Golden Smoke

What’s blooming in the area: Apple, chokecherry, Bradford pear, other white and pink flowering trees, first lilacs, tulips, yellow iris, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustard, stickseed, purple mat flower, oxalis, native and common dandelion, cheat grass; heath asters up. Seeds and bare root roses picked over at local hardware stores, especially the cheaper ones; only bedding plants available are vegetables.
What’s blooming in my yard: Sour cherry, green and purple-leaved sand cherries, few peach flowers, forsythia, Siberian pea, daffodils, grape hyacinth, hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, mossy phlox, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on spirea, lilac, cheddar pink, coral bell, Jupiter’s beard; caryopteris and weigela leafing; buddleia, hartweig, Maximilian sunflower, Mönch aster up; perky Sue greening; sand cherries fragrant.
Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Birds, small gecko, moth, bees, ants; turkeys near orchard.
Weather: It finally stayed above freezing all week; afternoons were in the 70's when I got home; still windy. A friend in Lamy complained his radishes and lettuce didn’t germinate because it was too cold, and now it’s so warm the lettuce will bolt. Last rain, 4/17/09; 14:12 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: It happens. I’m driving along and some flash of color catches my attention. I wonder what I missed when a truck looms in my rearview mirror. I resume speed, but promise myself a better look next time.
Last Saturday was different. I was driving my old Los Alamos commuting route through Santa Clara lands to see if any cherries were blooming on that side of the river when I saw something short and yellow that didn’t scream dandelion. This time, I drove back on the shoulder until I found the flowers, some golden smoke growing in a cut made through the rock, clay and sand thrown up by the rift.
American botanists place Corydalis aurea in the bleeding heart family, while Europeans consider it and all the Fumariaceae as part of the poppy family. Try as I might, turning books in all directions, I don’t see the connection with either. The flower looks very much like a fancy pea with two long, light yellow petals in a narrow tube that touch at the opening surrounded by two darker petals that curve open at the mouth. Bees push through the inner shell to get to the sac of nectar at the tip of the uppermost layer.
The flowers are embedded in short spikes like mints or snapdragons, that behave more like a mustard when they mature. Narrow pods replace the lower florets while the stems lengthen to hold more blossoms. When the shiny black seeds are ripe, the pods split. Ants, some nine species in Colorado, take the ejected grains to their nests where the larvae eat the lipid-filled elaiosome sacs attached to the exterior coatings. When the nutrients are gone, the ants bury the still viable remains in their trash heaps where they are more likely to germinate than if ants hadn’t intervened.
The winter annual is one of those wildflowers that’s widely distributed, from Alaska to the northern states of México, without being particularly common. It doesn’t seem to care much about altitude or soil, accepting sand and gravel, lava and limestone, from glacier-flattened northern Michigan to subalpine Colorado, but it needs something more than water, bees and ants. Some speculate ants scarify seeds or create particularly fertile environments, but Marion Blois Lobstein and Larry Rockwood weren’t been able to document the relationship.
Instead, John Zasoda’s team saw them come back the first season after white spruce had been cleared in Alaska, but they died out by the fifth. In Ottawa, another group noticed golden corydalis was one of the plants that appeared within the first hundred days after a woodland was burned, while Rebecca Shankland noticed they were particularly prolific in White Rock Canyon in 2003 when bark beetles were destroying something like 80% of the mature piñon in Los Alamos County.
I suspect the embryos for the ferny blue-green leaves I saw last weekend landed along the highway when some heavy truck picked up speed out of Española. I would guess one of the loosely covered gravel haulers from the other side of town, if only because my load of washed base coarse deposited several new species and a bunch of red ants in my drive.
As for my original quest, I saw no chokecherries. Instead, one white tree was blooming in a yard that could have been anything, cherry, plum or pear, and two cherries were growing wild in an unsettled area where someone driving through had probably thrown out seeds or bad fruit.
The littering was deliberate while the gear transition that shook off debris when a truck jolted was the consequence of physics. Both happen when a road is built. The environment changes ever so slightly. New species appear, but not everything that sprouts is a weed.
Notes:
Catling, P. M., A. Sinclair, A., and D. Cuddy. "Plant Community Composition and Relationships of Disturbed and Undisturbed Alvar Woodland," Canadian Field-Naturalist 116:571-579:2002.Hanzawa, Frances M., Andrew J. Beattie, and David C. Culver. "The Directed Dispersal: Demographic Analysis of an Ant-Seed Mutualism," American Naturalist, 131:1-13:1988.Lobstein, Marion Blois and Larry L. Rockwood, "Influence of Elaiosome Removal on Germination in Five Ant-Dispersed Plant Species," Virginia Journal of Science 44:59-72:1993.Shankland, Rebecca. "An Armchair Tour of White Rock Canyon on Earth Day," Los Alamos Monitor 23 April 2003, republished by Pajarito Environmental Education Center website.Stern, Kingsley R. "Revision of Dicentra (Fumariaceae)," Brittonia 13:1-57:1961.Zasada, John C., M. Joan Foote, Frederick J. Deneke, and R.H. Parkerson. "Case History of an Excellent, White Spruce Cone and Seed Crop in Interior Alaska: Cone and Seed Production, Germination, and Seedling Survival," USDA report, 1978.Photograph: Golden smoke, along road between Española and Los Alamos, 18 April 2009.

Chokecherry

What’s blooming in the area: Pink and white flowering trees, chokecherry, Bradford pear, tulips, mossy phlox, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustard, stickseed, purple mat flower, golden smoke, oxalis, and dandelion; cottonwood leaves forming; stickleaf, mullein, tumble mustard and pigweed coming up; local ditches running.
What’s blooming in my yard: Cherry, sand cherry, forsythia, daffodils, puschkinia, hyacinth, vinca, and yellow alyssum; buds on lilac and grape hyacinth; sea lavender and ladybells up; catalpa pods splitting, dropping seeds.
Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.
Animal sightings: Rabbit, ants; rooster crowing somewhere in area; Herefords and geese near village; both bees and flies on cherries yesterday.
Weather: Winds continue with temperatures still falling below freezing, rain Friday; 13:53 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Now’s the time for pink and white flowering trees. When I drove through Indiana in the 1980's and saw them growing wild in wood lots under taller trees that hadn’t yet leafed out, I romantically thought they were redbud and dogwood.
Here the pink flowers are probably crab apples bought at a garden center or ordered from a catalog. The white racemes are probably some kind of cherry brought in from elsewhere. While some could be sweet Prunus avium, sour cerasus, or the mahaleb rootstock, a number most likely are the chokecherries that Leonora Curtin says were made into wine and preprandial tea by Spanish-speaking people in northern New Mexico in the 1940's.
In one farm area once dominated by a French territorial house, someone planted rows of white flowering trees that extend beside two drives on one side of the road and along the edge of a flood-irrigated field on the other. Elsewhere, scattered trees have sprouted on the outer edges of property, often near water, where seeds could have been dropped by birds.
The trees are relatively short. It’s possible many were cut, and these are suckers with thin trunks that ramble towards the light. The wood itself didn’t need to be straight to be used for bows by San Ildefonso and other Rio Grande and western pueblos: it did need to be straight-grained and flexible.
Elsewhere in the country chokecherries can grow to 30'. The local species can survive 13" of precipitation a year, but William Dunmire and Gail Tierney say it much prefers the water courses in Frijoles canyon while William Dick-Peddie classifies it as a semi-riparian component of New Mexico scrub land. The Tesuque went to the Rio en Medio valley, northeast of Santa Fe, to find fall berries, while the Laguna harvested Mount Taylor.
In the far distant past, Prunus virginiana probably grew in most parts of North America. As the climate changed, three subspecies evolved: the red-fruited virginiana east of the Mississippi; the darker, red-berried demissa in the far west and along the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, and the still darker melanocarpa found in the drylands between.
It’s difficult to know the pre-Oñate range in northern New Mexico, because wild burros decimated the shrubs in Capulin canyon, while ranchers and sheepman may have cleared trees for firewood because the leaves contain prussic acid that can be dangerous when leaves are damaged. The hydrocyanic acid disappears in the fall and when the fruit is dried or cooked, but can still induce what one USDA group calls a "false sense of well-being."
One can only assume they were in the general area in the past. John Peabody Harrington notes the Tewa word for the shrub, abè, is one of the plant names that did not fit the naming conventions of the early twentieth century. He also notes that Tewa speakers used the word bè as a generic term for other rose family fruits like apples and peaches introduced by the Spanish.
While people everywhere have eaten the fruit fresh or cooked or dried and many have used it for gastrointestinal problems including diarrhea, it’s only the nomadic plains tribes who pounded the dried berries and seeds into small, circular cakes. The Navajo, Blackfoot, Dakota, Lakota, and others along the Missouri are the only ones who incorporated the tree and its fruit into their ceremonial life, in ways they chose not to discuss with Melvin Gilmore.
At one time, the Apache brought abebuwa cakes to San Ildefonso at Christmas. Harrington thinks Tewa speakers may once have made the buwa themselves, since there are records of someone named Abenbua in Pojoaque in 1715. If they had, and if the cakes had any spiritual effects, they may have been suppressed by the Franciscans after the reconquest and survived in the seemingly innocent form of yule offerings and the now anonymous hedgerows down the road.
Notes:
Crowder, Wayne, Wayne A. Geyer, and Patrick J. Broyles. "Chokecherry," USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service plant guide, 2008.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998 and on-line database summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Chokecherries growing beside ditch near territorial farm house, 18 April 2009.

Skunkbush

What’s blooming in the area: Pink and white flowering trees, Bradford pear, tulips, mossy phlox, purple mustard, hoary cress, one tansy mustard 3' high, first stickseeds, dandelion; Russian olive leafing; new growth on loco, snakeweed and chamisa; ring muhly and cheat grass growing; globemallow coming up Village ditches were running last Sunday.

What’s blooming in my yard: Cherry, sand cherry, few forsythia flowers, daffodils, puschkinia, hyacinth, vinca; purple lilac buds visible; apple, spirea, rugosa rose and red barberry leafing; peach, apricot and snowball leaf buds expanding; St John’s wort, David phlox, sidalcea, speedwell, salvia, catmints, ladybells and fern-leaf yarrow up; first peony emerging red; new growth on snow-in-summer; red leaves on sea pink, soapworts and beardtongue turning green.

Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.

Animal sightings: Miller moth on house one cold morning, more birds out when I leave for work.

Weather: Cold temperatures some mornings, high afternoon winds end of week, soaking rain yesterday; 13:34 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I had great plans for the garage corner, a climbing Iceberg or rose of Sharon, something tall with white blossoms I could see from the kitchen. I’ve settled for a two-foot high volunteer skunkbush with insignificant yellow flowers.

I first noticed a 2" sprout in late May of 2000, with leaves I thought might be from a white-flowered snowberry that had someone hitchhiked from Oakland County, Michigan. They have similarly lobed edges, but these members of the sumac family come in sets of three with the center leaf broken into three parts and mature into a more intense, more leathery green.

Skunkbush seeds have hard shells that don’t allow germination until they’ve been cracked or softened, often by heat or association with charred wood. The Cerro Grande fire raged for several weeks near Los Alamos in early May of that year. Ash-carrying winds may have dropped a scarified seed when they hit my garage.

In arid climates, where willows are scarce, basket weavers learned to use Rhus trilobata branches for both the upright, structural warp and the twining weft. Basket fragments made from skunkbush were found in Jemez Cave that date back more than 2,000 years. One of the remains had been dyed black. Centuries later the Navajo were still mixing the strong-scented leaves and tart scarlet berries with calcinated piñon gum to produce a black dye for baskets.

Basket making in the greater southwestern cultural area has been dated back 10,900 years with pieces found in Fishbone Cave in Nevada. Twined baskets woven between uprights date back to 8000 bc and tighter laced-together coiled baskets to 5000 bc. Before pottery, wicker ware was used for cooking and portable storage, as well as tools like nets.

Kat Anderson believes the mass production of basket work necessary to sustain a gathering society involved two technology complexes, one centered on production and the other on managing raw materials. She’s talked to people in California who remember when weavers burned their wicker sources several years before they were needed to encourage new, straighter, more supple growth that had time to cure before use.

A full size basket requires 675 new shoots. Anderson notes a mature, unmanaged skunkbush patch produces 6 usable shoots, while one that’s been burned produces 102. When seven patches of a suckering plant are required to produce one essential, easily destroyed implement, she believes burning had to have been an essential activity for hunter-gathering populations in the Sierra Nevada.

The farther one looks back into prehistory and the more perishable the artifacts, the more our knowledge is based on scant, scattered, providential discoveries. Vorsila Bohrer has described a split-twig animal figurine dating back 3,500 years made from a single six-foot strand of this sumac species which normally grows about four feet high including the upper branches. She believes the raw material could only have been produced by fire.

John Peabody Harrington found the antiquity of plant lore embedded in language itself. In the early twentieth century Tewa speakers used descriptive, compound names for plants, but they used single words for 36 species that had no known etymology. They were either very old terms, retained from an older language, or borrowed, or both. They included some of the most common plants like corn, pumpkin, yucca, piñon, and kun for skunkbush.

When any part of an integrated material culture is altered, the other parts may be lost or degenerate. Pottery began replacing baskets in the sixth century, the Forest Service started discouraging fires before World War I. By the late nineteenth century, only the Hopi maintained a strong basketry tradition integrated into their clan structure while the Zuñi were buying fine ware made with ko’se o’tsi from Apache craftsmen.

In the early twentieth century Santa Clara and Jemez pueblos were still using skunkbush for baskets, but they had probably forgotten how to manage their raw material. Mature kun growth hardens and was being used for arrow shafts by the Santa Clara and hoe handles by the Jemez. Today, the Jemez complain no wild sumac grows near their pueblo.

Relics of a pre-Pueblo past persist in the Tewa language, in the traditions of the Hopi, and in feral plants still found in prehistoric fields on the Pajarito Plateau. It’s pure chance that the repetition of the primeval interaction between fire and a refractory, fire-adapted plant dropped a skunkbush seed in my yard when one of man’s earliest tools was destroying the streets of one of science’s most advanced communities.

Notes:
Anderson, M. Kat. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, 2005.

_____ and Michael J. Moratto. "Native American Land-Use Practices and Ecological Impacts" in Sierra Nevada Ecosystems Project: Final Report to Congress, volume 2, 1996.

Bohrer, Vorsila L. "New Life From Ashes: The Tale of the Burnt Bush (Rhus trilobata)," Desert Plants 5:122-125:1983, cited by Anderson, 2005.

Dunmire, William M. and Gail D. Tierney. Wild Plants of the Pueblo Province, 1995, discusses Jemez Cave and pueblo.

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

Standley, Paul C. Some Useful Native Plants of New Mexico, 1912, cited by Leonora Scott Muse Curtin, Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore, on Navajo dye.

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

Photograph: Skunkbush buds in front of white stuccoed garage wall, 5 April 2009.

Snake Plant

What’s blooming in the area: Daffodils, mossy phlox, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustard, dandelion; Bradford pear leaf and flower buds opening, winterfat leafing. People cleaning ditches, plowing land, burning weeds.
What’s blooming in my yard: Puschkinia, vinca. Undamaged buds of peach and forsythia opened last Sunday, only to be killed by cold temperatures later in the week. More daffodils and tulips, grape hyacinths, Jupiter’s beard, cut-leaf coneflower coming up; pasture rose, purple-leaf sand cherry and privet leaves opening.
Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.
Animal sightings: Bees on peach last Sunday afternoon; rabbit around.
Weather: Morning temperatures varied from low twenties to forties with high winds; last snow, 3/26/09; 13:02 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Snake plants are the stereotypic house plant, even given to children because they’re hard to kill. Unfortunately, the one I had was in a cute pot with no room for the roots, so while it didn’t die, it also didn’t grow.
I associated them with dim settings, like the Philadelphia Italian restaurant in my graduate school days before non-smoking areas and fern bars, where the horizontally-stripped sword-shaped leaves were used in planters that separated the two sides of the row of booths. Because the perennials were tall and had colonized, I assumed they were a different variety from the one I had as a child.
Then, a couple years ago, in my never ending quest for something tall that would grow on my enclosed porch, I stuck a three-leaved rosette in a corner. I didn’t expect much, because the direct and indirect light is intense, summer and winter, the heat high and the water variable. It’s now three foot tall, and registered its first protest a few weeks ago when it put out a new sprout, as hidden from the light as it could be, between the parent and the wall.

Apparently, dark light, smokey air, and loud, loud music aren’t the only habitat deemed acceptable by the African native. Around Homestead, Florida, on the edge of the Everglades, snake plants live in open fields in full sunlight on land reclaimed from solid limestone. In greenhouses, growers keep the temperatures between 70 and 90 degrees.

While a number of Sansevieria species have been exported from Africa, the only one that’s commercially available is the Laurentii mutation of trifasciata characterized by the yellow leaf edge which is distinctly separate tissue from the rest of the plant. If a piece of leaf is stuck in the ground, only the green section will produce roots, and the yellow band disappears. A plant can only reproduce from new sprouts from its rhizomes, and even then, some, like my new rosette, revert to the species.

The chimera was apparently noticed and nurtured by some group living along the Congo river visited by Émile Laurent in either 1903 or 1904. The agronomy professor had been looking for economically useful plants like coffee and rubber since 1893, and his activities had led Leopold II to develop the Jardin Botanique de l’État for plants from his African enterprise. Although Laurent died on the return trip, his nephew Marcel took their collections to Brussels, where Émile de Wildeman cataloged them. A specimen was sent to Kew Gardens in 1910.

How they evolved in the Congo is anyone’s guess. The Sansevieria genus is more common to the east in Kenya, and the trifasciata species is associated with Nigeria and Benin where the Hausa and Nupe use single words for several species. Many Sansevieria are valued for the fibers extracted from the leaves, and some have found medicinal uses for plants they identify as trifasciata, including the Marachi in western Kenya and people in Rwanda. European sailors or Islamic traders took them to India, Indonesia and Fiji where other uses have been reported.

Sansevieria varieties arrived in Florida, apparently when it was still administered by the Spanish, and some naturalized there. During World War II, our government began testing different species and hybrids as alternative sources for rough fibers. They found Laurentii, its parent, and hyacinthoides produced the most fiber from quick growing leaf cuttings that withstood the comparative cold temperatures of Boynton in Broward County.

After the war, nylon and rayon replaced natural fibers and real estate speculators saw better uses for land near the ocean. The war surplus plants made up 16% of the foliage plants sold by Florida growers in the Eisenhower years when my mother gave me my plant. When the glut passed, so did the taste for what one Brooklyn Botanic Garden writer called the "very common," "inelegant" upright leaves with their "entire lack of form."

It wasn’t easy to find a snake plant, and even artificial ones don’t exist now in Santa Fé’s largest craft shop. I finally tracked one down in late 2006 in a corner of Payne’s Nurseries which was probably grown in Costa Rica or China. The reliable plant of my childhood, thriving on my inhospitable porch, has become as obsolete as the war-surplus Quonset huts that were erected along the industrial fringe of my Michigan hometown, and quite possibly as lost as the factories that were built there.

Notes:Blaydes, Glenn W. "The Romance of Domesticated Plants," The Ohio Journal of Science 53:193-215:1953, on yellow leaf margin.

de Wildeman, Émile. Mission Émile Laurent (1903-1904), 1905.

Free, Montague. All About House Plants, 1946.

Henley, Richard W. "Sansevieria in Florida - Past and Present," Florida State Horticultural Society Proceedings 95:295-298:1982.

_____, A.R. Chase and L.S. Osborne. Sansevieria Production Guide, CFREC-A Foliage Plant Note RH-91-30.

Photograph: Snake plant with new rosette to left on inside porch, 4 April 2009.

Hoary Cress

What’s blooming in the area: Snow that covered everything receded yesterday afternoon. Someone must have had a sale on those propane-powered flame weeders; last weekend, at least four men had them strapped to dollies and were pacing their fields and yards to burn off dead vegetation. Village ditch meetings yesterday and today.

What’s blooming in my yard: Peach, forsythia and hyacinth flowers dead; yesterday icicles were dripping off roses and cholla; Siberian elm seedling unfazed.

Inside: Brazilian bougainvillea, South African aptenia, kalanchoë and rochea weed.

Animal sightings: Rabbit tracks Friday morning; some flies hatched; five head of cattle were brought to graze a fallow field near the village.

Weather: Thursday night rain began before sunset. Then temperatures dropped. Several inches of snow fell on layers of ice that broke branches along the main road and bent pines, Siberian elms and my largest spirea and rose of Sharon. Friday, enough ice melted for the shrubs to spring back, but Saturday morning the thermometer on my front porch read 18 degrees. It’s still March with 12:46 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Every spring since I’ve lived here, some short spikes with white heads have bloomed near the post office in April and May. This year, they bolted sooner.

Since I didn’t recognize them from my Michigan childhood, I simply called them the white head. When I looked them up, I discovered hoary cress is new to most people: its most common name is white top.

It’s not that it’s some exotic from the far Altai. Linnaeus knew it as Lepidium draba in 1753, and various people reported it in this country in the nineteenth century. It’s simply that Cardaria draba, as it’s sometimes known, didn’t become a pest until the twentieth century, long after the vocabulary for common plants was formed.

Hoary cress owes its fluorescence to people’s desire to farm the northern great plains. In 1895, a senator from Wyoming, Joseph Carey, sponsored legislation that allowed private companies to build irrigation systems to make public lands more desirable for homesteading. The act defined desert lands as those that couldn’t produce hay, and was particularly popular in Idaho and Wyoming.

A few years later, Congress allowed the agriculture department to send people to collect foreign seeds and prepare them for use in this country. In 1897, Niels Hansen left South Dakota to prospect for alfalfa in Turkestan. His hay seed was so successful in the frigid winter of 1898-1899, that he returned in 1900 to find even better varieties.

Entrepreneurs immediately began offering Turkestan alfalfa seed, often at premium prices. However, the Russian steppes are vast, spanning modern Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Importers found the cheapest seed, usually grown in irrigated fields near western ports, while Hansen searched for seed from the most hostile areas, near Lake Baikal in the east.

By 1916, the USDA was telling farmers the seed sold as Turkestan was inferior to American strains. However, since it wasn’t given authority to regulate seed until 1939, all the agronomists could do was tell farmers the ways to recognize poor offerings. The imported stock usually was contaminated with Russian knapweed seeds which were larger than alfalfa and ivory colored. Herbert Groh believes hoary cress hid in those shipments.

Despite looking a bit like a sedum, hoary cress denies our egocentric assumption that the parts of plants we see, flowers and tree canopies, are their raison d’ètre. This mustard lives for its roots. The whitish rhizomes spread under the surface, and whenever they need more nutrients, they send up new shoots, creating dense stands that are unified systems of deep probes seeking water and dense fibrous mats a few inches below ground. Any part that’s broken off by a spade or plow can send up a new stalk to regenerate itself.

The roots, leaves and stems contain sulfurous chemicals that inhibit germination of alfalfa seed, and even prevent growth by its own seedlings. The sticky, mucilaginous, brown seeds develop new colonies at a distance from their self-aggrandizing parents.

The most persistent local plants have been those growing along the sidewalk by the post office and across the road near a concrete foundation. Last year, the grey leaves took over the gravel spread between giant yuccas and a wisteria in the next yard to the north.

The sprouts that broke ground last week may have been killed by this week’s snow and cold, but the roots will survive: they’ve adapted to Finland. Other than herbicides that destroy everything, the only way to kill alfalfa weed is discing the roots some 20" down every few weeks for several years until the seed bank is exhausted. Hoary cress blooms each spring because subterranean lifeforms usually outlast our will to eradicate them.

Notes:
Groh, Herbert. “Turkestan Alfalfa as a Medium of Weed Introduction,” Scientific Agriculture 21: 36-43:1940, cited by Zouhar.

Kiemnec, Gary L and M. L. Mcinnis. “Hoary Cress (Cardaria draba) Root Extract Reduces Germination and Root Growth of Five Plant Species,” Weed Technology 16:231-234:2002.

Oakley, R. A. and H. I. Westover. Commercial Varieties of Alfalfa, USDA Farmer’s Bulletin 757, 1916.

Zouhar, Kris. “Cardaria spp.,” US Forest Service Fire Effects Information System on-line database,2004

Photograph: Hoary cress buds near the post office, 21 March 2009.

Oxalis

What’s blooming in the area: Apricots, a few crabapples, one pink hyacinth, mossy phlox, hoary cress; tansy, tumble and purple mustard; native and common dandelion; Siberian elm in bud, arborvitae, piñon, and snakeweed greening. The truck garden was plowed early in the week, and weeds along the banks burned yesterday; so many people have been burning, the smell of smoke was strong Tuesday morning.
What’s blooming in my yard: Forsythia and oxalis; peach buds pink; first tulips, daffodils, daylilies, sweet peas, garlic chives, Maltese cross, Jupiter’s beard, tansy, and fern-leaf yarrow emerged; globe willow put out first leaves
What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, kalanchoë; rochea few flowers.
Animal sightings: First ant hills, bird standing guard on the utility pole in morning, cabbage butterfly last Sunday.
Weather: Frost Monday and Tuesday; mornings later in week around 40, and afternoons rose to near 70; last rain 3/13/09; 12:16 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: The first flowers of spring are often weeds: dandelions, tansy mustard, the Oxalis that poked out last Sunday near my back porch. Usually domesticated plants wait until conditions stabilize, but this year’s early warmth fooled the five-petaled yellow perennial.
Wood sorrels are particularly sensitive to heat: I don’t usually see their quarter-inch flowers until the first of May, when they retire by midday. Scientists aren’t sure if the plants respond more to light, heat, or internal circadian rhythms, but anyone who has one knows the alternating sets of three leaves fold into pyramids at night, on cloudy days, when temperatures rise, and when they’re touched.
The little Oxalis began as a native wildflower that moved into greenhouses where its shamrock leaves spread along earthen floors. When its flat brown seeds settle in small pots used for perennials like purple coneflower, it shoulders aside the seedlings in its quest for food, water, and light. However, when it appears in larger containers with shrub cuttings like azaleas, it has little affect on the health of its host.
Today the plant is ubiquitous, but it’s provenance is obscure because botanists have used small differences to define discrete species, then applied the same terms for different variants, and now are grouping them all into a single class. Today only the more aggressive creeping rhizome, Oxalis corniculata, is separated from my stricta which starts out erect, then flops from the point where its branches emerge from the main stem. The reason the distinction survives may arise less from biology than the fact the first is seen as more difficult to eradicate in cool nurseries.
When I see people identify an Oxalis, I’m more sure of their personal experience than I am reality. I know John Josselyn saw a yellow wood sorrel in New England in the 1670’s, but I don’t know if Edward Tuckerman is correct to identify it as the creeping species. I’m sure the Cherokee use wood sorrel for a variety of purposes, but don’t know who is correct, Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey, who suggest they use corniculata, or Myra Jean Perry who thinks they use my plant.
The differences don’t seem to matter much: people have substituted one species for another without serious consequences. Plains tribes use both the purple-flowered violacea and my yellow one as food for their children and horses. In Poland after World War II, children who ate the local white-petaled acetosella would eat the alien stricta when it appeared.
John Gerard used the local acetosella in a sauce to treat stomach problems in sixteenth century England, while Nicholas Culpepper recommended boiling the leaves into a red syrup for blood and ulcer problems in the mid 1650's. In this country, the Santa Clara chewed roots of the purple-flowered species for diarrhea, while San Ildefonso chewed the leaves to treat sores and swellings. Nearby Spanish-speakers boiled the leaves to expel worms.
By the end of the nineteenth century, King's American Dispensatory suggested both stricta and violacea were acceptable substitutes for the European acetosella, and found them useful against scurvy. However, every writer warns against overuse. The ascorbic acid converts into oxalic acid, which can bond with calcium in the body to produce kidney stones.
I think my Oxalis is a stricta that arrived from Iowa with a field-grown raspberry. I spotted the leaves in 2001 and 2003, and have seen the flowers every year since 2007 in the same place. In friendlier climes, it pollinates itself and the narrow green pods expel seed, sometimes spreading into a nuisance. Here I think a single yellow wood sorrel root has managed to survive in the drip line as one of the more benign signs of spring, one that blooms fitfully season after season without producing scratches or rashes.
Notes:Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's; 1826 edition republished in 1981.Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Felter, Harvey Wickes and John Uri Lloyd. King's American Dispensatory, 1898, Henriette Kress’s copy available online.Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.Josselyn, John. New England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country, 1672, reprinted by University of Michigan, University Library with 1865 notes by Edward Tuckerman.Luczaj, Lukasz. "Archival Data on Wild Food Plants Used in Poland in 1948," Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 4:4:2008.Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, and on-line database, includes Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919; Paul B. Hamel and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History, 1975; and Myra Jean Perry, Food Use of "Wild" Plants by Cherokee Indians, 1975.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Photograph: Yellow Oxalis flower, 15 March 2009.

Juniper

Local signs of spring: Some apricots blooming in village; prairie, hay fields, and purple asters greening; daffodils, mustard tansy, dandelions, and cheat grass up.

What’s happening in my yard: Roses, vinca, bouncing Bess, and chrysanthemums putting our new leaves; hyacinths growing; iris and grape hyacinths coming up.

What’s blooming inside: Bougainvillea, aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë; snake plant put out new sprout.

Animal sightings: Horses brought in to pasture.

Weather: Storm sat over area for a week, early morning temperatures alternated between 20 and 40, rain finally fall Friday; 11:56 hours of daylight.

Weekly update: The first signs of spring have arrived - stuffy noses, runny eyes, sneezes.

Each year I listen to friends blame it on juniper blossoms. I fully sympathize with their miseries but I have a problem with the idea of an evergreen with flowers. Too many artists’ renderings of dinosaurs in swamps surrounded by giant ferns, mastodons feeding on grass, and graceful mammals cavorting with flowers and insects impressed on my young mind that conifers do not bloom.

They may have seed cones, but they don’t have petals. That was the great dividing line in plant development between the gymnosperms and the angiosperms. Indeed, it was the drying of the earth that led to the great revolution. The sperm of earlier plants moved through water. When water disappeared, natured adapted with pollen that sailed through the air.

The long extinct seed ferns that developed in the coal swamps of West Virginia in the upper Devonian were the first to use pollen. Imprints from characteristic leaves for the cypress family have been found in upper Triassic, and evidence of two existing junipers from the upper Cretaceous. The local sabina subgroup of junipers with serrated leaf edges appeared with the Madro-tertiary geoflora of the Eocene and early Oligocene in México.

Last weekend I walked out to the nearest juniper on the prairie to see what it is, in fact, they are doing this time of year that causes so much suffering.

The male tree had clusters of brown leaves mixed in with the green that looked like piñon nuts from a distance. The strobili had emerged last fall, and over the winter pollen had developed in sacs on their underbellies. When the cones on distant female trees reach puberty, their end scales will part and sticky droplets form. Soon after, these pollen sacs will open and fling their life force to the wind.

At the time it leaves the tree, the tiny, spherical pollen grain is shrouded in two layers. When it lands, the thick inner, intine layer absorbs moisture from the droplet and ruptures. That, in turn, expels proteins from cavities in the outer, exine layer. If the female recognizes the chemicals as gifts from an appropriate suitor, the drop will desicate and the pollen grain will be pulled into the female cone for fertilization.

When a misguided pollen grain lands in a moist human space, it still sends out protein scouts to determine if a pollen tube can follow. The first time, the body generates an allergen specific antibody that lodges on the surface of a mast cell. The next time a grain of pollen intrudes, a waiting immunoglobulin E antibody snatches it. When enough are captured, the underlying mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory substances that trigger allergic symptoms.

In Santa Fe, where temperatures are more moderate and water more plentiful than here in the valley, one-seeded junipers grow close enough along the road to form pygmy forests. Nature could perpetuate itself there with mild breezes. Here in the grasslands, hundreds of feet separate Juniperus monosperma trees. Everywhere pollens are released for weeks, and travel miles.

Outsiders arrive in northern New Mexico awed by what they see as an ancient land. In fact, the Oligocene mountains are so young they haven’t yet eroded enough to produce foothills. Instead, dumps of Santa Fe composites parallel the volcanic Jemez and uplifted Sangre de Cristo. The barren ridges and lower mountain sides have been colonized by a far older life form, the junipers. Each year unsuspecting latecomers find themselves trapped in nature’s primeval rite of spring when the very air they breathe is turned into a great fertility bath of floating pollen.

Notes:
Upper Devonian - 360-374 million years ago, Appalachians, seed ferns
Upper Triassic - 213-231 million years ago, desert, cypress family
Upper Cretaceous - 65-97.5 million years ago, swamps, junipers
Eocene - 38.0-54.9 million years ago - arid southwest, sabina clade of junipers
Oligocene - 24.6-38 million years ago - Sangre de Cristo uplift, first Jemez fault

Adams, Robert P. "The Serrate Leaf Margined Juniperus (Section Sabina) of the Western Hemisphere: Systematics and Evolution Based on Leaf Essential Oils and Random Amplified Polymorphic DNAs (RAPDs)," Biochemical Systematics and Ecology 28:975-989:2000.

Emberlin, Jean C. "Aerobiology" in William W. Busse and Stephen T. Holgate, Asthma and Rhinitis, volume 2, 2000 edition.

Mugnaini, Serena , Massimo Nepi, Massimo Guarnieri, Beti Piotto, and Ettore Pacini. "Pollination Drop in Juniperus communis: Response to Deposited Material," Annals of Botany 100:1475-81:2007, describes female behavior.

Stewart, Wilson N. and Gar W. Rothwell. Paleobotany and the Evolution of Plants, 1993 second edition.

Wodehouse, Roger P. Hayfever Plants, 1945, describes male behavior.

Photograph: Male one-seeded juniper with brown pollen cones between serrated green leaves, 7 March 2009.

Irrigation Ditch

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose, lilac and chamisa stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, dandelions; three men working on new ditches, two have piles of block near their fences.
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: Bougainvillea, aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Heavy clouds kept birds in early mornings.
Weather: Too warm, too dry, too windy, too soon; couple trees started to bloom near the river; piles of Russian thistle collecting; all signs of rain that hit my roof early Saturday were gone by daybreak; 11:35 hours of daylight.
Weekly update: Ditch meetings are remembered as times when the community came together to elect its leaders and plan its communal work. The one a week ago was more like a corporate shareholders meeting, with an irrigation district manager who reported the previous year’s activities, provided status on construction projects, and announced when water would begin running.
People also like to remember that work as some festive spring weekend. Alvar Carlson said the original ditches often began when an ox gouged a furrow with a wooden blade that men deepened with spades. They piled the dirt they dredged along the banks to increase the carrying capacity of the ditches. In the 1930's, men spent at least thirty days each summer repairing the village ditch and twenty days on the one along the main road.
When settlers were expanding into lands between the Santa Clara and San Ildefonso in the 1730's, the Santa Cruz alcalde, Domingo Vigil, expected the San Ildefonso to extend the ditch in exchange for an agreement that a disputed grant stay within the control of specified local people. When San Ildefonso complained to the colonial governor, Juan Domingo de Bustamante ruled the natives couldn’t be forced to clean the ditch.
Constructing and maintaining secondary ditches is still unpleasant, hard labor. Last spring I ran into a drunk near the post office who told me he’d just returned from helping clean one of the ditches. He wanted me to cash a casino chip he claimed had been used to pay him.
Some ditches in my area are underground, but there are still many open sections where Russian thistles and trash collect. The association hires a man with a backhoe to do the major cleaning, including killing stumps. When a hay farmer at the ditch meeting asked why he couldn’t get water as early as the ditches nearer town, he was told scheduling that clean-up depended on how late the spring winds were blowing in new tumbleweeds.
Last summer our mayordomo offered to sell me some of the water rights the irrigation district had been buying to prevent Española and Santa Fé from obtaining them as a ruse to claim the water. One man down hill from me apparently took him up and is now busily repeating the work of the pioneers.
First, he or the ditch managers, hired a backhoe to bury a pipe from his property to the main ditch. Next, someone had to patch the crack that left in the county pavement. Then the man installed a pump to pull the water uphill to his property. Recently, he used a backhoe blade to level his land enough so water can be effective. This past week he dug another ditch going uphill the length of his property to distribute water and had dirt delivered to compensate for his scraped away topsoil. In five weeks, he will be able to connect some gated irrigation pipe to his pump and call the mayordomo to open the valve to water his small holding.
It’s hard to see how my neighbor can ever recover the costs of his investment. But when the water runs, perhaps it will be enough to show his kids. A friend of mine in town, where water is available on a schedule rather than on demand, tells me:
"We get water on Wednesday thru Saturday. From that point on, we simply share the water by taking our individual turn when our neighbor is done watering. For instance, when my neighbor next to me is watering, I simply ask him to let me know when he is done watering. When he is done, he releases the flow to me and I water my yard. When I'm done, if any other neighbor needs the water, I let them know when I'm done and release the water to them. If nobody needs the water after I'm done, I go to the main ditch and close the water flow down to our street. Over the years, it’s been kind of fun to water because it seems to keep our neighborhood close in that we get to chat and visit when we're exchanging water. I love it when the water is released to us. I've been working with water and crops almost all of my life and is something that I truly love. I should have been a farmer."
Even when the latest technology replaces the forgotten drudgery of the past, new ditch memories are made every summer.
Notes:Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990.
Twichell, Ralph Emerson. The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 1, 1914, on 1730's.
US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.
Photograph: Our local ditch filled with Russian thistles and pigweed; the concrete feeds through a metal culvert that goes under the road and is faced with plywood to stabilize the bank; 28 February 2009.

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.