Irrigation District

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, some grasses and weeds beginning to green in places along road.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through lower branches of peach and cherries mid-mornings; rabbit out last night at twilight.Weather: Early morning temperatures varied from low 20's to high 30's; afternoons near 60; last rain 1/24/09; 11:25 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Our annual ditch meeting was held this past Tuesday at the local firehouse. We’re now part of the Santa Cruz Irrigation District which has absorbed some twenty ditches, including three in my immediate area, since the federal government took over a botched private project begun in 1925 by John Block to dam the Santa Cruz river near Chimayó for the benefit of lowland farmers.
Arroyos, deep and wide, once defined the limits of irrigation supported settlement for people who no longer remembered how Romans built those aqueducts at Mérida in the conquistadores’ Estremaduran homeland. Hollowed logs were used to span canyons and gullies.
The village ditch existed between a wide arroyo and the river. Another somehow passed that barrier and stopped at the next deep arroyo. My ditch is more recent and uses metal pipes to carry water over one deep arroyo before dumping on ranch land before the next major break.
Open trenches were being used by the pueblos when Juan de Oñate arrived in 1598, and still exist in areas where canals cross Santa Clara land. The path of the main ditch uphill from the main road can be traced by the presence of trees in otherwise open grass and scrub land. In places where active laterals come down to cross the road, trees follow the open ditches. In other places, lines of trees survive where the ditches have either been filled or replaced with concealed metal pipes.
Many distribution ditches in the village are still open troughs, edged with grass or weeds; only a few have sluice gates Metal culverts now carry the water under drives, although a few have installed cattle guards. Portland concrete was perfected by Thomas Edison in 1902, and some ditches have been lined. Such reinforcement was an individual choice, so cement sections alternate with earthen ones.
The irrigation network on the other side of the arroyo required hours of maintenance in the 1930's, and had the highest concentration of people unable to pay fees for irrigation. Although the interior department didn’t provide reasons, it suggested the other area where people couldn’t afford the dam construction levies, La Puebla, had a channel that ran through sandy land with banks that constantly collapsed. Each breach meant their land could be silted and crops destroyed.
The ditch along the main road may have been sighted through equally bad land when its builders needed to find a way around the arroyo. It could be the more ambitious thought the high location would allow them to irrigate more land. It may also be they had forgotten what the early Spanish colonists knew who spent time looking for non-porous land for the acequia madre before they established a settlement.
When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation intervened in 1935, the agent for the receivers, Cook, had already taken over 75 pieces of land in the district, and resold some to migrants from Texas and Oklahoma. At some time in the recent past, hay farmers who settled along the main road buried their sections of ditch and installed surface valves to feed ten-foot sections of portable, perforated aluminum pipe that flood their fields. Recently, some homeowners who bought lots from those farmers have been using gated PVC pipe to water lawns.
Lost knowledge, new knowledge are separated by a wide arroyo from traditional village ways in an irrigation district that stretches from Fairview, settled briefly by Mormons in 1895, through Sombrillo now farmed by Sikhs and on down to La Puebla where Los Penitentes were active. Tourists use the lake formed by the dam, while everyone with water rights, from traditional settlements along the Santa Cruz to our Anglo hay farmers, depends on collected snow melt for vegetable plots and commercial fields, flower gardens and suburban lawns.
The social structures that govern water may have changed, technologies have certainly been modernized, but the challenges of growing anything but Russian thistles on dry land remain constant. If you see something green here, there will be a ditch nearby.
Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. "The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico," 1937, on-line through New Mexico’s Digital Collections project.Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990, describes log cañolas.Dobkins, Betty Eakle. The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 1959, cited by José A. Rivera and Thomas F. Glick, "The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias," Economic History Congress, 2002, for how settlers selected land for ditches.US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Photograph: Head ditch paralleling road with wooden gates; irrigated field on other side of embankment/dyke was burned this week; road near village, 28 February 2009.

Anthemis

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, rock rose, some grasses; forsythia buds greening; first hyacinth bulbs poking through, new Mexican hat and black-eyed Susan leaves. Smell of burning was in the air Saturday morning.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Domestic flock of some dark fowl with small heads and large bodies feeding near the village yesterday; wild birds still making noise in the morning from the river.
Weather: Mornings still cold, afternoons warmer, little water left to frost my windshield. I gave up on local stores and finally ordered a copy of the only almanac that provides useful daylight information, The Old Farmers Almanac, published in Dublin, New Hampshire; there are 11:16 hours of sun today.
Weekly update: I have the luxury of growing plants for strictly aesthetic reasons. When I lived in Michigan, my anthemis Kelway went to seed. I have no idea if I ever saw the same plant two years in a row, but knew I could always expect a great mass of wide yellow flowers in summer. It mattered nought they were "so little stationary" they were a problem for 18th century English plant hunters who depended on them for a living.
When I planted the old world native here two years ago, I hoped the self-fertilizing flowers would reprise their northern wetland behavior and spread a more matte, paler yellow amongst the similarly migrating Mexican hats and coreopsis, blanket and chocolate flowers. Last summer they bloomed for the first time. This winter their flat junipery leaves stayed green under piles of snow dumped from the roof in December, but turned red a few weeks ago when the cold cover disappeared.
Assyrians living under Ashurbanipal between 626 and 608 bc had no such economic freedom. When they saw the yellow composites, they saw a potential dye. This may seem obvious to us today when craftsmen can buy books on local dye plants, but the discovery that fabrics could be colored came long after the invention of textiles, and required someone somewhere to notice that treating yarn with a metal salt changed the fiber so it could accept a water-soluble pigment that wouldn’t wash off or fade.
No one knows where that discovery was made. We have some Chinese written references to dyes in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1045–711 bc) that suggest gardenia was used for yellow; a scrap of untested red fabric and a water-tight brick floor from Mohenjo Daro (2600-1900 bc) in the Indus valley; some safflower from Tell Hamman et Turkmen (2500 bc) in northern Syria and great deal of connecting open steppe inhabited by tribes that left no written records.
The yellow pigment from safflower was used on mummy wrappings found in the non-royal Tomb of the Two Brothers from the 12th Dynasty of Egypt (1985-1773 bc), but the dye was so heavily applied researchers believed the tinting was done just before the burial when there was no requirement fot it to survive light or water. Even though the madder used for Tutankhamun, who died some centuries later in 1343 bc, had been treated with aluminum and calcium salts, it still wasn’t boil proof.
Once dyers fully realized the importance of mordants, they would have begun experimenting and discovered different techniques and different metals produced different results with the same plant. The knowledge became the family inheritance, protected by secrecy from outsiders, and thus vulnerable to loss when synthetic dyes were substituted in the late 19th century.
A few years ago, a Turkish team interested in reintroducing natural dyes tested crop-grown Anthemis tinctoria with eight mordants and found wool treated before the dye bath turned some shade of solid, deep yellow, while that treated after varied from light yellow to cream and beige. When the mordant was included with the dye, the wool absorbed greenish hues. It’s the brown tones that were used in Azerbaijani rugs; in Turkey the finished yarns were dipped in an alkaline ash solution for a gloss that would have further altered the colors.
Anthemis never became a popular dye: weld was cheaper and more versatile, saffron carried more prestige. When field workers asked people the dyes they remembered, the plant was mentioned only once in the Latium region of Italy, but in Ezurum in eastern Anatolia people knew the colors that came from treating wool with alum, iron sulfate and chrome.
The only other place dyer’s chamomile has been mentioned is Latvia. There at the northern end of that open space traversed by the Indo-Europeans and all the other peoples, goods, and ideas that moved beyond the ken of the classic writers, it was used for the woven sashes used as signifiers of status and luxury.
Notes:
For information on rug dyes, see commercial sites like Seeing Is Dreaming and Azerbaijan Rugs.Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles, 1992, discusses the quality of the evidence from India and the Tomb of the Two Brothers.Campbell Thompson, R. The Assyrian Herbal, 1924, cited by Lise Manniche, An Ancient Egyptian Herbal, 1989.Guarrera, Paolo Maria. "Household Dyeing Plants and Traditional Uses in Some Areas of Italy," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2:9:2006.Kizil, Süleyman, Nuran Kayabsşi, and Neşet Arslan. "Determination of some Agronomical and Dying Properties of Dyer’s Chamomile (Anthemic Tinctoria L.)," Journal of Central European Agriculture 6:403-408:2005.Las Arañas Spinners and Weavers Guild, Inc. Dying with Natural Materials, 2004 edition of Vegetable Dyes of New Mexico, 1970, prepared by Jodie Aves and Janislee Wiese.
Nicholson, Paul T. and Ian Shaw. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, 2000, discusses the quality of the evidence from Syria and Egypt.
Özgökçe, Fevzi and ĪIbrahim Yilmaz. "Dye Plants of East Anatolia Region (Turkey)," Economic Botany 57:454-460:2003.

Pīigozne, Ieva. "Latvian Folk Dress," 2008," available on-line.

Sowerby, James. English Botany, 1790.

Welters, Linda and Īra Kuhn-Bolšaitis. "The Cultural Significance of Belts in Latvian Dress" in Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and Fertility, 1999.

Wu, S. S., and Z. B.Tian. Zhong guo yin ran shi (Chinese History of Dyeing and Weaving), 1986, cited by Yun Ye, Lynn G. Salmon, and Glen R. Cass, "The Ozone Fading of Traditional Chinese Plant Dyes," Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 39:245-257:2000.

Photograph: Red and green anthemis leaves protected by dead cherry leaves, taken from above, 21 February 2009.

Winter Color

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, iris, rock rose, sea pink, only the most well-protected hollyhock, red hot poker and mum leaves; some grasses. Someone cut high branches on trees along the main road, probably to maintain clearance for transporting house trailers and delivery vans.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through the cottonwood.
Weather: Tuesday’s snow was gone by end of day; only ice left is on the north side of the house where if fell from the roof in December; morning temperatures in high 20's.
Weekly update: The snow is all but gone, but not the thirsty air which, no longer satisfied with drying mud, sucks water from every living thing. And some that have passed beyond.
Color intensifies in dead leaves and seed heads, when only dried pigments remain. Bare branches of globe willows and the weeping one down the road are more yellow, while chamisa and snakeweed stems are bright green. Arborvitae leaves have turned chartreuse or dark brown. More roses and beardstongues have red parts, while purple aster leaves collect morning frosts. The greys remain grey, but dead Russian thistles blacken.
These are the killing times when the days grow longer and warmer, but the mornings still fall into the twenties. The additional energy from the sun stimulates chloroplasts, the parts of plant cells that synthesize carbon dioxide (C0₂) from the air into glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆), at the very time there’s less water (H₂0) available to support the necessary chemical reactions. Unused energy provokes crises.
Conifers respond by slowing their photosynthesis. As the blue and red light-absorbing chlorophyl disappears, the yellow pigments that coexist in the chloroplast to absorb other parts of the light spectrum become obvious. Even willow and aspen barks, which maintain some level of photosynthesis during the winter for deciduous trees, reduce their metabolism.
Some non-herbaceous perennials have been producing red anthocyanin pigments (C₂₁H₂₀O₁₁) at the very time their chloroplasts are too stressed to effectively produce glucose from the same components. However, the cyanidin-3-O-glucoside flavonoid traps the mid-range of light, the greens and hotter yellows between 500 and 600nm. When Kevin Gould compared red and green leaves of saxifrage shrubs from New Zealand, he found the pigments located in the upper epidermal layer and in the mesophyll, the soft center with the chloroplasts, reduced productivity pressures by absorbing 23% of the inhaled carbon dioxide.
In optimal times, chloroplasts return the excess oxygen atoms extracted from raw materials back into the environment. The chain of chemical reactions that goes by the name photosynthesis includes many oxygen-rich intermediate stages and oxygen electron transfers that can damage cells if the process is altered slightly by poor environmental conditions. This led Hideo Yamasaki to test the possibility that anthocyanin compounds found in hibiscus flowers protect plants by acting as antioxidants.
Since, Velissarios-Phaedon Kytridis and Yiannis Manetas have looked specifically at red and green leaves from two shrubs that store the pigment near the chloroplast in the central layer and two that keep anthocyanin in the epidermis. They found the former were better able to handle laboratory-induced oxygen stress, probably because the pigment’s proximity to the chloroplast allowed it to more effectively intercept wayward oxy-radicals.
Unfortunately, his epidermal shrubs included roses. A few weeks ago several of my hybrid teas still had green leaves, and two in back had red ones. Now all that remain are green stems. Few roots have ever made it through February and March, and none with enough vigor to thrive the following summer. They may be red, but they’re not as cleverly armored against New Mexico’s late winters as the native asters and beardtongues.
Notes:Foote, Knowlton C. and Michail Schaedle. "Diurnal and Seasonal Patterns of Photosynthesis and Respiration by Stems of Populus tremuloides Michx.," Plant Physiology 58:651-655:1976.Gould, Kevin S., Thomas C. Vogelmann, Tao Han, and Michael J. Clearwater. "Profiles of Photosynthesis Within Red and Green Leaves of Quintinia serrata," Physiologia Plantarum 116:127-133:2002.Kytridis, Velissarios-Phaedon and Yiannis Manetas. "Mesophyll versus Epidermal Anthocyanins as Potential in Vivo Antioxidants: Evidence Linking the Putative Antioxidant Role to the Proximity of Oxy-radical Source," Journal of Experimental Botany 57:2203-2210:2006;their mesophyll test plants were Cistus creticus and Photinia x fraseri; the epidermal ones were Rosa sp. and Ricinus communis.Yamasaki, H, H. Uefuji, and Y. Sakihama. "Bleaching of the Red Anthocyanin Induced by Superoxide Radical," Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 332:183-186:1996.
Photograph: Weeping willow with yellowing bark and conifers down the road, 14 February 2009.

Red Hot Poker

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses.

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

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.

What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae.

What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Except for dogs, animals are staying out of sight when commuters are about.

Weather: Some snow remains on the north side of the house. Morning temperatures still drop to the 20's, afternoons are still warm, and frost still forms from moisture pulled from the ground and plants. Last rain, 1/24/09.

Weekly update: My red hot pokers have always been a step behind my neighbors.

When I moved here, people’s Kniphofia bloomed in early to mid May with grape hyacinth-types spikes on stems at least 3' high, with bright orange flowers above and older, yellow ones below. When I ordered some Pfitzer Hybrids in 1999 from Weiss Brothers they came into flower a month later, a foot shorter and with more subdued colors. One plant, at the west end of the bed, never blooms until late summer.

Sometime each May I clear dead leaves from the bank where they grow with Dutch iris. The tan iris leaves pull away, but not the pokers’. They have to be cut or left another year before the plant is willing to let go. I never see piles of debris around my neighbors’ clumps.

Some leaves stay green well into winter, under protection of the upper ones that die with the cold. In the past week or so, many of those leaves have turned red, as photosynthesis has slowed, probably because the air is still sucking water from the soil and plant tissue.

Common torch lilies, as they’re also called, are usually defined as variants of the uvaria species. When the aloe family members were first introduced into gardens after the Boers and British moved into the interior of South Africa in the early nineteenth century, they bloomed in fall and needed protection in winter, usually from ashes. As late as 1920, the Encyclopedia Americana suggested the rhizomes be planted in the shrubbery to bloom between mid-summer and frost.

Walter Pfitzer introduced his hybrids in 1893 in Stuttgart. In 1907, The Journal of Horticulture told its readers the basal clumps of sword-like green leaves bloomed in August and September. A few years later, Liberty Hyde Bailey believed they were the same as the 5' tall grandis variety then in the trade.

Somewhere something changed. Max Leichtlin, a bulb breeder in Baden-Baden, may have introduced the more refined perennials in 1881. Bailey described his carnosa variety as less than 2' tall with apricot-colored flowers. At some point my plants’ ancestors may have mixed with praecox or some other spring blooming species.

The hardiness was probably indigenous to the genus, which grows along eastern Africa from Yemen to the Cape of Good Hope. Syd Ramdhani identified four centers of diversification in South Africa and one in Madagascar, and found most species thrive in high, mountainous grasslands like the Española valley. Chloé Galley’s team believes the Drakensburg mountains were the first center for the genus.

As for the red pigments, they fade from individual flowers as they loose their ability to interest birds as pollinators, leaving the basic yellow, but apparently persist in leaves when the chlorophyl disappears this time of year.

Gradations in time are apparently endemic to the species, and not just the result of seed grown plants and the vagaries of commercial nurseries. The ability to stay in tune with changes in environment was what Ramdhani believed made it possible for the genus to survive climate changes that followed the tectonic plate movements that first precipitated the diversification, and, on a much smaller scale, allow my hybrids to survive rio arriba winters when they might fail in the north.

Being out of step with one’s neighbors is sometimes the only way to survive when the times themselves are out of joint.

Notes:
Encyclopedia Americana. "Tritoma," 1920.

Galley, Chloé Galley, Benny Bytebier, Dirk U Bellstedt, and H Peter Linder. "The Cape Element in the Afrotemperate Flora: from Cape to Cairo?," Royal Society, Biological Sciences section Proceedings 22:535–543:2007.

Journal of Horticulture and Home Farmer, The. "Hardy Plant Notes" for 15 June 1907 discuss Pfitzer and tritoma.

Miller, Wilhelm and Liberty Hyde Bailey. "Kniphofia" in Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1914.

Ramdhani, S. Evolutionary and Biogeographic Studies in the Genus Kniphofia Moench (Asphodelaceae), 2007.

Photograph: Red hot poker stem and leaves laid low by the snow, with seed ready to drop through openings, 31 January 2009.

Yucca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses; Russian thistles gathering at fences.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitaes are either dark brown or chartreuse.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in cottonwood and catalpa early mornings.
Weather: Morning temperatures were ten degrees warmer earlier in the week; snow receding from the front of the house has uncovered spots of green. Last rain, 1/24/09.
Weekly update: There are times when I’m driving across New Mexico when I feel I’ve slipped into another dimension. It’s been miles since the last settlement and there’s been only grass and barbed wire fronting a road still sloping from the Great Plains to the Rockies. Then the rocks change.
Going southwest along route 152 towards Lordsburg, the ridges start to close in on fields, and suddenly there are great soaptree yuccas, the elatas that resemble palm trees with angry porcupine heads of long, green leaves. Going southeast along 84 to Clovis, just as I’m mesmerized by the passing sameness, the caprock of the staked plains begins, and so do the yuccas. This time they’re shorter, but stalks with the remains of previous seasons’ flowers still stand in huddles.
Last summer I wandered down the ranch road south of my house where the ground swells before dropping to the sandy bed of an arroyo. The road itself falls so steeply, ten-foot high walls rise above my head. I looked up, and there on my left were three yucca sentinels silhouetted against the horizon.
The inward-folding leaves are shorter than other yuccas, less than two feet high, and much, much narrower, no more than a quarter inch wide. Yesterday, they were a dark yellow-tinged green, with fibers escaping the white leaf margins near the bases of the rosettes. Only a few had old flower stalks, and they were ones with few leaves that looked like they were dying. Surrounding them were shorter plants, probably new sprouts from the rhizomatous roots. Maybe sixty clumps grew on both sides of the cut.
In the early twentieth century, the Santa Clara used the saponin-rich roots of Yucca baccata for soap to wash clothing and their hair, a practice that passed to the Spanish who called it amole. The p’a fruits were gathered in fall for food. The dark, relatively wide, inward-sweeping leaves were boiled, then chewed to free the fibers for cordage.
When I moved here several people had Yucca glauca plants with grey leaves several feet high, some with blades that flexed outwards. While my near neighbor has them behind his house, most planted them near the roadside fence where they bloomed this past year in May. Leonora Curtin was told by people to the north that some in the village used palmilla to curdle milk, and heard rumors the sharp-tipped leaves were used as scourges by Los Penitentes.
Generally, yuccas are scarce away from houses here, either because they’ve been cleared for wheat, sheep and cattle, or because they were always selective about their environments at our 6000' altitude. Yesterday, I saw only one wild plant outside the prairie, but ten people had three or four-foot plants with green, straight leaves, and three had ones with reflexed gray ones.
I suspect the ones on the prairie may be the narrow-leaved angustissima, found elsewhere in the county, that grew from black seed brought by the heavy equipment that dug the road. There’s no other explanation for two colonies facing each other across a deep divide. The wind could have blown seed or an animal run up and down the canyon walls, but first there had to be seed and then a direct wind or an animal too dumb to use the road to escape a predator.
Although some glaucas can fertilize themselves when the six creamy-white petals close upon the anthers, most species are pollinated by a yucca moth that perpetuates itself by laying eggs in the fruit. If conditions are wrong, the insects don’t hatch when the plants are in flower. After a bad winter, they may not emerge at all.
Any plant that relies on a single type of moth that can lie dormant for thirty years lives in a different sphere. In that world, those prairie plants are but a few seconds old, and my neighbors’ nurtured specimens mere visitors from the realm of the mundane.
Notes:Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dodd, Rhea Jean and Yan B. Linhart. "Reproductive Consequences of Interactions between Yucca glauca (Agavaceae) and Tegeticula yuccasella (Lepidoptera) in Colorado," American Journal of Botany 81:815-825:1994.Powell, J. A. "Longest Insect Dormancy: Yucca Moth Larvae (Lepidoptera: Prodoxidae) Metamorphose after 20, 25, and 30 Years in Diapause," Annals of the Entomological Society of America 94:677-680:2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. New Mexico county distribution maps for angustissima,baccata, elata, and glauca.
Photograph: Narrow-leaf yucca with needle grass along the ranch road, 25 January 2009.

Chaste Tree

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, some grasses. Someone down the road was pruning his apples yesterday.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.
What’s blooming inside: Brazilian Christmas cactus, South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in the cottonwood yesterday; sounds of fowl by the river earlier in the week.
Weather: A little rain Friday night, afternoons warmer.
Weekly update: Last summer’s remaindered temptations were two blue-flowered chaste trees. It wasn’t until I got the pots home that I remembered they need protection to survive zone 6 winters.
Rather than watch them die in the western blue border, I stuck the woody shrubs on the enclosed porch with some vague hope they might grow like trees in an atrium. Instead, their buds turned to dark berries without any evidence of an intervening stage, then the leaves turned brown. Since they’d shown no tolerance for missed waterings, I assumed they needed to be kept moist. To no avail, the leaves fell. I abandoned them in December. The only reason they’re still here is the snow, ice and mud have so disrupted use of the drive that only the most critical trash has been taken to the road.
Monday I happened to look at them when I was watering the geraniums and noticed new green leaves towards the top of each. Nothing obvious had changed: they’d had no water for more than a month, temperatures had ranged between 36 and 92 since I last reset the thermometer. Only the quality of the light streaming through the southeastern windows was different.
I thought I knew what deciduous meant. By the time I was in fourth grade, I’d been told the difference between northern evergreens and Michigan hardwoods that turned color after the first frosts of fall. However, the ability to shed and regrow leaves actually appeared in the warm Early Cretaceous when swamps were widespread and flowering plants just evolving. Daniel Axelrod believes when the climate began drying, the wetland plants that survived were those that sloughed unnecessary energy drains during droughts, like my chaste trees had done last summer when I forgot to water them.
After the unknown event that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, temperatures rose an average 18 degrees and precipitation quadrupled for nearly a million years. Jack Wolfe found deciduous trees moved north, then became dominant towards the poles. At some latitude, the absence of winter light became more critical to sustaining photosynthesis, than temperature or water. Those plants that could respond to reduced day length by shedding leaves were the ones that survived, like my nursery-grown clones did last fall.
Vitex agnus-castus seeds have been found in Syria at Jerf el Ahmar in layers dated between 9800 and 9300 BC, where George Willcox’s group traced changes in cereal grains as people in the early villages learned the ways of food plants. It’s impossible to guess what those settlers discovered about chaste tree berries. We know now they contain chemicals that stimulate the pituitary gland to produce female hormones, and that long before they appeared in fifth century BC Greek medical texts, they were used as contraceptives.
In the second century BC, Nikainetos described the tree as "wreathing of the Carians," implying it had been brought from Anatolia to Samos where it was used to bind the cult statue of Hera to a tree during her ritual marriage to her brother Zeus. Several hundred years later, Ovid said Athenian wives participating in the Thesmophorian festival reenacting Demeter’s wait for her daughter, Persephone’s return from the underworld prepared themselves by abstention and strewing their beds with agnos branches. Later, Pausanias reported Hera was born under the lygos tree on Samos and the statue of Artemis at the temple to Orthia Artemis in Sparta was found in a basket woven from its flexible branches.
Whatever the symbolism of associating these goddesses of procreation, Hera, Demeter and Artemis, with a plant that prevents pregnancy, the use of lygos branches suggests that in these sanctuaries, near the same latitude as my enclosed porch, people may also have been struck by the wondrousness of a deciduous shrub that’s among the first to return after the solstice, the first sign of returning life and the promise of spring.
Notes: Española is at 36E00' north latitude, Jerf el Ahmar at 36E22', Sparta at 37E4', Samos at 37E45' and Athens is at 37E94'.Axelrod, Daniel I. "Origin of Deciduous and Evergreen Habits in Temperate Forests," Evolution 20:1-15:1966, abstract available on-line.O’Brien, Joan V. The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the Iliad, 1993, discusses Nikainetos.Ovid. Metamorphoses, 8 AD, cited by "Thesmophoria," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.Pausanius. Description of Greece, c.143-161 AD, cited by Ioannia N. Tsoulogiannia and Demetrios A. Spandidos, "Endocrinology in Ancient Sparta," Hormones 6:80-82:2007 and by O’Brien.Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992.Willcox, George, Sandra Fornite, and Linda Herveux. "Early Holocene Cultivation Before Domestication in Northern Syria," Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:313-325:2008, available on-line.Wolfe, Jack A. "Late Cretaceous-Cenozoic History of Deciduousness and the Terminal Cretaceous Event," Paleobiology 13:215-226:1987, abstract available on-line._____ "Palaeobotanical Evidence for a Marked Temperature Increase Following the Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary," Nature 343:153 - 156:11 January 1990, abstract available on-line.
Photograph: New chaste tree growth with unshed leaves and berries on enclosed porch, 24 January 2009.

Sea Pink

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rounded birds with grayish bellies and red sides were around the front porch last Sunday morning; water fowl were still noisy the first part of the week when I left for work.

Weather: Remains of snow continued to shrink. Each day the dry air pulled more moisture from thawed mud that couldn’t sink into the frozen sublayer, then returned some in morning frosts on purple asters and the debris from cut weeds. Last snow 1/10/09.

Weekly update: The mere fact I planted something called sea pink in arid New Mexico tells you my command of the English language is not what it should be.

Sea pink. As in a plant that grows by the ocean, not the color of some exotic type of salmon or the aquatic tint that appears only when corals are forming. No, campion of the sea.

My plants’ Armeria pseudarmeria ancestors cling to the rocks of Capo de Roca, the westernmost bulge of Europe that protects Lisbon from the fury of the Atlantic. The better known Armeria maritima stretches form the Bay of Biscayne to the salt marshes along the coasts of England, Ireland, and the northern islands.

The genus first appeared within the leadwort family during the Miocene in Spain when grassy savannas were colonizing the world. Towards the end of that epoch, some 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean outlets to the Atlantic closed and the internal sea began evaporating. As it dried, temperatures and salt levels increased in the basin.

Sea pinks deployed several survival strategies, including glands on their narrow lance-like leaves that expelled salt. Andrew Hanson’s team believes Armerias also developed new ammonia compounds within their cells to stabilize threatened proteins and membranes. One, choline-o-sulfate, removed the sulphur that accompanied salt; the other, beta-alanine betaine, replaced the more common glycine betaine which diverted choline to other purposes.

When temperatures fell with the ensuing glaciers, Armerias ceased adapting. Species like maritima simply withdrew to the estuaries and Scottish mountains when forests returned. Farther south, beyond the direct reach of ice, Belén Gutiérrez Larena’s group found they drifted up and down the mountains of southeastern Spain. Splendens, filicaulis nevadensis and villosa bernisii flourish at different altitudes today on the Sierra Nevada massif.

Sea pinks transcended the shady cold in spite of themselves because nature had provided them with two different forms of female stigmas, one with rounded bumps, the other with hairy nipples. Each produces male pollen that can only fertilize the other. When one species’ peregrinations brought it into contact with another, they were able to mate, like pseudarmeria and welwitschii on the periphery of the Estoril coast or the parents of filicaulis nevadensis.

Such openness to outcrossing not only produced the natural hybrids of Iberia, but the garden varieties of giant thrift already common in 1874 when The Garden magazine warned readers if they planted Armeria varieties too near one another, they would indiscriminately fraternize, and only the rare white flowers on the globular heads would remain true. Even then, the Portuguese perennial was variously called formosa, pseudo-armeria and cephalotes and sometimes attributed to southern Europe and northern Africa.

Who knows the origin of the Joysticks I bought in 2005, grown from seed released by Kieft in 1999. Perhaps the Dutch breeders sent collectors to Portugal, perhaps they simply built on existing inventories. Javier Fuertes Aguilar found the source wouldn’t have affected the botanic ascription anyway When he and his partners tested the DNA of several Spanish species, they found the Armerias had hybridized so often individual endemic examples fit no predictable genetic pattern that a taxonomist could associate with a Linnaean label.

Perhaps I’m lucky I spaced the name. Joysticks have enough Messinian germplasm to withstand summer droughts in the rio arriba, unfazed by saline well water, and perhaps something from a more northern species as well to remain green this winter. Few would buy them if they were called Dead Sea pinks, but perhaps that would have warned the linguistically challenged.

Notes:
Aguilar, Javier Fuertes, Josep Antoni Rosselló, and Gonazlo Nieto Feliner. "Molecular Evidence for the Compilospecies Model of Reticulate Evolution in Armeria (Plumbaginaceae)," Systemic Biology 48:735-754:1999.

Gutiérrez Larena, Belén, Javier Fuertes Aguilar, and Gonzalo Nieto Feliner. "Glacial-induced Altitudinal Migrations in Armeria (Plumbaginaceae) Inferred from Patterns of Chloroplast DNA Haplotype Sharing," Molecular Ecology 11:1965-1974:2002.

Hanson, Andrew D., Bala Rathinasabapathi, Jean Rivoal, Michael Burnet, Michael O. Dillon, and Douglas A. Gage. "Osmoprotective Compounds in the Plumbaginaceae: A Natural Experiment in Metabolic Engineering of Stress Tolerance," National Academy of Science Proceedings 91:306-310:1994.

Hickey, Michael. 100 Families of Flowering Plants, 1988 second edition, describes characteristics of stigma on Armeria maritima.

JCN. "The Great Thrift," The Garden, 3 Jan 1874, published by William Robinson.

Tauleigne Gomes, Cristina and Claude Lefèbvre. "Natural Hybridisation Between Two Coastal Endemic Species of Armeria (Plumbaginaceae) from Portugal. 1. Populational in Situ Investigations," Plant Systematics and Evolution 250:215-230:2005.

Photograph: Joystick Red Shades sea pink growing in front of a retaining wall with dead grasses, 17 January 2009.

Sweet Pea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Sounds of water fowl drifted up from the river yesterday morning as the sun came out after snow in the night.

Weather: Snow dustings last Sunday and Friday night; freeze and thaw between so the drive has been too muddy to drive in at night and too icy to walk out in the morning.

Weekly update: These are the times that try plant’s souls. Those whose leaves survived the killing frosts have since faced dumps of snow, then mornings below 15 degrees, and now daily freeze and thaw cycles where temperatures range between 20 and 40. Only perennials with extraordinary biochemistry can survive.

My sweet peas so far have stayed green near the base, even though leaves farther along the stems have turned to paper. Green peaks from mounds of dead leaves on vines near the village that pile on themselves in summer when there’s nothing for their tendrils to clasp.

The plants are an improbable alien in arid New Mexico. They don’t tolerate salt, they prefer a pH between 5.8 and 7.5. In their homeland, they range from Morocco and Iberia to the Balkan peninsula, then up the Danube. They quail at the deserts of Africa and Asia and haven’t scaled the Alps of Switzerland and Austria. On this continent they balk at the cold of North Dakota and the Canadian prairies, won’t grow in humid Florida, and aren’t a success in the Mexican deserts.

The rosy racemes need 14 hours of daylight, which begins here the end of April, to begin developing. If temperatures remain around 40 degrees, which they did in the mornings until the first of this past June, they take eight weeks to develop. In the best years, they come into bloom around the solstice, just as the drought season sets in.

Lathyrus latifolia needs at least 26" of rain a year. The ones that have naturalized here grow on the banks on irrigation ditches, where they keep both cool and wet. To keep mine from browning out, I dump water on them whenever the drip pan under the outside faucet fills. They stay alive with only sporadic flowers.

Then, after being babied through the summer, the yellow veined leaves surprise and stay green into winter.

Staying green means photosynthesis is continuing at some rate. For that to occur, the roots must be functioning, as must the stem. Even though the rhizomes store some nutrients, they need to extract others, including water, from the soil. In this part of New Mexico, the average frost line is 10-15". Established sweet pea roots typically reach down more than two feet, at least 9" below frozen ground.

Photosynthesis occurs in the leaves which must remain undamaged by cold temperatures which can destroy cells when the surrounding water turns to ice. Bengt Lindforss first noted evergreens in central Germany that survived the frost contained no starches, because they had converted the carbohydrates to sugar. He then established the ability of sugar to protect plants by lowering the freeze point of internal fluids.

Nikolay Maximov read his work, then injected red cabbages with some sugars (glucose, glycerol) and some alcohols to show each could increase cold defenses. Sucrose is the primary sugar in the roots of sweet peas on limestone grasslands in central Europe in summer, according to Franz Hadacek and Günther Kraus.

Polish botanists noticed sweet pea’s relatively wide, coarse pairs of leaves have large, irregularly shaped cells which would give them greater tolerance for any ice crystals that might form than smaller cells would have. They also found summer leaves contain relatively high levels of salt and calcium. If maintained all year, the first would lower the freezing point, while the second would keep cell membranes flexible enough to expand and retract with potential ice.

The leaves look the same, summer or winter, mere dark presences hiding leguminous roots that put some nitrogen in the soil. However, the external matte appearance masks their strategies for survival as completely as the snow hides their existence from the drying sun.

Notes:
Fuller, Barry J., Nick Lane, and Erica E. Benson, Life in the Frozen State, 2004, describes work of Bengt Lindforrs and Nikolay Maximov.

Hadacek, Franz and Günther F. Kraus. "Plant Root Carbohydrates Affect Growth Behaviour of Endophytic Microfungi," FEMS Microbiology Ecology 41:161-170:2002.

Kartesz, John T. "Lathyrus latifolius L.," USDA National Resource Conservation Service, National Plant Data Center.

Koike, Yasuhiko, Tomoaki Inoue, Shigetoshi Suzuki, Haruzo Higuchi. "Effect of Photoperiod on the Flowering of Lathyrus latifolius L.," Journal of the Japanese Society for Horticultural Science 69:770-772:2000.

_____ N. Kouyama, A. Yoshii, S. Suzuki, and H. Imanishi. "Effect of Low Temperatures Applied to Seeds and Seedlings on Flowering of Lathyrus latifolius L," Horticultural Research 6:525-528:2007.

Krstic, Borivoj D., Pal P. Boza, Ljiljana S. Merkulov, Lana N. Krstic, Slobodanka P. Pajevic, Zivko S. Stankovic. "Morpholigcal, Anatomical, and Physiological Characteristics of Lathyrus latifolius L. (Fabaceae)," Matica Srpska Novi Sad 103:81-89:2002, in English.

Sammis, Ted. "Frost Depth in New Mexico and the United States," New Mexico Climate 6:4-6:2008.

Photograph: Dead and green perennial sweet pea leaves in light coming through crack between fence boards, 10 January 2009.

Bougainvillea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: A popcorn eating mouse, come in from the cold, has been leaving droppings on the kitchen floor.

Weather: Sunny afternoons with temperatures around 40 have alternated with very cold mornings to thaw and refreeze the drive each day.

Weekly update: Houseplants on my enclosed porch have a very simple contract: in return for regular water, some occasional fertilizer and heat in the winter, they’re expected to bloom in January. The flowers don’t have to be fragrant, don’t have to be exotic, but they do have to be bright.

When the remaining snow hides from the sun in northern shadows and water collects on frozen ground or seeps through a thin veneer of soft mud, I want to look up from my desk and see color. Geranium red, bougainvillea pink. Color.

In fact, the plants don’t even have to produce flowers if they promise color. Bougainvilleas are members of the four o’clock family with tiny white, five-petaled flowers perched on wasp-waisted tubes that are attached to large, brilliant bracts that resemble reflectors placed behind candles.

In the Canary Islands, the fragrance of the flowers brings hawk moths when they first open in the evening. In the Lucknow botanical gardens, butterflies come for the nectar and transfer pollen between adjoining varieties. In South America, hummingbirds flit from plant to plant. But in Florida, where single varieties abound, the woody vines are sterile and only the color could have attracted Jim Hendry in 1927 when he began hybridizing them.

His grandmother, Julia Frierson, brought the first magenta-colored Bougainvilles glabra ‘Sanderiana’ vine from Cuba in 1875. In 1919, his Everglades Nursery gave 200 ‘Crimson Lake’ cultivars to Fort Myers, and made a second gift in 1922 when Carl Fischer was promoting a highway from the midwest to his real estate investments in Miami. Local businessmen, no doubt, were lobbying to have the road come through the town where Henry Ford wintered with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone.

Of course, if one were wealthy enough, one could have seen them in Rio de Janiero where Philibert Commerçon first collected them in 1768 or noticed them on the way to the casinos in Havana or found them climbing the walls of an Italian villa where their thorns warned off intruders. Most Americans in the 1920's, however, probably first saw bougainvilleas growing in Fort Myers, for the western route of the Dixie Highway did indeed pass Hendry’s showroom on its way from Chicago and Chattanooga to Miami.

The eastern route, however, is the one people would have used when I was growing up, the one that connected Detroit and Knoxville with the Soo and east coast of Florida. My first sense of winter color comes from walking by the windows of the exclusive women’s clothing store in the nearest city that featured beachwear in January. Inside, clerks reminded customers it had a convenient branch in Palm Beach.

Now I’ve personally never been to Florida, and probably saw my first bougainvillea in Phoenix in the 1980's where they’re so common the peaches and pinks of the short-day flowers were muddy and mundane. Still, I know I owe my plant to Hendry because he released ‘Barbara Karst’ around 1940 and every plant in existence must trace its heritage back to a cutting from his creation.

However, the reason I bought it has nothing to do with him or Florida, and everything to do with Fischer, who made his money manufacturing headlights. For him, cars weren’t a safe trust fund. They were about racing at the Indianapolis track he built. They were about escaping midwestern winters down a smooth, broad way south. They were about providing an alternative to Ford’s monotonous black. They were about color, brilliant bougainvillea pink.

Color.

Notes:
Hendry, Helen Johnson. "History of Bougainvillea," A. W. Kelley’s Gardens website, 2007.

Zadoo, S. N., R. P. Roy, and T. N. Khoshoo. "Cytogenetics of Cultivated Bougainvilleas II: Pollination Mechanism and Breeding System," Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 41: 498-5-3:1975.

Photograph: Two Barbara Karst bougainvillea buds and a flower, each attached to the central vein of a separate bract just below the base of the tube, 3 January 2009.

Winter Mysteries

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, blue flax, sweet pea, sea pink, winecup, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s Beard, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, coral beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Man down the road has brought in some hogs.

Weather: Storms moved through, dropping some snow on Monday night and Thursday morning. After warm temperatures melted most of it, leaving mud sitting on frozen ground, temperatures fell this morning to their lowest so far this winter. Plants still buried under piles of snow will be OK; I’m not sure about those with shallow roots in the thawed areas. 8:24 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: ’Tis the time for some houseplant to produce a brilliant flower to protest the soddeness that follows melting snow.

It won’t be the succulent I bought last July when the local hardware was selling off the orphans. The perennial came with a picture of bright red flowers, the names Rochea coccinea and Campfire. In fact, it has tiny white, tulip-shaped flowers in groups of nine crowded on elongating stems that are barely visible from a distance.

In the early days of the last depression, Bailey said Rochea flowers grow in dense terminal clusters, that coccinea sports bright scarlet, two-inch-long flared tubes. The only red I see appears along the edges of the pairs of elliptical leaves when temperatures fall and slowing photosynthesis drains away the green. Rochea’s ovate leaves are supposed to alternate along the stems; these form beneath the pairs of light-sensitive flower heads.

I suspect I have a South African weed that probably was grown in Estancia by McLain Greenhouse from contaminated seed. Had it been a cutting, they would have known. But then, had they known, poor Española is just the sort of place it would have been shipped to salvage the cost of potting soil.

The spring selection in the hardware associated with the smallest chain in town has been declining each year. Probably because the parent faces stiff competition from Lowe’s and Wal-mart, it’s been offering fewer plants each year, and the choices have been getting odder, as if the buyers were taking the lowest priced, remaindered lots. One year the only fruit trees the store received for its spring tent sale were peaches. Last year they got almost no tomatoes.

The more managers retrench in the belief people won’t be buying, the more they create that condition. People who walked in last spring and found half the usual shelf space devoted to annuals, and came back a week later to find nothing new had been received, didn’t return. When last year’s seeds arrived later than usual, I regretted not spending more time looking at mail order alternatives.

It was with some foreboding then that I opened the early batch of seed catalogs this week: fear they had retreated to offer less I could grow, panic that if I didn’t find everything I needed, I might have to go without. Of course my anxieties were met with higher shipping costs and the loss of some favorite varieties. The single colored larkspur had been replaced by a "new series" for "commercial cut flower growers." Jewel nasturtiums were gone from another and the Bright Lights cosmos banished to the "super sale" of the discontinued.

But then, I looked at catalogs from places I haven’t used in a while and discovered they not only had adequate substitutes and lower shipping, but tucked here and there were those elusive possibilities that tempt me to try something new: why not another variety of creeping zinnia instead of nasturtiums? why not pink baby’s breath in place of larkspur?

In the scheme of things, these alterations aren’t particularly radical, aren’t going to make much difference to any company’s bottom line. They’re just extensions of what I’ve learned works, the simplest kind of innovation. They aren’t nearly so daring as buying that weed last July, and, whilst that unknown may not be the bright spot of color I’d expected, at least it’s blooming, unfazed by the market forces that sent it my way, a quiet witness that even the lowly have a place in this winter of discontent.

Notes: Baily, Liberty Hyde and Ethel Zoe Bailey. Hortus, 1930.

Photograph: Unknown plant sold as Rochea coccinea, 23 December 2008.

Vinca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, blue flax, sweet pea, sea pink, winecup, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s Beard, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, purple aster, some grasses; arborvitae turning brown.
What’s gray, blue or gay-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, coral beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea; Christmas cactus close to opening.
Animal sightings: Birds were out Tuesday as soon as there was enough light to see, even though a low wind made it difficult for them to perch. Sunday the blue bird huddled above the porch post under the eave, obviously regretting the decision to winter here.
Weather: Sunday, wind and rain in the night before Monday’s fine snow that turned heavy after dark. The 7" in my drive has been compacting and evaporating ever since, but there’s still a thin covering in many places ready to turn to ice if it’s stepped on. 8:23 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Something still green for the solstice should not pass unnoticed.
The Vinca minor I planted in deep, dry shade in 2000 and 2001 has survived and produced a few flowers, but the trailing stems have yet to find places wet enough to root and expand. Even so, after this week’s snows the sparse, leathery leaves are green.
John Williamson noticed periwinkle in the "Unicorn in Captivity" tapestry produced in France around 1500 for François IV de La Rouchefoucauld. One group of five-petaled blue flowers appears with a carnation under the animal’s tail, where it signifies the promise of fertility. Another clump, beyond the enclosing fence near a pomegranate, is intended to ward off the evil represented by the white campion.
The unicorn hunt, shown in five tapestries in the set, climaxes when the male animal is killed on the solstice, after having been tranquilized by the attention of a young virgin. The animal’s immediate rebirth into captivity was associated by church leaders with the birth of Christ a few days after mid-winter, but has deeper roots in the annual battle, first suggested by James Frazer in The Golden Bough, between the oak, representing summer and the sun, and holly, signifying the winter that must kill the god-king so a younger, more vital man may rein.
Robert Graves noticed the same juxtaposition of periwinkle with the lure of fertility and betrayal leading to death in a French ballad from the 1100's in which a shoemaker representing Llew Llaw Gyffes is tempted by a beautiful lady into a large bed with blue pervenche flowers on the four posts. The Celtic sun god is murdered by his rival after she binds him with the runners.
Myrtle, as my mother prosaically called periwinkle, is peripheral in the iconography of these artifacts of high French culture, but its associations with death and fertility go back to those times when plants, not animals, were used to express man’s relationship with nature and the supernatural.
Around 1230, Guillaume de Lorris wrote one of the most popular romances of the period, "Roman de la Rose," which is set in May when, to quote Chaucer’s translation, "the erthe wexeth proud" and men forget the past solstice "in which that winter had it set." A young man enters a walled garden posted with warning signs of evil where he falls in love with a rose, but is imprisoned by the guardian before he can liberate her. The first flowers Lorris lists in the garden are violets and "fresshe pervinke, riche of hewe."
The thing I wonder is how a flower, for it is always the flower that is used, no matter how inappropriate the season, went from being the healing herb used by Romans for its astringent qualities to a symbol for the sorceress who lures a man to his destruction. One possibility is that when the Romans took the Apocynaceae north to places like Britain it no longer produced seed, and any sterile plant was seen with suspicion by people who relied on grain.
After the courtly culture of the troubadours passed, the plant that had been emblematic of destructive virginity became the magical tool to cure it. In London around 1525, the unknown man who published The Book of Secrets of Albertus Mangus prescribed a charm made from powdered periwinkle, houseleaks and earthworms to "induceth love between man and woman."
In 1650, Nicolas Culpepper associated periwinkle with Venus and told his English readers the French used an infusion "to stay women’s courses," the physical manifestation of barrenness and impotence. This use of tannin from the leaves persisted into the early twentieth century when homeopathists recommended lesser periwinkle for the heavy flows of menopause that signal the end of female fecundity.
Today, both pagans and papists notice the perennial: Magica D’La Luna proclaims violette des sorciers a Wiccan patron herb while Mary DeTourris Poust includes pucellage in her garden devoted to flowers sacred to the virgin Mary. The constellation of motifs found in medieval France may have dissolved, but myrtle still blesses both the solstice and Christmas with green leaves rising from the snow.
Notes:Anonymous. The Boke of Secretes of Albartus Magnus, of the Vertues of Herbes, Stones, and Certaine Beastes. Also a Boke of the Same Author of the Maruaylous Things of the World and of Certaine Effectes Caused of Certayne Beastes, 1525, edited by Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman as The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, 1999.
Boericke, William. Materia Medica, 1901; augmented 1927 edition kept in print by B. Jahn Publishers of New Dehli; his description is "continuous flow, particularly at climacteric."
Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's; 1826 edition republished in 1981.

D’La Luna, Magica. "Periwinkle," available on-line.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, 1922 abridged edition.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess, 1966 second edition.

Poust, Mary DeTurris. "Planting with Prayer in Mind, 7 May 2008, available on-line.

Tuckwell, William. Chaucer, 1910, grouped with early work, translations before 1373.

Williamson, John. The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn, 1986; the seven tapestries are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Photograph: Vinca minor and dead June grass and iris leaves, 18 December 2008.

Orchards

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue and yellow flax, oriental poppy, sea lavender, sea pink, winecup, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, tansy, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, anthemis, chrysanthemum, black-eyed Susan, purple aster, some grasses.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea.
Animal sightings: Bird with chalky blue back around front porch last Sunday; rabbit tracks in snow Wednesday morning.
Weather: First snow Tuesday, along with first major power outage since the Thanksgiving fiasco a few years back; 8:24 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: The first thing my furnace man asked last week was "Did you get any fruit?" When I had someone up from Santa Fe, he noticed the catalpa, but this tradesman, like any true son of the rio arriba, saw the peach and wanted to know.
Small talk in the valley has its own rhythms. I asked after the apples and he said the only ones who’d gotten much were in Los Alamos.
This would be a hard year if we still followed the old ways that depended on dried or stored apples for food and fresh ones for cash in the fall. The spring cold spells coincided with blossoming times, and I only saw fruit on a few trees in the 24 orchards I routinely drive by.
Most of the orchards have seen better days. Belle Becker says her family sold apples on the highway to Taos to people who came from Texas to fill their trucks until "the deep freeze in the 70's." That’s back when Emilio Naranjo was at the height of his political power in the county. Now, many have gaps where trees have died and not been replaced. A few are used for parking, but some are still carefully maintained, the grounds plowed or mowed, the branches pruned, the fruit picked. One paints the trunks white, another puts plastic collars made from empty plant containers around the bases.
Commercial apples are relatively recent. When Francisco Domínguez visited the area in 1776, he noticed only peaches and apricots. But, by 1830, Josiah Gregg saw trees around Santa Fe grown from pips that had come north. The Santa Clara bought the small, thin-skinned yellow mansanà from Mexican peddlers and used them to seed small orchards. These manzanas méxicanas were growing in Chimayó when Don Unser’s grandmother, Benigna Ortega Chávez, was a child early in the twentieth century and seen in Santa Cruz in the 1930's.
Change came with the railroads. Not only did the Denver and Rio Grande open markets for local farmers, but the transcontinental lines provided a distribution network for Clarence Stark, who began promoting his Delicious in 1895 by sending free samples with mail orders. By 1900, those saplings had begun to bear, and people wanted the sweet, five-pointed fruit from his Missouri-grown bare roots.
A revived knowledge of pomology probably filtered south from Denver where Stark had been treated for tuberculosis in 1887. While there he established dryland orchards and made promotional trips, including some to Mormons, who’d brought their apple growing techniques from the east. Whipple wrote in 1914 that the apple industry was still comparatively young in New Mexico and expanding the most around Farmington. Delicious wasn’t yet among the common varieties.
The seedling Jesse Hiatt found in Iowa near his Yellow Bellflower tree around 1870 was probably just reaching the Rio Grande when Naranjo was born in Guachupangue in 1916. Mrs. Chávez remembers her father, Reyes Ortega, and Santos Ortiz brought the first manzanas americanas to Chimayó from Sombrillo. By the time Naranjo was in high school in Santa Fe in the 1930's, Red Delicious and its pollination partners, Jonathan and Winesap, had become the most important varieties in Santa Cruz.
There are no orchards left along the Taos highway at my end of town, and only a few places in the village have trees. The land in the one has turned commercial, that near the church was always too valuable for farming. Arboleroas were kept to the periphery there, like they were in Chimayó, where trees were banished to life outside the plaza.
Some of the early plantations were ambitious. The largest one today is six rows of 32 trees suggesting an original plan for 192. The other large plantings look like they were 6 by 20 and 6 by 16. More orchards are two or four rows wide and six trees deep, one to two dozen trees. When hard cash came from men like Naranjo’s father, Alejandrino, who worked the mines and smelters of Colorado, these were sizable investments.
Such abundance must have become not only a symbol of economic comfort in bad times, but also such a mark of success that people still buy a half dozen trees for their much-reduced lots. Dwarf trees a 92-year-old man can maintain without a ladder are planted in three rows in a fenced plot to the right of Naranjo’s home. When he died a few weeks ago, he may have outlived the traditional life that formed him and the political machine he built, but his trees, like all the orchards in the area, are outliving him. Next year, people may ask his heirs if they got any fruit.
Notes:Becker, Belle. Interviewed by Kevin Huelsmann for "The Villages of Española," Rio Grande Sun, 29 May 2008. Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez, 1956.Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Terry, Dickson. "The Stark Story," Missouri Historical Society, The Bulletin, Sept 1966.US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.
Whipple, O. B. "Apple Growing in the Western Mountain States" in Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1914.
Photograph: Small apple orchard near the village, 7 December 2008.

Buddleia

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue flax, sea pink, winecup, pinks, soapworts, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, tansy, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, June and other grasses. Russian thistles breaking loose; ditch meeting this week.

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

What’s red: Raspberry, cholla, privet, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose.

What’s turning yellow: Apache plume.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea; first bud on Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Last Sunday migrating birds made a great din overhead, but the scattered dark specks kept disappearing into the cloudless blue sky when they changed direction and stopped reflecting the sun. The only thing I know is they weren’t geese, for they neither honked nor flew in formation.

Weather: Mornings mostly cold, nights mostly clear and starry; last rain 11/27/08; 8:31 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Whoever it is who decides what plants to ship to our local hardware stores always sends things that can’t survive here. Every year people buy the brilliant, cerise-flowered Salvia greggii, variously described as zone 6, 7 or 8, but are more cautious with unknowns that aren’t in flower. One woman walked away when the clerk told her the maple she was looking at needed to be taken in for the winter.

Then, at the end of the season, when these inappropriate perennials are on sale with 50% price reductions, some are willing to gamble. Two years ago, the overstocked stranger was Buddleia davidii. I bought two Monum at my local hardware that were immediately eaten by grasshoppers, then I tried two Black Knight from a Santa Fe big box that I immediately sprayed.

Someone down the road must have taken the entire remaining inventory of the plum-colored Monum, and this summer had three-foot bushes on irrigated land out by an outer wall. The butterfly bushes began producing lilac-shaped racemes at the ends of new stems in mid-July that continued into September. Mine were attacked by grasshoppers again, and grew only a foot with sporadic blooms in August.

But now my shrubs are doing something extraordinary - putting out new growth when our early morning temperatures are falling in the low twenties. Furthermore, Julie Ream says, if my tubular Black Knight florets managed to be fertilized, the seed is still maturing and will be disbursed sometime in January, while some Hungarians discovered they could root cuttings in sand in greenhouses kept as low as our daytime 45 degrees.

Seeds for these Scrophulariaceae were first sent to Kew Gardens from Yichang near the gorges on the Yangtze in western Hubei where the British had forced an open port in 1876 after the Second Opium War. The area was known for the quality of its tea leaves and oranges, and the first customs officer, Augustine Henry, was looking for new medicinal plants in 1887. Most modern varieties are derived from stock grown at the Jardin des Plantes and sent to Kew in 1895, perhaps from seed collected in the 1860's by a French missionary, Armand David.

Reginald Farrer became fascinated by plants in an abandoned quarry when he was a teenager, and, after leaving Oxford for a visit to China in 1902, returned to England to write a popular book describing his rock garden in 1907. The following year he raved about Buddleja variabilis, as it then was called, saying it was as luxuriant and gorgeous as any tropical, hardier than many lilacs, and bloomed in August.

At the same time, he converted to Buddhism, then returned to China a few years later with William Purdom to visit Gansu in the Tibetan borderlands. Among the seeds they sent back to Kew in 1914 where those for a dwarf davidii subspecies, nanhoénsis. The species is polyploidic and thus can easily produce genetic sports that may or may not survive.

The intrepid traveler visited Arras in war-ravaged France after the first World War, and came upon a Buddleia gone wild in the rubble, "exactly as I last saw it on the shingles of Tibet." Some sport of the plant naturalized on the lime debris of London during the Second World War, and many now fear it may become as invasive on the gravel edges of stream beds as it has in the kiwi plantations of New Zealand.

Before it was condemned by environmentalists and banned from gardens in Washington and Oregon, nurseries periodically introduced new cultivars by selecting mutations, including Peace in 1945. Ruy promoted the hardy Black Knight in 1959 which, coincidentally, produces less seed than most varieties. Monrovia introduced a cultivar of nanhoénsis in 1984 as Petite Plum or Monum for smaller gardens.

It’s since been the object of research by botanists trying to find better growing methods for nurserymen and by others trying to find ways to kill it. Farrer himself wondered who had planted the cherished "new rare treasure" he saw in Arras, before adding "not that it matters, or can make any difference to this scene of sordid modern ugliness in ruins." Perhaps it was a similar swing in taste that exiled this unwanted, paradoxically heat loving, cold thrifty plant to the shelves of Española. Farrer, himself, died in Burma in 1920 looking for more plants.

Notes:
Farrer, Reginald John. Alpines and Bog Plants, 1908.
_____ My Rock Garden, 1907.
_____ The Void of War: Letters from Three Fronts, 1918.

Ream, Julie. Production and Invasion of Butterfly Bush (Buddleia davidii) in Oregon, 2006.

Újvári, Melinda and Gábor Schmidt. "Mini-cutting Propagation - A New Way for Propagation Semi-shrubs," no source provided, available on-line.

Photograph: New growth on Black Knight buddleia with iris in back, 30 November 2008.