewing gum by the Tewa and local Spanish-speakers in the early 20th century was richardsonii.
The last thing I consider is the possibility that nature may be the reason my natives fail. Wildflowers that are specific to a small location are inherently fussy. Apparently, the various Hymenoxys flourished on limestone soils during the dry, warm period after the Wisconsin glacier, then began adapting when the climate changed again.
At some time, the parent of the three commercially available species underwent enough genetic change that the descendants have been redefined as Tetraneuris, partly because they are the only ones that can double their sets of 30 chromosomes. One acaulis subspecies around the Great Lakes has retreated into such small, widely separated areas that the lake daisy has lost its ability to reproduce because the remaining plants are too similar to mate. Marcella Demauro found similar outcrossing, self-compatible populations in Illinois and Ohio could only breed with each other, but not within their own environments.
Another endemic in Valley Verde, Arizona, that Daniel Godec believes probably diverged from another acaulis variant, is found on only four gypsum hill tops because it has become too sensitive to soil and slope. Who knows what my particular plants need.
The local Hymenoxys, pingué, apparently was able to accept a more variable climate, for it ranges from New Mexico to Saskatchewan. It’s strongest adaptation has been the production of chemicals which poison sheep foolish enough to eat it. It apparently increased to cover vast areas when overgrazing eliminated more palatable forage.
It’s ironic that no one is offering this more forgiving species in the trade today because men have tried to grow the Colorado rubber plant commercially for the latex in the roots. Even its old uses and dangers have been forgotten since bovines replaced ovines. Michael Moore says the best many can conjure today is that it was used "to get rid of too many sheep."
The memory of yellow covered hills still leads to the desire for the long-blooming native that is satisfied by plantsmen who believe their particular offering is the true perky Sue. They look enough alike to fool all but the trained botanists, and sometimes they do actually naturalize. Just not in my garden.
Notes:
Campbell, Lesley, Brian Hubbard and Michael Oldham. "Cosewic Status Report on the Lakeside Daisy, Hymenoxys herbacea in Canada," 2002, available on-line.
Demauro, Marcella M. "Relationship of Breeding System to Rarity in the Lakeside Daisy (Hymenoxys acaulis var. glabra)," Conservation Biology 7:542-550:1993.
Godec, Daniel J. "Distribution and Taxonomic Discussion of Tetraneuris verdiensis, an Apparently Rare Edaphic Endemic from the Verde Valley of Arizona," Rare and Endangered Plant Conference, 2000.Moore, Michael. Commentary in L. S. M. Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947; revised by Moore for Western Eagle Press, 1997.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Range Plant Handbook, 1937; republished by Dover Publications, 1988.Photograph: Perky Sue, offered as Hymenoxys scaposa, more properly Tetraneuris scaposa, 24 May 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Locust, tea and miniature roses, snowball, yucca, wisteria,, yellow columbine, fern-leaf globemallow, loco weed, tansy mustard, hoary cress, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; buds on saltbush; seeds on June grass; ragweed and Russian thistle emerging. A man was discing his field on Thursday evening after the rains; two were clearing weeds by hand from a furrowed field yesterday.
In my yard: Spirea, iris, flax, vinca, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, coral bells, winecup, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue; buds on beauty bush, oriental poppy, hollyhock, sea pinks, pinks, and fern-leaf yarrow; seed pods on Siberian pea tree; Illinois bungle flower, baptista, leadplant, tomatilla, and purple ice plant emerging; rugosa rose, caryopteris, Russia sage suckering.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, marigold, gazania, Dahlberg daisy.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë; bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: First grasshopper of the season, bumble bee on iris, ladybug on saltbush. Small yellow bellied birds have nested in the front porch soffit and now retreat to the peach tree when I’m out to yammer about their territorial rights.
Weather: Finally some real rain on Thursday; that evening when I crested the ridge into our valley, the cottonwoods and Siberian elms were an undulating mass of brilliant emerald green hummocks along the river where they were filling out. 15:23 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Bees don’t work in the wind and neither does spirea. This is the second year my flowers have all been to the leeward, hidden between the blue-green leaves and the garage.
Spirea is not particularly well adapted to this climate for the notched leaves demand water. Before the drought of 2003, someone at Santa Clara had a hedge edging the road. That dry summer, the 3' bushes turned brown in July; the following year, only a few shrubs near the house had leaves. This year there are no flowers on the few green branches that poke up among the uncut dead ones.
The bare root I ordered in 1995 never broke dormancy. The potted shrub I bought locally in 1996 didn’t survive the winter, but the one I got in 1998 did so well I added four in 2000. I had put the first at the garage corner where it got some water from the roof. The new bush at the other corner has done well, but is about half the height of the first which has yet to produce branches heavy enough to flex. The ones that depend only on me show more bare ruddy branches than ones with leaves.
This rose family member’s ancestors are native to the well-watered parts of China. Spiraea trilobata sojourns near and above the Huang Ho which flows through Shaanxi with only 15" of precipitation a year to Jiangsu with an average annual 32" minimum. Spiraea cantonensis grows in northern Jiangxi along the Yangtze where winter temperatures don’t usually fall below freezing and annual rainfall ranges between 56" and 72".
The first, with its yellow-brown twigs, was introduced into Europe in 1801. The other, also called Reeve’s spirea, arrived in 1824. It probably was sent to England by John Reeves, a tea inspector and naturalist with the East India Company in Canton who purchased many of his plants from the Fa-tee nurseries. Both were grown by Joseph Breck in Boston in 1851.
Billiard et Barré offered a cross around 1862 that combined the habits and coloring of the one with the vigor of the other. Louis Van Houtte promoted it from his great nursery enterprise near Ghent. A generation later, in 1888, Burpee was advertising Van Houtte’s shrub as "the most showy of all the Spireas, and one of the very best shrubs in cultivation." By 1914, Wilhelm Miller pronounced it the most popular foundation shrub on Illinois farms. When I lived in Michigan in the early 1980's, many of the white frame two-story houses in Ypsilanti built on high basements to accommodate coal furnaces were fronted by mature shrubs that reached above the foundation line to spill out branches lined with small heads of tiny white flowers like so many billowing layers of tulle.
Bridal wreath may have arrived in the valley with mail order catalogs, but the houses where it grows are ones built after World War II when the national lab brought prosperity to the area. One person on the farm road has a specimen sprawling near a block wall while another has a thick, upright shrub near a wooden fence. In the village, one person has four neatly pruned canisters dotted by flowers along a chain link fence and one plant too small to train.
I planted my hybrids by the garage because spirea smells - not like a hyacinth or a rose, but with a strong distinctive odor that I can detect when I’m a foot away from the five-petaled flowers. This year mine have been attracting skinny insects no more than 1/16" long that apparently don’t mind strong vapors. That’s a good thing because bees also stay home when it’s cold or wet.
Notes:
Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden, 1851, reprinted by OPUS Publications, 1988.
Burpee. Cited by Gerald Klingaman in "Vanhoutte Spirea," 2003, available on-line.
Efloras.org, Flora of China, includes location information for cantonensis,vanhouttei, and trilobata.
Miller, Wilhelm. The "Illinois Way" of Beautifying the Farm, 1914.
Rehder, Alfred. Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs, 1947, provides introduction dates,
Photograph: Spirea, 17 May 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Wisteria, pink and yellow iris, Jupiter’s beard, fern-leaf globemallow, tansy mustard, hoary cress, oxalis, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions, cheat grass, June grass. Snowballs in bud; rose of Sharon and skunk bush showing leaves; bigleaf globemallow coming up. Siberian elm seeds have been blowing all week, sometimes in great brown drifts.
In my yard: Siberian pea tree, spirea, tulips, purple and white iris, yellow alyssum, flax, vinca, mossy phlox, small-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue; pinks, coral bells, sea pinks, and fern-leaf yarrow in bud; catalpa leafing out; butterfly weed and California poppies coming up.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë; bougainvillea, zonal geranium
Animal sightings: Rabbit exploring yard; more birds heard, but not seen; flies and ants
Weather: First week that morning temperatures did not reach freezing, but high winds continued. Last year the lilacs were in full bloom; this year the only one in the village that started to open has retreated. Last snow April 4, but last significant moisture March 5. 15:00 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: My yellow alyssum is going out of bloom this dry spring, one plant, 15" high by 24" wide, in a 100 square foot bed of bare dirt and slowly emerging foliage.
It would be nice to have a larger mass of color, but my attempts to add more plants failed. In the late 90's, the plant was sold by one of the local hardware stores, and bloomed so nicely for several people near the village that I bought nine in Santa Fe in 1999. Four survived. The next year I replaced four, and ended the season with five. The number dwindled to two in 2003, and since 2005 it’s been only the one.
At the time I wondered what I was doing wrong; now I’m curious how the one plant has managed to survive so long. When I read descriptions I suspect I have a changeling. Garden writers constantly use words like compact and trailing when they recommend it for rockeries. My perennial is shrubby with stiff branches leaning out rather like a succulent fall sedum, with last year’s gray-green foliage dying beneath.
Back then, I would have blamed the usual culprits especially growers who substitute cheapers plant for named ones. This year Jelitto offers 1,000 seeds of my variety, Goldkugel, to growers for $5.56; Germania sells the more generic, even shorter Compactum for nearly a dollar less, $4.60 per 1,000. Few of Germania’s immediate customers, the ones who specialize in germinating seeds for wholesale growers, still sell yellow alyssum. Henry’s Plant Farm offers Gold Ball, the English for kugel, while Raker offers Compactum. Both, no doubt, buy seeds from more than one supplier.
Back then, I would also have suspected growers who sell plants that aren’t ready to transplant or do so when it’s too late in the season. As businessmen with bank loans to cover the season, they need to make money from their distributors who demand plants for Mother’s Day weekend. Jellito’s growth schedule for Goldkugel varies from 9 to 13 weeks. These mustard seeds don’t perform to the day like tomatoes, and planting a young seedling four weeks too early or too late could well produce disaster in this hostile environment.
Gardeners do not accept repeated failures. Allan Armitage says he could grow this native of the rocky northwestern Ottoman Empire in Michigan and Ontario, but it failed in the summer heat and clay soils of Georgia. The Missouri Botanical Garden says it can survive in humid Saint Louis, but for only a few years.
Growers notice when plants no longer sell or when they receive too many demands for refunds. This year only a few nurseries offer my Aurinia saxatilis. The store where I bought my plants in 1999 is advertising an Alyssum montanum variety. Alyssum and Aurinia are members of the same Alysseae subtribe within the Brassiceae familythat can only be distinguished by specialists. Lobularia maritinum, what we call sweet alyssum, is tentatively grouped with them, but has some anomalous DNA.
Even more quickly do growers drop plants that gardeners never buy for aesthetic reasons, no matter how hardy they may be. One would think Goldkugel’s tiny, four-petaled flowers offered everything beginning gardeners could want. The great rounded clusters cover the plant, are attractive in detail and from a great distance, open at one time, stay open, and are easily sheared off. The hairy basal leaves last all winter. Even though tonier nurseries offer paler varieties like Citrina, the strong chrome yellow is not too bright for people who love daffodils, yellow tulips, and forsythia.
Even successful plants become difficult to obtain when they prove too difficult or too expensive to grow or ship. Karl Jelitto was one of the men in the 1970's who pioneered the commercial production of cold weather perennials from seed, rather than labor-intensive cuttings. His innovation increased the complexity of seed production, while simplifying planting for his customers, especially after companies emerged who produced seedlings for the next tier of nurserymen.
Once seeds were reintroduced, nature became the most likely jester for random sports. Today Bugtussle Perennials offers what it calls a seed strain with "more compact uniform plants" that have "none of the floppiness of the other Aurinias." My plant could be a similar genetic quirk.
Every year at this time, after the cherries in the center of my main bed have bloomed and I’m waiting for perky Sue and columbine to open, I look at the lone yellow alyssum plant and wish for more, but then remember it’s all probably the result of some cosmic event that probability says I can never duplicate, an event that can only be accepted and appreciated as presented.
Notes:
Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.
Bugtussle Perennials. "Aurinia saxatilis Summit," on-line catalog.
Germania Seed Company. "Alyssum (Aurinia)," on-line catalog.
Jelitto, Klaus R. "My Recollections of 50 Years in the Seed Trade," available on-line.
Jelitto Staudensamen GmbH, "Alyssum saxatile 'Compactum Goldkugel,'" on-line catalog.
Missouri Botanical Garden. "Aurinia saxatilis," available on-line.
Photograph: Yellow alyssum, 10 May 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: First lilacs, wisteria, iris, flax, tansy mustard, hoary cress, western stickseed, common and native dandelions, cheat grass. June grass is beginning to unsheath, first tahokia daisies are coming up, Virginia creeper and grape are starting to leaf out.
In my yard: Siberian pea tree, tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth, yellow alyssum, mossy phlox, Mount Atlas daisy. Perky Sue has buds, while forsythia and sand cherries are leafing out.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë; bougainvillea buds.
Animal sightings: More horses in to pasture.
Weather: Another week with temperatures ranging from the low 30's to the mid 70's that encourage plants to grow so high winds can suck the moisture from the soil, the stems and the leaves, leaving a false promise of fertility that was the talk of people in line in the post office yesterday. Forest fire danger is high with the last snow April 4 and the last significant moisture March 5. 14:44 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: My Siberian pea tree reminds me that nature, like any good choreographer or composer, likes to take a motif and run it through all the possible positions or keys and tempos.
With Caragana aborescens, the theme is the archetypical pea flower with two lips, one hunched over the other that we’re used to seeing in red, pink and white on perennial sweet pea vines or in more varied colors on knee-high annuals. Nature tried clusters of large cream disks hanging off high branches with the catalpa tree and short spikes of tiny purple funnels for loco weed.
On this particular legume, nature spaces small, narrow flowers between clover pads so they look like dead leaves from a distance. The blossoms are so short lived that after the first few day, the shrub doesn’t look much better up close when buds and dead flowers outnumber the fully flexed ones. The narrow brown seed pods look more natural when they reach out from the limbs in late summer.
Obviously, humans don’t share nature’s fascination with the arabesque and want something more from a plant than a demonstration of what’s possible, no matter how grotesque. I bought three bare roots from an Ohio nursery in 2001 because, much as I like forsythia, I don’t like it near the pink and white flowering trees in spring and wanted another yellow to add depth to the arching branches.
Unfortunately, last year was the only year the two floral periods overlapped. Most years the pea tree starts to bloom the day after the last forsythia flower withers. This year, frost killed the one before the other could open.
In spring the bright chartreuse forsythia foliage clashes with the greyed lime-green of the pea tree. The smooth, yellow-brown bark of the one jars against the olive ridged bark of the other. However, by summer, the leaves darken on both and expand to produce the variations in color and form I’d hoped for in spring.
Most who plant Caragana do so for utilitarian reasons. On the northern great plains, the USDA suggests farmers use rows of trees and shrubs to protect their fields from drying winds. When extension experts draw up lists of survival requirements, they discover few densely-branched, long-lived, quick-growing plants can handle cold winters, high winds, and saline soils while surviving grasshoppers, repelling gophers, and tolerating modern pesticides and herbicides.
They’d also like the roots to be porous and the plants to be natives that will never escape, but they can’t have everything. They accept the pea tree for the outer edge of tree rows, where the numerous 12' vertical branches create barriers beneath the taller tree crowns.
Botanists know grasshoppers will eat pea trees bare and heat can defoliate them, but they also know the shrubs recover in fall to return fully clad the following year. They also appreciate the dense roots that reach down 16" to hold the soil and attract rhizobia bacteria to add nitrogen.
Siberian pea trees grow on the steppes of Asia from the countries bordering the Silk Road, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, and Kazakstan, north to Siberia and Mongolia and west to Ukraine, Belarus, and the Balkans. Wayside says the Russian Imperial Botanical Gardens received a sample in 1730, and Lamarck knew about it in 1785, either from the Jardin du Roi or from his travels through Europe in 1871 and 1782 as Louis XVI’s royal botanist. They came to the United States as ornamental shrubs do, with little fanfare, but weren’t much used until the 1930's when the Soil Conservation Service promoted them.
Even though pea trees generally don’t grow well south of Nebraska, they do adapt to New Mexico. The New Mexico Botanist reports some have seeded themselves into a sandy wash near the Las Dos subdivision northwest of Santa Fe. Like anything that can survive this hostile environment, they introduce unexpected variations into the garden and, sometimes, to the consternation of environmentalists, into the wild where nature remains an inveterate experimenter with form oblivious to human aesthetics.
Notes:
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste. Encyclopedie Methodique. Botanique 1:615:1785.
New Mexico State University, Range Science Herbarium. "Plant Distribution Reports," The New Mexico Botanist, 19 October 2004.
Wayside Gardens. "Caragana 'Walker'" catalog description available on-line.
Photograph: Siberian pea tree, 27 April 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Apples, fence row cherries, tulips, mossy phlox, tansy mustard, western stickseed, dandelions, and cheat grass. Bradford pears and other flowering trees have peaked while some forsythia flowers survive. Cottonwoods are beginning to leaf out. People continue to burn off last years dead matter. The local hardware stores have received their first bedding plants.
In my yard: Siberian pea tree, tart and sand cherries, daffodils, grape hyacinth, yellow alyssum and Mount Atlas daisy; first buds on iris; lilac ready to bloom; first leaves on tamarix, weiglia, privet, and snowball. Sidalcea, speedwell, purple coneflower and Maximilian sunflowers have emerged.
Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Fewer bee hives are visible down the road where men have been running heavy equipment. Several times, I’ve chased off a pair of pigeons trying to roost on the back porch rafters.
Weather: High winds, with some morning temperatures below freezing. Last snow April 4, but the last significant moisture was March 5. The ditches are running, and people are flooding their fields with water pumped from the aquifer. 14:29 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Daffodils are the one spring bulb that naturalizes here, partly because the soil and climate are similar to its native Spain, and partly because it's adapted to protect itself from external threats.
One couple put in a row against their chain-link fence in the fall of 1998 that bloomed heavily for several years, then produced fewer flowers when conditions did not promote the development of flowers. In those years, the bulbs continued to reproduce, and this year there were scattered yellow flowers on expanded clumps.
Closer to the village, a woman planted a large quantity in 2000 under her grapevines. They have had more flowers on taller stems, probably because she had done more to improve her soil and may have purchased higher quality stock. Two years ago she added more bulbs, this time ones with white flowers, and they too have been heavy bloomers.
My experience is closer to the first. I planted 100 mixed white varieties along the west side of the garage in 2003 that bloomed heavily the next spring. Then, with the dry years, the variety decreased, the stalks and narrow leaves grew shorter, and fewer flowers appeared. Last year, almost nothing bloomed, despite more leaves. So far this year, both double and single trumpets with yellow cups have appeared.
Climate is critical here even though the Dutch have been bred bulbs for varied conditions. My land is more exposed and farther away from the river than my neighbors, and my plants never come into bloom until after theirs have passed. This year my flowers appeared two weeks later than usual.
The winds have been especially brutal this spring, but Shelley Etnier and Steven Vogel have suggested Narcissus pseudonarissus stems are able to twist so the flowers that reach out sideways can lesson the impact by as much as 30% by turning with the wind. Unlike the peach, the petals have stayed in place; unlike the roses, the stems haven’t dehydrated.
Others who’ve planted these bulbous members of the amaryllis family have been less successful, probably because their growing conditions aren’t harsh enough. Daffodils need to be cold in winter. Two people whose bulbs disappeared after several years planted them in protected raised beds while my two successful neighbors planted theirs near the road.
They may have used raised beds to protect the plants from gophers, but daffodils are one bulb that has developed its own tools for defending itself. The dry, outer layers contain needle-like grooved crystals of calcium oxaltate which injure whatever that touches them. Hopefully, that discourages gophers with the first nibble.
The bulbs also contain masonin and homolycorin, which enter the cuts made by the raphide crystals to trigger an allergic response, and lycorine, which can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and convulsions by inhibiting the last step in ascorbic acid biosynthesis. Unfortunately, those toxins don’t work until they’re ingested, which means a bulb may be sacrificed to punish an offending rodent.
Daffodils do more than fail for those who try to domesticate them. They release the same raphide crystals to produce rashes when people harvest bulbs for growers or when they cut the stems. Then, the stems continue to ooze auxims that kill other flowers in the vase. The most popular varieties, like King Alfred and Carlton, are the worst.
If daffodils grow here, it’s on their own terms, and like many of my neighbors, they just want to be left alone.
Notes:
Etnier, Shelley A. and Steven Vogel. "Reorientation of Daffodil (Narcissus: Amaryllidaceae) Flowers in Wind: Drag Reduction and Torsional Flexibility," American Journal of Botany 87:29-32:2000.
Hanks, Gordon R. Narcissus and Daffodil, 2002.
Photograph: Daffodils in the wind, 26 April 2008; Silver King artemisia between the clumps and winterfat in the background.
What’s growing in the area: Pink and white flowering trees, including Bradford pears, purple-leaf sand cherry and fence row cherries are blooming, along with red and yellow tulips, tansy mustard, mossy phlox, western stickseed, and dandelions. Apple buds are developing; black grama grass is greening; chamisa has leafed out; cheat grass getting dense. Smoke and scorched land from people burning more dead plant material.
In my yard: Sand cherries, daffodils and first grape hyacinth are blooming; spirea, lilac, tulips and yellow alyssum in bud; first leaves on apricot and beauty bush; pinks, snow-in-summer, and small-leaf soapwort are growing; peonies and ladybells are coming up.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, coral honeysuckle.
Animal sightings: First cricket on the garage; more black ant hills in drive.
Weather: Friday’s frost was more destructive than last weekend’s snow; peach and forsythia flowers have darkened; first cherry flowers are gone, except those heavily shrouded by leaves. Heavy winds mid-week with a little snow Thursday morning. 13:56 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: When I first moved to New Mexico, I asked someone in the local extension office what trees would grow, and was told to try things like silver maple, catalpa, and Elberta peach.
I was confused, because I’d always been told that peaches in Michigan did well only on the sandy soils protected by Lake Michigan and otherwise, to quote MSU’s Liberty Hyde Bailey, they were a "luxury" cultivated "at great risk." Samuel Rumph developed the Elberta variety from a chance seedling he believed was a natural cross between an imported Chinese Cling given to his grandfather and a Crawford growing in a neighbor’s orchard on the Georgia fall-line in the 1870's.
Still I had neighbors who were growing peaches, so I bought the only variety available in the local hardware in 1997, an early Elberta semi-dwarf. Then the learning began, for I discovered that much as I had absorbed how to garden from my mother, I knew absolutely nothing about fruit trees.
The first thing I discovered was there is a reason horticultural manuals devote so much space to spraying regimens. In May of 2000, I noticed my leaves were deforming and coated with some sticky, crystalline stuff. It was too late to do preventive maintenance, so I started hosing down the tree. I don’t know what was attacking my tree, but there were suddenly more ladybugs in the area, so I suspected it was some insect rather than a fungus.
The problem recurred in May of 2003 and again I washed the tree. This time, I also tried the lime-sulfur spray that experts recommend be used in late winter. Then the grasshoppers hit in 2005, and stripped the tree of every leaf and potential bud.
The next year, pocket gophers started burrowing around the roots, but the only damage they seem to have done was destroy the iris growing beneath the branches. They didn’t eat the rhizomes so much as expose them to underground air. My uphill neighbor says their tree just dried up. My guess, the gophers left my yard for theirs. The rodent does love members of the rose family.
Finally, last summer on its eleven birthday, my tree produced its first crop and I learned the value of more advice I had ignored. After the grasshoppers, I had let the branches grow where they would to recover. When the fruit started to ripen, it got heavy, and branches near the house that I’d plan to cut in winter were suddenly blocking my way. Out came the branch cutters, repeatedly as the longer the fruit ripened, the more branches there were that drooped into my path.
I had one of those bumper crops that Bailey said a tree may have three or four times in its twenty fruitful years. There were too many peaches to eat, and I wasn’t interested in canning in August. I thought I could leave the excess fruit for the birds, only to discover it began to rot, started to smell, and then attracted the local stinging insects. Hastily, I picked everything.
Now the tree has reverted to its infertile state with the center still barren from the grasshoppers. The sparse flowers were killed by frost this week. There is a possibility that somewhere in the upper reaches a few blossoms were pollinated last weekend before the high winds and cold arrived, but I won’t know until summer.
Now I’m wondering what will happen in ten years? Will the tree die and need to be cut down, or will it just produce no fruit? Each time I try to start another tree or shrub in the area to take over its space, the gophers, winds or drought destroy it. If I only knew then what I know now.
Notes: Bailey, Liberty Hyde. "Peach," in Wilhelm Miller and Liberty Hyde Bailey, Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, 1901.
Photograph: Elberta peach after frost, 19 April 2008.
What’s growing in the area: Pink and white flowering trees, daffodils, tansy mustard, and dandelions are blooming; four-winged saltbush and blackbush are leafing out; loco and muhly ring grass are greening.
In my yard: Until Saturday’s snow, peach and forsythia were blooming; lilac, cherry, and sand cherry buds were showing color. Siberian pea tree and spirea leaves are opening; caryopteris leaves are forming; first red hot poker, hosta, and coreopsis are up; garden phlox and Rumanian sage have first leaves.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea, coral honeysuckle.
Animal sightings: Brown birds were pecking through seeds that were exposed when I cleaned part of the north bed Sunday; yesterday afternoon, bees buzzed around the peach.
Weather: Snow before sunrise Saturday was gone as soon as the sun appeared; earlier in the week, temperatures ranged from below freezing to low 60's with occasional winds. 13:47 hours of light today.
Weekly update: Now is the season people who hate Siberian elms hate the most. Last year’s seeds are sprouting with roots already longer than the visible stalks, while the newest crop of fertile chartreuse disks is starting to gather in the cracks and corners of the post office.
The tree is detestable enough for its housekeeping habits, but many hate it on philosophical grounds. They go to the river in search of what’s unique about the bosque, and instead this water-hungry, sun lover is what they see. The realities of survival in a drying environment do not meet their images for the desert southwest.
Some scoff at those who introduced the tree, looking on the promotion of Siberian elms during the depression as another government boondoggle. But then, the agriculture department was concerned with the consequences of another confrontation between hopes and realities, between attempts to farm the plains and years of drought that produced the dust bowl. It found descendants of seeds brought from the Peking area in 1914 by Frank Meyers could survive those brutal conditions to slow erosion and put the unemployed to work.
Chuck Dunbar, an Albuquerque blogger, blames their use in the city in the 1950's on an "ecologically ignorant mayor." In those years, my parents planted Chinese elms along the street of their house in an area where the boundary separating the new subdivision from town was the oaks and maples lining streets of established neighborhoods.
At that time, the two species, Ulmus pumila and Ulmus parvifolia, were often confused, and while my mother thinks she ordered the second, she more likely received the first. She knew her trees would grow quickly, but were short-lived. The Chinese tree has stronger wood that’s less likely to crack in ice storms, stays green in winter in warm climates, and is less hardy far north.
When I sold the house some thirty years after she planted her trees, the maples were just filling out, but the elms still stood. Unlike her American elm, they had defied Dutch elm disease. They not only had met her hopes to establish a home that looked like all the others of her childhood in other tree-lined towns, but outlived her.
Of course, one did find the pipe that connected the house to the water main and irritated my father no end. But even he did not have the tree cut down; he simply paid the plumber and replanted the lawn in her memory.
Naturally I’m ambivalent about this reminder of my childhood. I certainly don’t want any tree with weak wood and strong taproots growing near the house or garage. I’ve learned the seedlings are hard to remove, and regenerate when broken off. I’ve had to cut down the same tree for several years before the root finally gave up.
Still, the dark green corduroy leaves are no where near as dangerous as those of maples or catalpas in the fall when they turn yellow. The toothed lances bending inward from central ribs are simply too small to clog eaves and downspouts, won’t suffocate what lies under them in winter, and can’t harbor other pests. They just blow away or disintegrate.
I’m perfectly content to have them in front where little grows since it was grazed decades ago. However, they won’t settle there, for the same reasons they don’t invade the prairie. The seeds prefer disturbed ground, especially along shoulders and outbuildings where extra moisture collects.
When I look at the landscape this time of year, studded with daubs of bright green against dark evergreens and still pale, leafless cottonwoods, I realize how barren this place would be without the brown-anthered flowers. I love the grandeur of the grasslands, but my mother raised me to feel uncomfortable if no trees exist to demarcate civilization. Whatever their faults, these trees do volunteer to live on alkaline soil with salty water in high winds while the preferred fruit trees huddle behind the shelter of stuccoed walls and coyote fences.
Notes:
Dunbar, Chuck. "Bonsai Forest of Siberian Elm," 1 April 2007, available on-line.
Photograph: Siberian elm along the shoulder, 5 April 2008.
What’s growing in the area: More apricots and daffodils are blooming; Siberian elms, mossy phlox, tansy mustard, and dandelions are coming into bloom; Bradford pears have buds; bittersweet has leaves; white sweet clover, heath asters, pigweed, and horseweed are back.
In my yard: Forsythia, puschkinia, and hyacinth are blooming; lilac, privet, rose, spirea, red-leaved sandcherry, barberry, Russian sage, sweet pea, soapworts, and perky Sue leaves are emerging; daylilies, daffodils, tulips, catmint, salvia, ipomopsis, hartweigii, vinca, black-eyed Susan, chocolate flower, and fern-leaved yarrow are emerging; leaf buds are more obvious on tamarix, snowball, and Siberian pea
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, bougainvillea; coral honeysuckle.
Animal sightings: Small red ants are out; horses have been brought in to pasture down the road.
Weather: Winds and daily temperature swings are threatening tea rose stems; some forsythia, hyacinth, and puschkinia flowers have been killed by cold mornings; last rain 5 March, but ground in north garden still holds water; 13:18 hours of light today.
Weekly update: The pale puschkinias blooming in the shadow of June grass on the west side of the house are true children of the enlightenment that spread through the deracinated German nobility of northern Europe in the eighteenth century.
Peter I was the first Russian czar to discover western technology, partly through contacts with German, Dutch and English merchants in cities like Yaroslavl on the river route to Archangel. He ordered his nobility adopt western manners, and founded the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724.
He married his daughter, Anna, to the duke of Holstein-Gottorp. His wife, Catherine I, married the grandson, Karl Peter, to the daughter of an Anhalt-Zerbst prince. Sophie became Catherine when the renamed Peter became czar in 1762. Within months, she deposed him, ostensibly for supporting the aggrandizing Prussia in the Seven Years War.
Catherine II revived Peter I’s interest in western thought by founding the Saint Petersburg School of Mines. She eventually became a patron of Denis Diderot, whose encyclopedia symbolizes the enlightenment faith that it was possible for humans to define all useful knowledge and for the leisured class to make significant contributions in several arts or sciences.
At least some of the nobility followed their German leader’s example. Aleksei Ivanovich Musin-Pushkin became an archaeologist in Yaroslavl. His contemporary, Apollo Apollossowitch Mussin-Puschkin, experimented with chromium, platinum, and carbonic acid. Although distantly connected to the poet, Alexander Pushkin, the family maintained a plot in the same Wiesbaden cemetery where the academy head, Ekaterina Dashkova, would be buried.
In Britain, Augusta of Sachen-Gosha married the son of German-speaking George II, then settled into an estate at Kew when her Hanover son rose to the throne in 1760. Her gardener, William Chambers, began gathering plants from newly discovered parts of the world as a physical manifestation of the encyclopedists’ premise that all things could be comprehended if brought together. Joseph Banks expanded the effort when he took over the gardens in 1772 by sponsoring expeditions and requesting colonial leaders cooperate with the royal effort.
The entanglement of the enlightenment with colonial aspirations was flourishing when Catherine’s son, Paul I, took over Kartli-Kakheti in eastern Georgia in 1801 as part of Russia’s ongoing dispute with Persia over its southern border. The next year, Count Apollo explored transcaucasia with a Saint Petersburg trained botanist, Johannes Michael Friedrich Adams.
Apollo Apollossowitch sent 206 Caucasian plants to Banks in 1804. The next year, Adams introduced Puschkinia scilloides, a small, subalpine bulb with five-petaled, bell-shaped flowers on 5" stalks, to readers of the Saint Petersburg academy journal. From there it moved into commerce. William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll were growing the dark-blue veined member of the lily family by the end of the century.
I’d probably still have this plant if there had been no Russian enlightenment, if Catherine had not usurped her husband's role, if Persia had not not a threat.. My subspecies, libanotica, might still have been discovered by bulb traders in the levant. After all, new species tulips and daffodils are being introduced every few years. But, I wonder, what would I call the earliest blooming spring flower that some mistakenly refer to as striped scilla.
Photograph: Puschkinia with dead blades of June grass, 5 April 2008.
What’s growing in the area: Apricots, forsythia, first daffodils are blooming; cholla reverting to its normal green; piñon, arborvitae, weeping willow, needle and muhly ring grasses show new growth. People are still cleaning up from winter with more pruned branches laying about. Some were burning weeds yesterday morning. One person with a grassy yard has burned his entire area.
In my yard: Raspberry suckers, first tulips, Maltese cross have broken ground; small-leaved soapwort turning green; hyacinth buds still bundled into leaves.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, kalanchoë, bougainvillea; coral honeysuckle in bud.
Animal sightings: White-tailed brown rabbit in drive Thursday morning.
Weather: Fewer nights were below freezing, more middling winds. Last rain 5 March; 12:39 hours of light today.
Weekly update: June grass is a camp follower. I no sooner put in my driveway, and there it was, next to my door. Then it tried to invade the garden, and finally settled along the edge of the west bed.
As I remember from M*A*S*H reruns, people who congregate on the periphery of miliary bases not only include those with something to sell, but also those seeking protection or other favors. When a distant kinsman of mine, William Woods Averell was posted to Fort Craig to protect the northern end of the Jornada del Muerto on the Camino Real from Apache in 1857, the biggest problems were not enough water and too much alcohol. The first was hauled up ramps from the river in wagons; he didn’t say who supplied the second.
Water is what attracts June grass. It needs at least 16" of precipitation a year, more than we get here. Its dark green leaves and rigid stalks would stand out if they grew on the prairie with the more flexible needle and rice grasses. Instead, the fibrous roots find pockets of moisture, then wait for the wind to break the stems to scatter seed far and wide. Eventually some lands along a road way where moisture collects and it can perpetuate itself.
Right now, after the winter snows and rains have passed, it’s putting out new growth from within its protective mass of dead leaves and cured stalks. The perennial will be blooming by early May, when the sheaths will open to reveal tightly packed chevrons of grains that will resemble corn in its husk. After the seeds have dropped, the cool weather grass stagnates during the heat of summer.
Koeleria macrantha may be widespread here and throughout the northern hemisphere, but it probably arrived here like any camp follower. Frank Kienast’s team found fossilized seeds on the Bykovsky peninsula near the mouth of the Lena river in eastern Siberia where permafrost erosion has exposed piles of hardened sediment that date back to the time when the last glaciers trapped water and exposed the Beringian land bridge that connected northeastern Asia and Alaska.
Kienast reports that steppe vegetation like June grass which supported large herbivores disappeared around 900 BC, killed by changes in moisture not temperature. It’s still found on the North slope of the Brooks range, and probably moved south with the climate. June grass may already have been here when mammoth hunters camped near Clovis some 11,000 years ago.
Like any camp follower dependent on others for its survival, June grass tries to anticipate and satisfy the expectations of potential patrons. The long, relatively wide blades look like lawn grass and stay green most of the year. However, it is a bunch grass, not one that spreads to fill in spaces at an even level. Even when plants are close to each other, it’s impossible to walk on them without falling into crevices between 3" high clumps.
Over time, habits of accommodation become second nature. When the environment changes, June grass passes on its adaptations through genetic changes. Czech plants have a 5% smaller genome than Slovakian ones. In Colorado, June grass transplanted from 12 locations, still differed when and how it grew. Philip Robertson and Richard Ward believe that moisture in the homeland was more important than altitude and the concomitant exposure to sun and growing season length in determining those habits.
Even though June grass must always adapt, this camp follower tries to recreate a familiar world behind its shield of external conformity. I’ve never been able to eradicate it from the west side of the house where flax and grape hyacinths grow. Kienast found June grass seed mixed with Alyssum obovatum, Silene repens, and perennial flax in ancient Siberia. Nick Hermann’s group found it growing with another Muscari in central Germany and the Czech Republic. Here the tall clumps create a protective border on the windward side for those early spring blue flowers, just beyond the demarcating bricks that define the camp perimeter.
Notes:
Averell, Willaim Woods. Ten Years in the Saddle, edited by Edward K. Eckert and Nicholas J. Amato, 1978.
Herrmann, Nick, Gabriele Weiss, Walter Durka. "Biological flora of Central Europe: Muscari tenuiflorum Tausch," Flora 201:81–101:2006.
Kienast, Frank, Lutz Schirrmeister, Christine Siegert and Pavel Tarasov. "Palaeobotanical Evidence for Warm Summers in the East Siberian Arctic During the Last Cold Stage," Quaternary Research 63:283-300:2005.
Pecinka, Ales, Pavla Suchánková,, Martin A. Lysak, Bohumil Trávníek and Jaroslav Doleel. "Nuclear DNA Content Variation among Central European Koeleria Taxa," Annals of Botany 98:117-122:2006.
Robertson, Philip A. and Richard T. Ward. "Ecotypic Differentiation in Koeleria Cristata (L).Pers. from Colorado and Related Area," Ecology 51:1083-1087:1970.
Photograph: June grass, 23 March 2008.
What’s growing in the area: Honeysuckle, bittersweet and arborvitae are greener. New growth on snakeweed. Down the road Russian thistles that were piled, but not burned before last Sunday’s winds, are now spread across nearby fences. Two men were cleaning a ditch in the village yesterday. Seeds, bare root roses, and the first trees and shrubs were available in one hardware yesterday; the other local store has had seeds for several weeks.
In my yard: Reseeded garlic chives are up. Maltese cross and cutleaf coneflower are putting out new leaves from their crowns. Pinks are beginning to perk up after being flattened by the last snows. Buds are visible on the cottonwood; green is breaking through buds on lilacs and spirea. Roses have been breaking dormancy: some are leafing out, while others are just showing red buds and others have those buds elongating.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, kalanchoë, bougainvillea
Animal sightings: Hornets began hatching the beginning of the week; men have begun training horses in the village.
Weather: Temperatures continued wild swings from low 20's in the mornings to 60's when I arrived home; one evening the thermometer read 68. High winds since last snow on March 5; 12:19 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Hairy golden asters are one of those plants that manages to live an exuberant live without attracting much notice, much like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
In my yard, the native composite begins to bloom in June, and keeps on blooming until frost kills the current year’s growth. I’ve seen single stems pushing through sidewalk cracks in an old Santa Fe neighborhood that’s been converted to migrant housing by real estate speculators, and I always see it along the road in August.
Went I walked along the shoulder last summer I discovered that what looked like a pure stand, in reality, was a mix of Hopi tea, gumweed, and golden asters. The first composite has a tall, narrow disk with no ray flowers, while the second has a wide, squat disk with small rays. The asters have widely spaced, long, narrow ray flowers with the usual pad of disk flowers. Different as they are, from a distance they merged into a yellow blur when seen from a car window.
Even though it peaks in mid-summer, there’s never a time when the foot high plants are covered with flowers. After the first few weeks, round white seed heads coexist with pure yellow daisies at the tips of stems that start to sprawl as they grow heavier. Gardeners and nurserymen prefer plants that remain erect, smother themselves in flowers, and drop their petals without deadheading.
Botanists have looked so carefully at individual parts they’ve discovered a number of species when in fact there may only be one. Thomas Nuttall collected Chrysopsis villosa in 1811 on the Missouri, while Frederick Pursh called it Amellus villosus in 1814. They were separated from Heterotheca because the latter’s pappus, the part that acts as a container to hold individual disk and ray flowers and their succeeding seeds, has no bristles on the ray flowers. Golden aster pappi have two layers, the outer with bristles, the other with hairs that help the seed move with the wind.
Taxonomists also excluded them from the asters, which Joseph Dalton Hooker and George Bentham believed existed in both the old and new worlds, because asters aren’t yellow. Hairy golden asters became false hairy golden asters, if they were called anything.
Then came DNA analysis. In 1996 Chung Shen Xiang and John Semple not only reported North American asters have a different parent than asters in Europe, but they’re also related to Chrysopsis and Heterotheca. In 1951, Lloyd Herbert Shinners had already suggested those two genera were the same after he found vestigial pappi on Heterotheca in Mexico, and reduced pappi on some Chrysopsis. More research just proved asters, including the yellow ones in my yard, are still evolving with porous borders between what botanists want to call species.
Ranchers ignore them because they’re not poisonous and not particularly edible, except to sheep in the worst conditions. Since the harsh tasting leaves are ignored by herbivores, the taprooted perennials often cover overgrazed lands in summer. Only zoologists have found animals that like them, including chickadees, porcupines, bees, and caterpillars.
Few tribes have noticed them. The Cheyenne, who ranged from southern Colorado to the Black Hills, used the tops as a sedative. The Navajo, who migrated to New Mexico and Arizona from father north sometime before the Spanish, only discovered the plants were slightly irritating without being dangerous and so they could be used as a ceremonial emetic. No one local has found much use for something that survives drought, intense light, and heat.
Most forget it once it drops its narrow, green leaves that look gray from their white hairs. However, towards the end of last year I thought I saw leaves coming up from a crown. When I went back, I couldn’t find them and thought I misremembered or they had gone the way of other plants fooled by the long fall. A few weeks ago, I thought I saw them again, but I had to sit on the ground yesterday and pull away last year’s dark, woody stems and dead grasses to verify that they now have the most vigorous new growth of anything in the yard.
It’s the old problem of vantage point. Get too far away, and many things look the same. Get too close, and one thing disintegrates into many. Don’t look at all, and plants thrive unheeded and unheralded.
Notes:Haines, Arthur. "Clarifying the Generic Concepts of Aster Sensu Lato in New England," Botanical Notes, 10 December 2001.
Harms, Vernon L. "Cytogenetic Evidence Supporting the Merger of Heterotheca and Chrysopsis (Compositae)," Brittonia 17:11-16:1965.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database.
Photograph: Hairy golden aster, 22 March 2008.
What’s blooming in the area: Tea, miniature and shrub roses; Apache plume, tamarix, prickly pear, cholla, four-wing saltbush, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, daylily, fern-leaf globemallow, alfalfa, loco weed, oxalis, tumble mustard, velvetweed, white evening primrose, Indian paintbrush, bush morning glory, bindweed, milkweed, goat’s head, goat’s beard, hawkweed, plains paper flower, Hopi tea, hairy golden aster, native dandelion; brome, three-awn, sacaton and rice grass.
