Rock Soapwort

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, catalpa, Austrian copper, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, fern-leaf globemallow, cheese, tumble mustard, stickseed, sweet pea, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, milkweed, oxalis, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, bindweed, perky Sue, blanket flower, fleabane, goatsbeard, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, brome and three awn grasses; buds on stickleaf; datura visible; large brown patches of dead tansy mustard and cheat grass.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Dr Huey, Lady Banks and miniature roses, privet, German iris, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, chocolate flower, coreopsis, Moonshine yarrow; buds on butterfly weed, anthemis and Parker’s Gold yarrow.
Looking east: Floribunda and Persian yellow roses, peony, oriental poppy, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on hollyhock.
Looking south: Beauty bush, weigela, pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses, raspberry; buds of daylily; mushrooms sprouted.
Looking west: Flax, catmint, baptista; buds on sea lavender and white beardtongue.
Bedding plants: Both moss rose and sweet alyssum still sparse after transplanting.
Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Cottontail, hummingbird, gecko, bumblebee on pinks, small bee on rugosa, fly in Persian yellow, mosquitoes, large black harvester and small red ants; robins near village; Jack rabbit came in from the prairie Wednesday.
Weather: Hard rain last Sunday night left water in the prairie and the needle grass immediately turned a brighter green. Rain continued off and on since, while the furnace came on when morning temperatures fell into the low 40's; 15:43 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Rock garden has been used to describe everything from alpine beds that reproduce conditions above the timberline to rocks strewn among bedding plants. They all have their roots in the Romantic movement that preferred scenes of dramatic nature to the orderly classicism of formal beds.
In one of the first alpine manuals, published in 1870, William Robinson suggested Saponaria ocymoides would fall "over the face of rocks" and was "excellent for planting on ruins and old walls." In this country, Louise Beebe Wilder believed "no edging is prettier than large irregular stones sunk part way in the earth" with plants like Saponaria ocymoides creeping and tumbling over them.
American interest in rock gardens had increased when steam engines made it possible for them to visit the Alps, the Mediterranean coast and Italy in the nineteenth century. Plants became souvenirs that showed they not only had done the Grand Tour, but had absorbed a superior aesthetic.
In 1886, the Scientific American told its readers the low-growing soapwort could be seen "hanging from the rocks by the roadside" when they drove out from Luchon in the Pyrenees. This year a tour group promises visitors they will see them blooming in May at roadside stops when they climb up from a Catalonian monastery near les Avellanes.
I know I was tempted after I saw pictures of lavender pink flowers spilling down a wall in one of the inexpensive catalogs that promote them as Mediterranean or Cote D’Azur Pinks. I installed my first plants in late summer of 1995 at the far south end of my retaining wall where they could fall over the edge. They didn’t survive the winter. I tried again in 2004, and this time planted two seedlings in spring farther north and below the wall. I added three more two years later that didn’t survive.
The winds are severe in both places, but the one area has more shade. Despite those pictures of perennials basking in the Mediterranean sun, they don’t like the heat and drought of early summer. Each year they begin blooming the end of April, first of May and stop in mid-June. Some years the leaves turn brown. Alan Armitage says they won’t survive southeastern humid summers, but here, after the monsoons have mediated the climate, they produce scattered flowers until the end of August.
The member of the carnation family is native to the lower elevations from the Pyrenees to the Austrian Alps, and grows down to the coast and on the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. The reason so many tourists notice them is they are one of the first plants to colonize disturbed land like that created by their carriage roads. Researchers found they were abundant the second year after a fire in the Swiss Alps around 4000' while Angelika Schwabe’s team thought grazing might explain their increase since the 1930's in the Inner Alps of northern Italy.
The Saponarias, with their open heads of long-tubed five-petaled flowers, may not need rocks to flourish, but they must have winter. If they disdain the south, a Belgian team found they can grow nearly 1,500 miles north of their natural range. Jelitto tells growers if the dark brown seeds don’t germinate within three to four weeks, to cool the flats, and that young plants need three to ten weeks of cool temperatures to bloom. In my west facing eastern bed, the persistent leaves turn maroon in cold weather.
It doesn’t much matter if one plants these long-blooming flowers to create a rugged subalpine garden or if one simply wants a groundcover that can fill lots of bare ground, sooner or later the aesthetic and pragmatic converge. I might have wanted a Mediterranean look with soapworts hanging over the retaining wall, but they were going to survive where conditions best fit their needs and I could either figure that out by planting them in different places or fill my empty spaces with something else.
Notes:Catalogs for Van Bourgondien (Cote d’ Azur Pinks) and Spring Hill Nurseries (Mediterranean Pinks); website for Jelitto Staudensamen GmbH."Alpine Flowers in the Pyrenees," Scientific American Supplement, 561:110-114:2 October 1886.Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.Moser, B. and T Wohlgemuth. "Which Species Dominate Early Post-fire Vegetation in the Central Alps and Why?," International Conference on Fire Research, 2006.Naturetrek Tour Itinerary. "Catalonia - Eastern Pyrenees," 2009, available on-line.Robinson, William. Alpine Flowers for English Gardens, 1870.Schwabe, Angelika, Anselm Kratochwil, and Sandro Pignatti. "Plant Indicator Values of a High-phytodivesity Country (Italy) and Their Evidence, Exemplified for Model Areas with Climatic Gradients in the Southern Inner Alps," Flora 202:339-349:2007.Van der Veken, Sebastiaan, Martin Hermy, Mark Vellend, Anne Knapen, and Kris Verheyen. "Garden Plants Get a Head Start on Climate Change," Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:212-216:2008.Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilder. My Garden, 1916.
Photograph: Rock soapwort growing in front of a railroad timber retaining wall, 28 May 2009.

Locoweed

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, Russian olive, Austrian copper, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, snowball peaked, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, yucca, peony, fern-leaf globemallow, hoary cress, tumble mustard, stickseed, alfalfa, purple loco, scarlet beeblossom, oxalis, bindweed, blue gilia, perky Sue, fleabane, goatsbeard, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, cheat, single and three awn grasses; buds on stickleaf; buffalo gourd, purslane, tahokia daisy and ragweed up.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Black locust, Dr Huey, Lady Banks and miniature roses, German iris, golden-spur columbine, chocolate flower and Moonshine yarrow; buds on catalpa, privet, hartweg, anthemis and Parker’s Gold yarrow; squash up.
Looking east: Persian yellow rose, oriental poppy, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, California poppy, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on hollyhock and Maltese cross; tomatillo up.
Looking south: Beauty bush, weigela, rugosa and rugosa hybrids, spirea, raspberry; Sensation cosmos
germinating.
Looking west: Flax; buds on catmint and sea lavender; last of the herbaceous perennials emerged, shasta daisy and perennial four o’clock; buddleia coming up from the ground.
Bedding plants: Moss rose.
Inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, humming bird, bumblebee on Apache plume, bees and flies around beauty bush, orange butterfly on locust, vicious mosquitoes, small moths, large black harvester and small red ants; cow mooing somewhere nearby Wednesday morning
Weather: Rain off and on since Thursday has penetrated a few inches into my drive, but left barely a trace in the native yard. Plants that formed their buds last year, like daffodils and spirea, had a great spring, if they missed the days with extreme temperatures; those like needle grass that rely on current conditions are having an average season. 15:33 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Ranchers have no problems recognizing loco weed: it’s the purplish flowered legume, with pairs of leaves spaced along its stems like feathers and odd leaflets at the tips, that kills animals by attacking their neurological systems, enlarging their hearts and congesting organs like those used for digestion.
Discovering the source of the poison was an early conundrum for the agriculture department. In 1909, Charles Marsh identified the connection to locoweeds and noted the similarity between locoism and problems caused by Swainsona in Australia. Researchers first suspected barium was the toxic agent that caused horses to treat small stones like boulders and cows to stagger. Then they investigated selenium, but found it only produced some of symptoms and didn’t appear in all areas where livestock were sickened.
Finally, in 1979, Steven Colegate’s team identified the active chemical in the Australian plant as swainsonine, and scientists like Russell Molyneaux and Lynn James confirmed its existence in the two southwestern locoweed genuses, Astragalus and Oxytropis. Now Karen Braun’s group has found a fungus living within the plants is the actual producer of the dangerous toxin.
I have no way of knowing if the Oxytropis lambertii currently blooming in my drive is dangerous. Biologists culture their samples to detect the fungus. However, Michael Ralphs’ team found only three lambertii populations of one subspecies growing in southern Utah, Arizona and southwestern New Mexico contained swainsonine. They found none of the chemical in any of the plants from the rest of Utah, eastern Colorado, and northeastern New Mexico.
Even though lambertii is the most common locoweed in New Mexico, it probably needs more moisture than exists in this area, at least 16" a year. The taprooted perennials didn’t appear until I graveled my drive, and may either have come with the truck or been lying in the soil waiting for the right conditions.
Right now, one is in the drive outside my front porch that’s survived repair trucks, one hides in the grass at the edge of the gravel to the west, and two are at the eastern edge. There have never been more than four clumps, though ones have come and gone, and they’ve never strayed from soil with water trapped by gravel. This year, two have colonized, perhaps from underground runners.
The Astragalus growing outside my neighbor’s bark-covered fence may be as harmless and as accidental. The colony didn’t appear until he built the fence and planted some fruit trees. Again, the seed may have come with the wood or been waiting for ideal conditions. The pinkish, introverted pea flowers bloomed the past two weeks downslope from where he waters the trees.
My purple flowers with white reflector blotches on their upper petals differ from his because the individual florets are spaced along bare, straight stems while his smaller racemes cluster at the tips. My Oxytropis rise from basal rosettes of five widely separated pairs of grey-looking leaflets on stalks that may stand three inches off the ground and often persists through the winter. The leaf stalks with five to eight pairs on his Astragalus splay from stem joints that also hold the flowers. There are more leaf stems than flowers, and they reach beyond the color to catch the light. My leaf segments are flattened narrow lances with pointed tips, while his are narrower, folded down the center and blunted at the ends.
Ranchers really don’t care about such variability in nature. Marsh told them all they needed to know. The seed banks that produced my flowers and those of my neighbors make locoweed nearly impossible to eradicate. It will be a while before the discovery people should control an invisible fungus on the open range has any affect on livestock losses.
Notes:Braun, Karen, Jennifer Romero, Craig Liddell, and Rebecca Creamer. "Production of Swainsonine by Fungal Endophytes of Locoweed," Mycological Research 107:980-988:2003.Colegate, Steven M., P. R. Dorling, and C. R. Huxtable. "A Spectroscopic Investigation of Swainsonine an Alpha Mannosidase Inhibitor Isolated from Swainsona-canescens," Australian Journal of Chemistry 32:2557-2264:1979.Marsh, Charles Dwight. The Locoweed Disease of the Plains, 1909.Molyneaux, Russell J. and Lynn F. James. "Loco Intoxication: Indolizidine Alkaloids of Spotted Locoweeds (Astragalus lentiginosus)," Science 216:190-191:1982.Ralphs, Michael H., Stanley L. Welsh, and Dale R. Gardner. "Distribution of Locoweed Toxin Swainsonine in Populations of Oxytropis lambertii," Journal of Chemical Ecology 28:701-707:2002.
Photograph: Oxytropis lambertii at the east end of my drive, 19 May 2009; the pink flower held at the lower left is the last of the season from my neighbor’s Astragalus.

Scarlet Globemallow

What’s blooming in the area: Austrian copper and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, skunkbush, yucca, peony, oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, nits-and-lice, hoary cress, tumble mustard, stickseed, wooly and common loco, scarlet beeblossom, oxalis, blue gilia, alfilerillo, perky Sue, goatsbeard, native and common dandelion; needle, rice, June and three awn grass; some cheat grass turning brown.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Black locust, Lady Banks rose, German iris, golden-spur columbine, first chocolate flower; buds on Moonshine yarrow; grape leafing; cherries, sand cherries, and Siberian pea pods forming.
Looking east: Snowball, Persian yellow rose, winecup, mossy phlox, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, last year’s snapdragons, rock rose, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on hollyhock and sea pink.
Looking south: Beauty bush, rugosa rose, spirea peaked; zinnias germinating.
Looking west: Vinca, flax; leadplant up.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum.
Inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Long red snake, rabbit, humming bird, other birds heard but not seen, gecko, bumble bee on locust, ladybug on goatsbeard, miller type moth, large black harvester and small red ants.
Weather: Spring winds, summer heat; yesterday’s winds and clouds left little water; last useful rain 5/03/09; 15:11 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Delicate is not the first thing I associate with the mallow family. Maybe smores by the camp fire or hollyhocks behind a fence, but not translucent etherealness.
Scarlet globemallow is a useless name for the flowers blooming in my yard: they’re the same color as the copper globemallows that will appear later this summer. I distinguish them by their habits. The current plants stay short with silvery, divided leaves and dense racemes, while the later ones get tall with widely spaced flowers on woody stems and leathery, serrated leaves.
The one remains a perpetual youth, the other becomes the wizened crone who spent too long in the sun. Sphaeralcea coccinea blooms in May, with occasional flowers in August and September; angustifolia comes into bloom in late July and stays around until late September. The one reopens each morning, the other seems forever available.
Neither are scarlet or copper, but tangerine. The five petals of the late summer cups have the uniformity of paint, while the early flowers are luminescent with white bases beneath the characteristic, protruding stamen columns. A few on the prairie are darker, while one that appeared in my yard in the middle 1990's was white. It survived until a bad storm in 2000 sent sheets of water down the drive that broke away the soil surrounding soil the basal leaves.
The currently blooming perennials have adapted to the short-grass prairies west of the Mississippi, ranging from Chihuahua to the grasslands of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while the other is native to the desert scrub of the southwest from Colorado through central México.
Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley reported the first, which they still called Malvastrum coccineum in 1915, grew in the "open hills and plains, in the Upper Sonoran zone" throughout the state, while the other, which they identified as Sphaeralcea lobata, was found on the "open hills and in river valleys, in the Lower and Upper Sonoran zones" and was a nuisance in the irrigated fields of the lower Rio Grande.
In my yard the hard brown seeds of the more exquisite one have germinated in the needle grass where there’s a bit more water. Along the road to the north, they stay back from the shoulder. One group has spread through its rhizomatous roots along the tracks left by off road vehicles. In the prairie, away from the arroyo and ranch road, a few have emerged from deep taproots next to bunches of grass where wind currents dropped the seeds.
The elusive globemallow may be the atypical graceling among the mallows, but it still has the family chemistry. Most Malvaceae contain mucilage that forms a protective film over inflamed tissue. The Lakota chewed roots of the prairie plant to create a lotion to protect their hands from fire and scalding during ceremonies, while the Santa Clara used powdered roots of the arid species to treat snake bites and "sores in which considerable pus appears."
The Tewa speakers also used the mucilage from powdered root skins to make face paint and associated it with the medicines used for broken arms and legs. William Dunmire and Gail Tierney report Picuris used the roots of the early summer plant to make castes for broken bones, while Santo Domingo used an unidentified species as the bonding agent in calcimine house paints and Taos mixed the mucilage with mud to harden their floors.
Local people may have treated the two plants interchangeably and botanists may have taken a while seeing through variations that didn’t connote species, but there does remain a difference between the piqués of an ephemeral flower that comes back year and year, despite the hazards of southwestern life, and its plodding cousin.
Notes: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 Dilwyn J Rogers, Lakota Names and Traditional Uses of Native Plants by Sicangu (Brule) People in the Rosebud Area, South Dakota, 1980; Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 1919, and Shelly Katheren Kraft, Recent Changes in the Ethnobotany of Standing Rock Indian Reservation, 1990.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.
Photograph: Scarlet globemallow, 9 May 2009.

Baby Blue Iris

What’s blooming in the area: Last apples, Austrian copper, Persian yellow and Dr. Huey roses, Apache plume, rosy-purple flowered shrubs, skunkbush, first oriental poppy, fern-leaf globemallow, nits-and-lice, hoary cress, purple, tumble and tansy mustard, stickseed, loco, oxalis, some type of short lavender phacelia, blue gilia, alfilerillo, perky Sue, goatsbeard, native and common dandelion, June, cheat and three awn grass; buds on hollyhock; Siberian elm has invaded one of the active hay fields.
What’s blooming in my yard: Lilac peaked, forsythia, spirea, Siberian pea, tulips, grape hyacinth, German and Baby Blue iris, vinca, mossy phlox, coral bells, cheddar pink, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, yellow alyssum, flax, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on some roses, snowball, beauty bush, sea pink, and Moonshine yarrow; tamarix, sand cherry and Russian sage leafing; Illinois bundle flower, lilies, butterfly weed and baptista up; pied snapdragon made it through the winder.
Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum.
Inside: South African aptenia, kalanchoë and zonal geranium; another new snake plant sprouted.
Animal sightings: Snake, rabbit, birds, gecko, bees, dragonfly, small moth, baby grasshopper, harvester and small red ants; quail and hummingbirds are back. Some noisy black bird, smaller than a starling, has staked out the peach this year; hopefully it eats grasshoppers.
Weather: Bare root plants that didn’t go out until after the last frost are in shock because they didn’t have enough time to settle before this week’s afternoon temperatures rose for hours into the low 80's; windy yesterday; last rain 5/03/09; 14:54 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Iris are quintessential passalong plants. They spread through rhizomes that form impenetrable woody brown mats that must be thinned to prevent the plants from choking themselves. Once they go dormant in summer, little can harm them. Gertrude Jekyll used to take a plasterer’s hammer to hers, while a woman I knew in Michigan took some she found in a discard pile that had been exposed for months.
My first Michigan plants were some coffee-colored German iris that came in a shopping bag from a friend who’d bought a home with a neglected garden in rural Metamora. My first iris here were some tall blues I salvaged from my abandoned yard in Abilene, Texas.
A few years later, a man in Los Alamos gave me a grocery bag of root sections he’d thinned for his in-laws in October that he said were Baby Blues. They’re blooming now, about nine inches high and a pale, almost silvery blue with white beards.
Those particular iris are probably the result of more swaps and trades among friends than can be recounted. Michael Foster used to receive rhizomes from American missionaries and others traveling in the middle east which he would add to his iris garden in Cambridge, England, before trying to cross them with other iris, just to see. When friends came to visit, Laetitia Munro says, they usually left with bags filled with his surplus.
Some of his crosses produced spectacular blooms because some of his gifts had mutated into tetraploids with double the usual chromosomes. He called one Amasia for the area in Turkey where it was found; another, Ricardi, was named for its collector in Palestine.
After he died in 1907, Robert Wallace sold some of Foster’s hybrids through his Essex nursery, while William Dykes used his notes to publish The Genus Iris in 1913. By 1920 there were so many tetraploid varieties being offered under so many names, a group of concerned gardeners and nurserymen met in New York to bring order with the American Iris Society.
Despite the publication of their first list of valid names in 1922, people continued to trade their rhizomes and experiments with friends. In the 1930's, two men swapped pollen to overcome problems with crossing species with asynchronous bloom periods. Paul Cook’s Tennessee-grown German irises flowered the same time as the earlier blooming dwarf pumilas were opening for Geddes Douglas in Indiana.
Their lilliputs sparked another flurry of breeding activity as others sought to produce what the AIS renamed standard dwarfs. The flowers remained the size of germanica and the leaves still reached the lower flowers, but the stems shrank to hold two or three closely spaced buds that looked good in mass plantings. Lilliput falls flared out so they and their beards could be seen from above.
My plants are clones of something that was growing in White Rock in 2000, but they are not identical. Some have horizontal petals, some do not. A few have darker blue veins on their falls, while others are more purple. It may be color varies by minute differences in soil and exposure in my yard, or that the early ones differ because temperatures and sun angles are lower, but it also may be that the inherent variability of irises has reappeared after the plants survived outside the standardizing conditions of the horticultural industry.
I’m not sure Baby Blue is a registered name; today it’s used for a cultivar of the Alaskan Iris setosa. It doesn’t really matter: passalong plants almost always acquire folk names. Like Foster I sometimes associate mine with places like Metamora and Abilene, but more often I call them by the memories they evoke of Ruth and Steve and Claude.
Notes:
Austin, Claire. Irises: A Gardener's Encyclopedia, 2005.Hobhouse, Penelope. Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening, 1983, compilation of writings by Jekyll with commentary by Hobhouse, including quotation from page 225.Munro, Laetitia Munro. "Notable Irisarians: Sir Michael Foster," available on-line.
Photograph: Baby Blue iris after last weekend’s rain, with grape hyacinths, reddish sea lavender stems from last summer, and gray Silver King artemisia leaves; one on left has horizontal outer petals, while falls on right are curved; 3 May 2009.

Grape Hyacinth

What’s blooming in the area: Apple, rosy purple flowered shrubs, iris, hoary cress, purple, tumble and tansy mustard, stickseed, golden smoke, oxalis, flax, blue gilia, perky Sue, native and common dandelion, June, cheat and three awn grass; grapes and Virginia creeper leafing; Russian thistle and pigweed coming up.

What’s blooming in my yard: Lilac, forsythia, spirea, Siberian pea, tulips, last daffodils, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, mossy phlox, coral bells, first small-leaved soapwort, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on snowball, cheddar pink, sea pink, and Jupiter’s beard; catalpa, black locust, and Rose of Sharon leafing out; purple coneflower and purple ice plant coming up; piñon transplanted in 2006 now knee-high.

Inside: South African aptenia, kalanchoë and zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, birds, gecko, red and black ants, flying grasshoppers, first stinkbug, bumblebee on Siberian pea, hummingbird bird moth on Persian lilac.

Weather: Temperatures remained above freezing all week; rain and wind yesterday; 14:31 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Infrastructure is more than dams, ditches and roads. The expansion of gardens and gardening in the nineteenth century depended as much on complex social networks as it did on faster rail and steamship transportation.

Maximilian Leichtlin, the man who introduced the grape hyacinths now blooming to the west of the house, was born in 1831 in an area where local aristocrats’ gardens had trained a cadre of local workers. The Margrave of Baden-Durlach, Karl Wilhelm, had moved his capital to Karlsruhe in 1715, then planted a lustgarten supplied with plants by Christian Thran whom he sent collecting in Algeria and Tunisia.

Karl Wilhelm’s grandson, Karl Friedrich, redesigned the gardens around 1800 and sold off the original orangery and greenhouses, no doubt to courtiers who had multiplied when he was made Grade Duke of Baden. During Leichtlin’s childhood the gardens were neglected by succeeding dukes, but were revived by Friedrich I in the 1850's. Soon after Leichtlin moved to Ghent, where he worked for Louis von Houtte’s nursery for 17 years.

Leichtlin returned to the Karlsruhe region in 1871 where he established a private garden near Baden, which had developed into a luxury spa and casino. His primary interest was bulbs, including gladiola and crocosima from southern Africa, hostas from Japan, and even a form of mariposa lily from the Sierra Nevada. Like any modern Wall Street tyro, he used the contacts and knowledge he had developed when he worked for someone else.

As soon as he knew something about a plant, he exploited the networks that were developing commercial markets by sending bulbs to important gardeners, nurseries and publishers. In 1878, Baker described his Muscari armeniacum in The Garden Chronicle in England. In 1892 Leichtlin began writing his own "Notes from Baden-Baden" for Americans reading Garden and Forest.

His rival, George Gaw, used political contacts to study the crocus. He asked British consuls in Trebizond and Erzerum in the 1880's to send him bulbs. He passed the ones he didn’t need to friends like J. E. Elwes, who in turn sent the most promising to Barr’s Nursery. They introduced a light blue flower as Muscari conicum. When the Dutch publicized a different plant with the same name, Barr renamed its Heavenly Blue.

Until international groups were organized to agree upon nomenclature, gardeners weren’t able to order bulbs, seeds or roots with the trust that has proven necessary to the spread of trade. In 1926, Kew Gardens’ Botanical Magazine determined Elwes’ plant was the same as the darker one grown by Leichtlin. Louise Beebe Wilder believed the pictures of Muscari armericum she saw in van Tubergen’s catalog looked like Heavenly Blue, but when they grew they were stronger, taller, and a "rich blue-violet in color, the teeth white but not very conspicuous."

Catalogs can still be misleading. Last fall I needed to replenish my grape hyacinths and innocently ordered Blue Spike because the suppler’s picture showed a dark blue flower. The color in my soil is much greyer. The fatter heads are both more visible and, unlike the photograph, harder for my eye to blend into a pattern.

Taxonomic agreement is still missing. Some retailers describe Blue Spike as a hybrid. One calls it a mutation, and many simply say it’s a cultivar. A few mention the flowers are sterile and won’t reproduce like the species. Unfortunately, the catalog I read wasn’t one.

I planted my first grape hyacinths in 1997. The next year there were far fewer plants, but those that survived were beginning to naturalize from bulb offsets when they were nibbled in the dry spring of 2000. The rabbit or ground squirrel ate more in 2003 and I replenished them in the fall. Again I lost a number the first year, but was seeing those best adapted to New Mexico start to come back when a gopher burrowed in the area in 2007.

Wilder loved her Heavenly Blue, but warned readers to "keep it out of the rock garden" because the seeds and bulblets make it "almost impossible to eradicate." Here, nature keeps it in check. I should have ordered the species because the qualities that make it aggressive elsewhere are the very ones I need for it to come back in after the initial die off. The quality of the modern marketing infrastructure is so high, I forget caveat emptor.

Notes:
Schmidt nursery's website has the most information on the life of Maximilian Leichtlin.

Wilder, Louise Beebe. Adventures with Hardy Bulbs, 1936, reprinted in 1990 by Collier’s American Gardening Classics series; her source for the story about Gaw is the 1926 Botanical Magazine article that redefined Heavenly Blue.

Photograph: Blue Spike grape hyacinth with smaller species grown from bulblet or seed in rear, 25 April 2009.

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.