Showy Milkweed

What’s blooming in the area: Dr. Huey, wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, buddleia, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, wide-leaved and red yuccas, lilies, daylily, red hot poker, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, Jupiter’s beard, alfalfa, brome grass; corn about 6" high.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, four-wing salt bush, showy milkweed, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, tumble mustard, alfilerillo disappearing with heat, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, gypsum phacelia peaked, woolly plantain, purple mat flower, nits and lice, goat’s head, wild licorice, loco, white sweet clover, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, native and common dandelions, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper and stickleaf; needle grass only bloomed along my drive, not in the yard or on the prairie; cottonwood cotton collecting on ground.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, raspberry, winecup mallow, coral bells, small-leaved soapwort passing, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, pink salvia; buds on baby’s breath; oriental poppy petals had white blotches Monday from whatever blew in from Arizona.

Looking south: Pasture, floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla.

Looking west: Chives, vinca, Husker red beardtongue, blue flax, catmints, Rumanian sage, flowering spurge; buds on sea lavender.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis; buds on butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan and fernleaf yarrow.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, impatiens; buds on nicotiana; peppers still struggling with the heat.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Small and large hummingbirds, house finches and other small birds, gecko, bees on catmint, cabbage butterfly, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Air smelled of burning chemicals Monday from fires to the southwest; all week the Jemez grew slowing indistinct at sundown, sometimes disappearing altogether while the sun turned red as it entered the layer of dust and ash; some mornings temperatures fell into the 40's and others they didn’t go below 60; last rain 5/19/11; 15:55 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The biggest milkweed I’ve ever seen is blooming above the village ditch.

When I get on the bank, last year’s grey, furrowed pods are as high as my nose; when I stand on the road side, they’re above my head.

This year’s flowers reach my biceps. Fuzzy leaves, 7" long and 3 1/2" wide at their base, cuddle 3" balls dotted with pale pink stars. The supporting stems are about 3/8" thick.

This showy milkweed’s larger than any in the parent colony a mile away to the southeast where plants grow about two feet in a ditch bottom and along its inner banks. The difference is that water flows through the one ditch more often than it does the other. Even though this milkweed species ranges west from the great plains, it still needs water.

We’re outside any path used by migrating monarch butterflies, so this member of the milkweed family has been free to respond to the arid environment. Leaves and stems of Asclepias speciosa contains much less latex than those of the common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, or the broadleafed Asclepias latifolia found on the edge of a monarch path in west Texas. However, they contain more than is found in the horsetail variety, Asclepias subverticillata, used by the Zuñi to the west.

While the absence of monarchs has meant a need to expend less energy to defend against predators, it has also meant the plant has to attract some other insect to fertilize its flowers. Large blossoms and great quantities of nectar are two obvious devices of allurement.

Their green centers contain consolidated reproduction units that snare the legs of unwary insects. As they free themselves, they dislodge packets of pollen which they shake off or drop when they approach the next flower.

The bee I saw land on one of the flowers was extremely cautious, approaching the cluster from the base and attacking a flower from one of its bottom points.

Unfortunately for the milkweed, the insect is likely to go to the next available flower on the plant instead of flying to another plant and a plant can’t accept its own pollen. Matthew Finer and Martin Morgan found plants they deliberately pollinated produced more pods than those in the wild where insects alone did the fertilization.

What’s surprising is that the plants they hand pollinated, but left available to insects also produced fewer pods than the ones they pollinated but covered so insects couldn’t reach them.

Susan Stone Bookman thinks the reason is showy milkweed plants have a finite ability to feed themselves and so are forced to kill off more than 95% of the flowers and potential pods. Mature pods contain two to seven times the amount of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus as young ovaries.

From this, it’s easy to see that flowers that are pollinated first would be most likely to survive than those visited later, and that afternoon fertilizations, when the plant is more stressed, would be less successful. What’s not self-evident is that, if enough time passes, Bookman found another flower in a cluster can be successfully pollinated.

While very few pods survive to tower above the living mass of grey-green leaves, the dark flat seeds they produce are extremely viable. In one test, 95% emerged the first year, most in May, and the rest before the end of July. They can even survive some time in water and still germinate.

Young seedlings concentrate on developing what will become long taproots which allow them to survive the early summer droughts that precede the monsoons. As a result, they can be choked by surrounding vegetation before their stems rise into the sun.

The milkweeds in the village landed near a fence covered by Virginia creeper. The warm weather perennials don’t put out their leaves until after the vine, and so must shove their way through their competitors every year.

Although most are single plants rising from a crown, some specimens apparently can produce additional plants from their roots when conditions require. However, the presence of nearby clones increases a plant’s problem with endogamous pollen.

Botanists raised in a world where they’re told market forces rule supreme like to do cost-benefit analysis or energy efficiency assays for plants, hoping in the process they are finding the key to evolution. Perhaps I’m a hopeless romantic when I think the lives of milkweed are more than a series of sacrificial tradeoffs made to survive an irrational climate, that their moments of grandeur are more than feeding opportunities for bees.

I know they don’t exist for my aesthetic pleasure, that the slim chance of my noticing them as I drive by is of no concern to nature. Still, such events occur and just might also aid their survival. After all the ditch holding the parent colony is cleared every year, and the milkweeds persist.

Notes:Agrawal, Anurag A., Marc J. Lajeunesse and Mark Fishbein. “Evolution of Latex and its Constituent Defensive Chemistry in Milkweeds (Asclepias): a Test of Phylogenetic Escalation,” Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 128:126–38:2008; the latex levels they found were: subverticillata: .277, speciosa: .819, syriaca: 1.540, latifolia: 5.925; all by syriaca occur in northern New Mexico.

Bookman, Susan Stone. “Costs and Benefits of Flower Abscission and Fruit Abortion in Asclepias speciosa,” Ecology 64:264–273:1983.

_____. “Effects of Pollination Timing on Fruiting in Asclepias speciosa Torr. (Asclepiadaceae),” American Journal of Botany 70:897-905:1983.

Conrad, Jim. “Milkweed Flowers,” Backyard Nature website, has a clear description of milkweed flowers with good pictures.

Finer, Matthew S. and Martin T. Morgan. “Effects of Natural Rates of Geitonogamy on Fruit Set in Asclepias speciosa (Apocynaceae): Evidence Favoring the Plant's Dilemma,” American Journal of Botany 90:1746-1750:2003.

Ulev, Elena D. “Asclepias speciosa,” 2005, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System on-line database; summarizes research of others, including W. S. Chepil’s “Germination of Seeds. I. Longevity, Periodicity of Germination, and Vitality of Seeds in Cultivated Soil,” Scientific Agriculture 26: 307-346:1946.

Photograph: Showy milkweed growing with Virginia creeper outside a 4' fence atop a village ditch bank, 5 June 2011; last year’s pods rise on the brown stalks in back; a flower opened wide at the bottom left shows the green center.

Wild Licorice

What’s blooming in the area: Catalpa, purple-flowered locust, wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, sweet pea, wide-leaved yucca, onion, daylily, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia; buds on lilies; datura up.

Beyond the walls and fences: Russian olive, tamarix, Apache plume, four-wing salt bush, common and showy milkweeds, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, tumble mustard, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, velvetweed, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, wild licorice, loco, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper. Winds have dislodged salt bushes from crevices high in the arroyo walls.

In my yard: Black locust, beauty bush, privet, Dr. Huey and rugosa roses, raspberry, chives, red hot poker, oriental poppy, winecup, vinca, golden spur columbine, coral bells, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved soapwort, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, sea pink, Maltese cross, blue flax, Hartweig and pink evening primroses, pink salvia, catmints, Rumanian sage, chocolate flower, coreopsis; buds on hollyhock, butterfly weed, bouncing Bess, Mexican hat, fernleaf yarrow, blanket flower and anthemis; morning glory seeds breaking through; daffodil leaves turning brown.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose; buds on nicotiana; tomatoes and peppers still wilting every afternoon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbird, bumble bee on baptisia and catmint, small bee on catmint, small butterfly on blue salvia, hornet on pink evening primrose, cricket, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Winds early in week, followed by smoke from the west; everything lay in suspension as the sun turned red and futile storms foregathered; last rain 5/19/11; 15:49 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Is the wild licorice blooming along the ditches near the village a native plant or a weed?

In the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooten and Paul Standley described the legume with its prominent white spikes and prickly pods as a “common weed in cultivated ground and along ditch banks.” Among the places it grew were Zuni, San Juan, Ojo Caliente, Chama and Raton.

More recently, a group in Colorado wanted to know which plants were part of the natural under story for cottonwoods, willows and salt cedars, so the land could be properly restored along the Rio Dolores when tamarix was removed. They found Glycyrrhiza lepidota was an indicator for a willow canopy.

It was the same kind of quest for the remnants of the real rather than the ruderal that sent Lenora Curtin down a wagon track near La Ciruela in the late 1940' where she found a woman with ten children near a “willow-sheltered streamlet” who told her that she drank a strained extract of crushed licorice roots three times a day from the third day after giving birth to her first menses. She especially recommended it “in cases of retention of the afterbirth.”

Curtin doesn’t reveal anything more about the woman.

Angelico Chavez, however, tells us his great-great-grandfather, José Encarnación Chaves, helped found the village in former Comanche territory after the United States established Fort Union in what is now Mora County in 1851. The mountain community, originally settled by people from places like Belen, boomed in the early 1880's when it supplied ties for construction crews of the Santa Fe railroad, then withered away. Chavez’s grandfather Eugenio moved to Wagon Mound around 1885.

More interestingly, Chavez tells us José Encarnación’s grandfather, Christóbal Chaves, married a woman whose family was from Mexico City, María Josefa Núñez. His mother was appalled when he married outsiders, but his grandchildren began to call themselves los Chaves Mexicanos. Eugenio came to believe his own grandfather had come from México.

When he died, his cousin Bernardo Chaves wanted to marry the widow. His first wife had been a plains Indian servant. She refused.

It’s traditions associated with María Josefa which are important for wild licorice. Many of the plains tribes had discovered the same thing the Europeans knew, that a saponin in the root of many members of the genus was good for treating coughs and the throat in general. Only the Europeans used it as a gynecological aid.

In first century Dioscorides included licorice in his section on herbs used as abortifacients, without explicitly saying it would serve that purpose. John Riddle found it used thereafter in formulas for treating delayed periods or removing the remains of the placenta. He believed its efficacy in the first instance arose from the fact it contains estrogenic chemicals.

Recently, Finnish researchers may have discovered why it works to clear the body after labor. They found children of women who ate licorice flavored candy when they were pregnant were more likely to have impaired cognitive functions that led to behavioral problems. The group hypothesized that the active agent, glycyrrhiza, weakens the embryonic sac and thus inhibits its ability to act as a protective barrier from harmful chemicals that pass from the mother into the fetal brain.

The knowledge of wild licorice in northern New Mexico may have developed in several phases. Since lepidota is the only species growing in North America and its range doesn’t extend into México, people raised in places like Durango may well have forgotten the plant. The trait local settlers noticed was that the root foamed in water like the amole or yucca, and so it was called amollilo.

The folk knowledge derived from the Spanish Glycyrrhiza glabra could have arrived separately, and then spread. Curtin found a woman in Chimayó who mixed it with rice in water as an emmenagogue and another who used the unstrained pulp in water to produce “a good cleanser of the uterus.”

While it’s easy to think there was one group of settlers who came with Juan de Oñate and who returned after the Pueblo revolt, the histories of Angelico Chavez’s family and of Chimayó suggest that, under that seeming uniformity, there were a great many opportunities for new ideas to be introduced and enough internal migration to diffuse medicinal lore and plants.

The woman, or women, who first used the plant didn’t have to have seen the Spanish plant, only an imported root. The preparation Curtin heard described, mashing the roots in water, is much simpler than the European technique of crushing them under millstones, then boiling them and evaporating the liquid to produce sticks.

What’s not widespread is wild licorice. Its deep, fleshy taproots demand a moist environment. While the long pea-shaped flowers are fertile, the reddish-brown seeds have relatively low germination rates. To compensate, a single plant expands into a colony from creeping rhizomes which can be transplanted.

The area where the Santa Cruz flows down from Chimayó to enter the Rio Grande was once a wetland where wild licorice could easily have grown. However, after the Santa Cruz was damned and the area drained to eradicate malaria, much of the original riparian vegetation disappeared. The plants growing along the local ditches could be survivors from that past or something introduced, a potential weed in an increasingly suburbanized community.

The transition from one status to the other, from valued native to unwanted weed, may be as slow, as subtle and undeliberate as the family legends that transformed the reality of María Josefa into the romantic grandfather of Eugenio.

Notes:
Chavez, Angelico. Chavez, 2009.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Julyan, Robert Hixson. The Place Names of New Mexico, 1996, on La Ciruela.

Korb, Julie E., Cynthia Dott and Sara Bombaci. “Understory Plant Community Variability among Tamarisk, Cottonwood, and Willow Canopy Types along a Regulated Reach of the Dolores River, Colorado - Implications for Ecological Restoration ,” Tamarix Coalition website.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes ethnographies of plains and other tribes.

Räikkönen, Katri, Anu-Katriina Pesonen, Kati Heinonen, Jari Lahti, Niina Komsi, Johan G. Eriksson, Jonathan R. Seckl, Anna-Liisa Järvenpää and Timo E. Strandberg. “Maternal Licorice Consumption and Detrimental Cognitive and Psychiatric Outcomes in Children,” American Journal of Epidemiology 170: 1137-1146:2009; most candy sold in this country as licorice in fact is flavored with anise, not licorice.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992, discusses Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica.

_____. Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, 1997.

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Wild licorice growing on a ditch bank near the village, 20 May 2011.

Glasswort (Horse Tail)

What’s blooming in the area: Wild pink, hybrid tea and miniature roses, silver lace vine, iris, red hot poker, onion, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia, sweet pea; buds on daylilies. People have been planting.

Beyond the walls and fences: Russian olive, tamarix, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, tumble mustard, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, wild licorice, loco, yellow sweet clover, perky Sue, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; buds on Virginia creeper.

In my yard: Beauty bush, privet, skunkbush, peony, oriental poppy, winecup, vinca, golden spur columbine, coral bells, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved soapwort, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, catmint, chocolate flower; buds on chives, hollyhock, sea pink, Rumanian sage, coreopsis and anthemis; cosmos and zinnia seedlings breaking through.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon; buds on nicotiana; recent transplants began having problems with the heat on Wednesday.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Gecko, bumble and small bees, hornet, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Summer began this week with warmer days and nights that changed my comfort level in the house; wind never stop for long; last rain 5/19/11; 15:40 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Aquatic plants represent an alien world to this land lubber. I discovered cattails and water lilies when I went to summer camp, but paid no attention to whatever else was growing in and around the lake.

Now, when I see something unusual growing near a river, I only know it comes from the watery world, but have no idea what it is and or how to find out.

Last May I noticed some leafless green stems about a foot high along the sides of the village ditch. The branchless stalks grew in clumps of two to six, apparently from a common base, and were crowned with dark pointed cones. Last weekend I saw them again.

They look like thin onions until you see the hollow stalk is divided into segments about an inch and half long which can be pulled apart. The main part of each section is yellow green. The areas at the slightly swollen joints are more yellow and the part just before the yellow at the top of each piece is a darker shadow of the vertical grooves.

Each ridge appears to end in a piece of dark brown fringe which merges into eight picots, usually composed of one tall central thread and two shorter, curving ones. Last week the dark tip looked like a compressed group of segments waiting to elongate. Yesterday the stems were taller and the tips much smaller.

When I put one in water, it started to smell after a few days: although it remained firm, the injured area, where it was picked, was rotting rather than putting out a root. When I left it on the counter, the round stalk dried into a rectangle. The two wide sides had deep indentations. Internally, the stem is composed of eight vascular bundles, two of which become leaves. The deep grooves may represent those critical bundles.

The nearest drawing I could find is one of the upper part of a slender glasswort in Roger Peterson’s wildflower guide for northeastern North America. He says Salicornia europeana’s found along the coast from Nova Scotia south and occasionally in the Great Lakes states.

Peterson’s drawing doesn’t look at all like the one in the guide for this area, which says slender pickleweed is found in the southwest and Texas, nor does it look like the photographs of any of the glassworts found in the United States. It’s least like the dwarf species, Salicornia bigelovii, reported in Chavez County which has shorter, plumper sections.

It doesn’t help my identification when experts say “because of the succulence of the plants and the highly reduced morphology, it has been difficult to develop a satisfactory taxonomy of the genus” or that the term europeana has been used as a synonym for “I don’t know.”

Glassworts are commonly associated with saline waters. Indeed, a group led by Gudrun Kaderit believes it diverged from a perennial Salcocornia during the Miocene in the area between the Mediterranean and Tethys seas, and that the genus proliferated as the glaciers were forming. They believe it became an annual to survive the cold. Salt moderates freezing temperatures, and the tolerance to salinity may have arisen from the same need to survive where it was slightly warmer.

Another group, this led by Anthony Davis, found glassworts tend to live in coastal salt marshes where they’re doused daily with sea water, but live on saline or alkaline soils fed by fresh groundwater.

Their life cycle is closely tied to variations in water. Different species germinate at different time between February and May when tides are less active and they can live in truncated, that is branchless, forms without enough sodium chloride. In late summer the uppermost segments produce two clusters of three flowers arranged in triangles close to the joint. Each bisexual flower produces one yellowish-brown seed which winters over near the parent.

I don’t remember what happened to the plants last June, if they disappeared with the heat, drought and competition from other plants, or if I simply didn’t notice them later. The fact the seeds are only viable for a year implies they either were able to reproduce or their population was replenished.

The local ditch was originally dug by Spanish-speaking settlers to divert the Santa Cruz river. It became part of a network of inland waterways when the river was damned below Chimayó in the 1920's to better capture the snow melt and provide more reliable irrigation all summer. As it is, the ditch is relatively dry in winter and alternates between being full and draining during the summer in ways similar to coastal tides.

In southeastern Alberta, Lloyd Keith discovered that when fresh water was impounded it raised the level of the water table and permitted water from the saltier aquifer to flow into man-made lakes. As the water became more saline, the surrounding vegetation began to change, with glassworts appearing in some places.

I don’t know anything about the groundwater in Chimayó, but I know my well had 78 milligrams of sodium per liter in 2002. While that’s below the 1,900 found in standard sea water, it’s above the one to two percent solution found optimal for many species by Davy.

It’s actually easier to understand how such an obscure member of the goosefoot family could arrive in the local acequia than it is to name it. The reservoir is now managed by the Bureau of Land Management, who has turned it into a recreation area and stocked it with trout.

Boats are promiscuous. Texas fishermen may stop in Chavez County on their way to Lake Mead. Some locals go from lake to lake within the state. Any seed can hitch a ride on the bottom, on a trailer tire, or in a can of muddy water.

As often happens with wild flowers too insignificant to be included in field guides, I’m left to call this anything I choose, until someone corrects me, even if the name is fanciful or wrong. As Gertrude Stein suggested, the name doesn’t matter if its thereness is there. And glasswort* is definitely there.

Correction, 6/5/11: Vicki (see comment) recognized this as Equistem hyemale, commonly known as scouring rush, a member of the only surviving genus of a group of very ancient, primitive vascular plants. It is mentioned by Wooten and Standley, but is not in Peterson or the other field guides for the region.

The only thing above that is specific to glasswort is the description of the vascular bundles. The rest is based on observation or are comments on the locale.

In the last week the plants have grown at least another foot.

Notes: Water test done by National Testing Laboratories of Cleveland.

Ball, Peter W. “Salicornia Linnaeus” on eFloras’ Flora of North America website; includes the quotation.

Davy, A. J., G. F. Bishop and C. S. B. Costa. “Salicornia L. (Salicornia pusilla J. Woods, S. ramosissima J. Woods, S. europaea L., S. obscura P.W. Ball & Tutin, S. nitens P.W. Ball & Tutin, S. fragilis P.W. Ball & Tutin and S. dolichostachya Moss),” Journal of Ecology 89:681-707:2001.

Kadereit, Gudrun, Peter Ball, Svetlana Beer, Ladislav Mucina, Dmitry Sokoloff, Patrick Teege, Ahmet E. Yaprak and Helmut Freitag. “A Taxonomic Nightmare Comes True: Phylogeny and Biogeography of Glassworts (Salicornia L., Chenopodiaceae),” Taxon 56:1143-1170:2007.

Keith Lloyd B. “Some Effects of Increasing Soil Salinity on Plant Communities,” Canadian Journal of Botany 36:79-89:1958:

Peterson Field Guide. A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northestern and North-central North America, by Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny with illustrations by Peterson, 1968.

_____. Southwestern and Texas Wildflowers, by Theodore F. Niehaus with illustrations by Charles L. Ripper and Virginia Savage, 1984.

Photograph: Glasswort picked from village ditch bank, 22 May 2011; photographed the same day.

Woolly Plantain

What’s blooming in the area: Snowball, Persian yellow, pink shrub, hybrid tea and miniature roses, pyracantha flowers above last year’s dark berries, wisteria, silver lace vine, iris, peony, oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, purple salvia; grapes killed by cold and those that hadn’t broken dormancy both leafing; buds on daylilies.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, purple and tumble mustards, alfilerillo, scarlet bee blossom, white evening primrose, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, woolly plantain, escaped alfalfa, American licorice, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, needle, rice, and three awn grasses; cheat grass turning red; buds of Russian olive and loco; Virginia creeper seedlings and tree of heaven suckers coming up.

In my yard: Beauty bush, privet, skunkbush, winecup, vinca, yellow alyssum peaked, golden spur columbine, oxalis, baptisia, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, catmint, perky Sue and chocolate flower; buds on hollyhock, sea pink and coral bell; seed pods appearing on Siberian pea tree; rose of Sharon developing new leaf buds after existing ones killed by cold; put in tomatoes and warm weather seeds.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Cows brought into village pasture; hummingbird around Bath pinks, gecko, white spider crawled out of iris flower, hornet tried to land on snowball in the wind; harvester and small black ants, earth worm.

Weather: Some rain late Tuesday, followed by near freezing temperatures Thursday morning that punished some plants and flowers; winds most afternoons; 15:17 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The most amazing thing about woolly plantain is where it grows. While it’s interesting the little annual has bloomed at least three years along the road, it’s astounding the only place it grows outside the arid west is Patagonia in southern Argentina and Chile.

Nina Rønsted’s team believes Plantago diverged within the Plantagina family a little over seven million years ago in the Miocene when grasslands developed and that the genus began spreading about 5.47 million years ago. Most of the subgenera existed before the formation of the great glaciers two million years ago.

Some species of Plantago emerged in the historic record in Patagonia some 17,000 years ago when the glaciers were receding. Vera Markgraf’s team found pollen in cores that suggest the area around Coyhaique in the Aisén province of Chile was drying into an open ground shrub-steppe. The genus increased between 13,700 and 11,000 years ago when grasses dominated the steppe and fire activity declined. The pollen then disappeared from their soil samples when the amount of charcoal increased.

Farther south Rodrigo Villa-Martínez and Patricio Moreno found Plantago pollen in soil cores from 12,600 years ago drilled in the Torres del Paine National Park. It was disappearing from the strata by 10,800 years ago when the westerly winds began moving and moisture levels began changing.

Today the South America range of woolly plantain extends from Patagonia into the pampas north of Buenos Aires, but stops at the Amazon drainage. In Chile, it doesn’t reach as far west as the coast.

One would guess Plantago patagonica began as a grassland species that survived in refuges during the glaciers to reemerge when conditions dried. The grasslands would never have had to be contiguous for it to spread between the tip of South America and New Mexico, just close enough for migrating animals to spread the reddish-tan seeds.

Today, the short plant is primarily found on the western plains and in the intermountane region from Baja and Sonora north into the prairie provinces of Canada with scattered populations through the upper midwestern areas freed late from the ice. In Ohio, the only known population grows on “an old beach ridge associated with pre-glacial Lake Warren” in Williams County, which borders Michigan. In Michigan, the taprooted annual’s been found in the band of counties north of the glacial hills separating the state from Ohio and near Lake Michigan.

Rønsted’s group implies the fires that came with a changing climate and forest vegetation is what reduced its range. A team led by Todd Esque found that recent burning caused a significant decline in the number of Plantago species seeds in the ground in the Mojave, and the loss was greater for plants that grew under shrubs than in the open. While a single fire wasn’t enough to exterminate the plants, the repeated fires east of the Mississippi could certainly have had that effect, if they had once grown there.

In the areas that remained grasslands, grazing may have limited woolly plantain’s population. It’s eaten by guanaco and sheep in South America, and cattle and prairie dogs in this country. All those mammals prefer grasses, but the winter annual is eaten because it’s there when other vegetation’s scarce and it’s neither poisonous nor prickly.

If the plants are able to survive long enough to reproduce, the seeds are collected by harvester ants. However, if the seeds survive, they can last some time in dry soil to germinate when conditions are right.

In my yard, the narrow spikes appear for a few years, then disappear. They bloomed in my north-facing garden from the middle 1990's until about 2001. In 1999 they emerged along the east side of the house where they grew until grasses took over in 2004. By then, some seeds had settled in back where they were last seen in 2008. They can survive competition in the desert, but perhaps not in wetter areas where plants become more muscular.

If patagonica is a species that once had a much larger range and has been forced to retreat to disconnected environments hostile to other plants, it has persisted because it modified itself into a winter annual rather than a perennial. Unlike the common plantain I knew as a child, which had broad leaves that lay on the ground, this has narrow leaves that stand erect to collect the sun without being overly exposed.

Most important, the plant has developed an ability for a single seed to germinate and reestablish a colony. The tiny, four-petaled flowers appear in dense, short stalks covered with white hairs that isolate each flower. They fertilize themselves by activating the male anthers when the female stigmas are receptive. Most plantains are out-breeders.

Edward Voss thought woolly plantain probably wasn’t native to Michigan because the earliest report was from Washtenaw County in 1928. Judging from the plants in my yard and growing down the road, it seems to be a native plant that’s constantly being reintroduced back into its historic range, perhaps by vehicle and heavy equipment tires since the 1920's. Then, it dies out for the same old reasons, because nothing really important changed in its absence.

Notes:
Esque, Todd C., James A. Young and C. Richard Tracy. “Short-term Effects of Experimental Fires on a Mojave Desert Seed Bank,” Journal of Arid Environments 74:1302-1308:2010.

Kartesz, John T. Floristic Synthesis of North America range map, available on John Hilty’s Illinois Wildflowers website for “Plantago patagonica (Woolly Plantain).”

Markgraf, Vera, Cathy Whitlock and Simon Haberle. “Vegetation and Fire History During the Last 18,000 cal yr B.P. in Southern Patagonia: Mallín Pollux, Coyhaique, Province Aisén (45°41'30¢ S, 71°50'30¢ W, 640 m Elevation),” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 254:492-507:2007.

Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Division of Natural Areas and Preserves. “Plantago patagonica Jacq., Woolly Plantain,” available on-line.

Rønsted, Nina, Mark W. Chase, Dirk C. Albach and Maria Angelica Bello. “Phylogenetic Relationships within Plantago (Plantaginaceae): Evidence from Nuclear Ribosomal ITS and Plastid trnL-F Sequence Data,” Linnean Society Botanical Journal 139:323-338:2002.

Sharma, Namrata, Pushpa Koul and Awtar Krishan Koul. “Pollination Biology of Some Species of Genus Plantago L.,” Linnean Society Botanical Journal 111:129-138:1993.

Villa-Martínez , Rodrigo and Patricio I. Moreno. “Pollen Evidence for Variations in the Southern Margin of the Westerly Winds in SW Patagonia over the Last 12,600 Years,” Quaternary Research 68:400-409:2007.

Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 3, 1996.

Photograph: Woolly plantain growing along the shoulder, its spike shrouded in white hairs, 15 May 2011.

Western Goat's Beard

What’s blooming in the area: Snowball, Persian yellow, tea and miniature roses, peony, oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, golden spur columbine, moss phlox fading, donkey tail spurge darkening; people set out pepper plants.

Beyond the walls and fences: Fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless crypthanka, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, western goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, rice, three awn and cheat grasses; June grass shedding seed; tree of heaven coming back from cold; goat’s head coming up through road paving; buffalo gourd and goldenrod up.

In my yard: Spirea, Siberian pea tree nearly gone, skunkbush, iris, vinca, yellow alyssum peaked, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, chocolate flower; buds on privet, catmint, sea pink and baptisia; black locust recovering from cold; butterfly weed, white spurge, calamintha and lead plant emerged; creeping mahonia has new leaves; wind blew petals off tulips early.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird and small brown birds, gecko, small dark butterfly with orange spots, harvester and small black ants, earth worms.

Weather: Wind relentless as temperatures creep higher; last snow 5/01/11; 15:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Flowers on western goat’s beard remind me of those imitation crystal snowflakes sold in December to put in the window or on a tree. The thick, clear plastic doesn’t reflect or refract light, nor does it let it pass through. The ornaments are visible simply because they block light.

Tragopogon dubius flowers are concentric rings of long, narrow straps. The outermost are pointed, light-green bracts, usually 13 in number. Inside there’s a shorter row of light yellow, five-pointed petals, sometimes offset from the bracts, sometimes overlapping, that gives them their unique sunburst character.

Each afternoon, the bracts fold, shutting the flowers for the night. The following morning, usually about the time I go to the post office on Saturdays, they reopen facing the sun. While the flowers respond only to light, they don’t have to be directly in the sun to open, only close enough to sense it. I have several growing in back that open a little after nine before the sun actually reaches them.

Each day, the center of the inch and a half wide inflorescence expands. The mound of ray florets - for this composite has no disks - has a central core of still unopened flat yellow envelopes that are narrow at the base and pulled tight at the top. Inside each is a brown tube that leads to a white threadlike ovary and black anthers, which John Hilty says, are pressed against the dark style.

The outer row of unopened petals pulls away from the tip, elongates and opens in the center to form a protective tent around the reproductive organs. Narrow yellow tubes at the tops of the styles lengthen, then branch into lighter colored Y’s to capture the darker yellow pollen spread by insects from this or neighboring plants.

Later, the stigmas darken and fall away, sometimes caught like corn silk when the bracts close and trap the pollen. When the next row of petals begins to swell, the already opened ones are pushed against the previously opened florets and eventually lie against the frame.

When all the florets have opened, the ovaries harden into seeds and the receptacle, that sits on a hollow cone, reflexes. The white hairy sepals surrounding each floret elongate into winged parachutes that form a ball, like that found on the closely related dandelion, only much larger, usually two to three inches across, and tawny.

The outer seeds, the ones formed first, are darker and heavier because they contain more phenolic compounds. When a wind comes, they fall closer to the parent plant than the lighter, younger ones. The larger seeds germinate later and produce larger, taller seedlings.

The waxy leaves are as fustian as the flowers. Many describe them as grass-like, because they’re long and narrow. However, they’re immediately identifiable along my drive, because they don’t look anything at all like the surrounding bunch grasses. They’re darker green, taller, and curve inward into claws. It’s obvious they surround a single stalk and are not so many independent blades rising from a crown.

The basal rosette emerges in late summer when newly ripened seed has fallen and temperatures are still between 59 and 72 degrees. The biennial doesn’t bolt until the root crown expands beyond .11 centimeters, and is most likely to bloom when its about quarter inch across and the plant has undergone some period of coolness.

Although an urn of leaves and its supporting root may store carbohydrates for years before conditions are right for it to flower, a stalk usually rises the following spring. The spaces between the original leaves lengthen into a mop.

At the current stage of many in my yard, the conical bud at the tip of the stem peaks up from the nest of leaves. As it pushes from its skirt, new leaves will open from swollen joints on the stem, each wide at the base, then narrowing into a folded blade like the lower ones.

As the stalk grows, it may branch, with each subordinate stem also pointing upwards. The plant will continue producing terminal heads as long as conditions are favorable. Although they usually peter out by late summer, last year there were flowers until frost in late October.

When they die, the hollow stems harden into inverted wooden umbrellas one to two feet high. The plants that grow in the drive become dangerous to the car and must be removed. Undisturbed plants break away in winter and join the tumbleweeds.

I usually pull them after the monsoons when the ground is throughly wet. The taproot is deep, thick, and strong enough to come out in one piece. When the ground is dry, like it is now, the stem snaps and a white milky sap is released. The only way they can be controlled early in the season is by cutting them before they go to seed.

Even then, western goat’s beard puts up new stalks, sometimes shorter ones, and continues to produce flowers so out of scale with their surroundings they draw attention to themselves. Like the plastic snowflake that doesn’t deliver the promised light, my fascination with the flower shape is deadened by the sheer size and rigidity of its internal and external parts.

Enlargement destroys delicacy when it makes things too visible.

Notes:
Clements, David R., Mahesh K. Upadhyaya and Shelley J. Bos. “The Biology of Canadian Weeds. 110. Tragopogon dubius Scop., Tragopogon pratensis L., and Tragopogon porrifolius L.," Canadian Journal of Plant Science 79:153-163:1999.

Gross, Katherine L. “Predictions of Fate from Rosette Size in Four "Biennial" Plant Species: Verbascum thapsus, Oenothera biennis, Daucus carota, and Tragopogon dubius,” Oecologia 48: 209-213:1981.

Hilty, John. “Western Goat's Beard,” Illinois Wildflowers website.

Maxwell, Christine D., Alicja Zobel and David Woodfine. “Somatic Polymorphism in the Achenes of Tragopogon dubius,” Canadian Journal of Botany 72:1282-1288:1994.

Photograph: Western goat’s beard, picture taken while plant was still in shade around 10:35 on 8 May 2011 and old enough to have a reduced core but no so old that the outer petals are flattened yet.

Peony

What’s blooming in the area: Late apples, lower branches on snowballs, first pink peony, first bright orange oriental poppy, Jupiter’s beard, moss phlox, purple salvia, donkey tail spurge; grape leaves killed by cold. There’s a lot of bare stems in rose bushes from winter kill.

Beyond the walls and fences: Fernleaf globemallow, western stickseed, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June, rice and cheat grasses; Virginia creeper and tree of heaven leaves killed by snow and subsequent frost; Virginia creeper already recovering.

In my yard: Sour cherry, Siberian pea tree, tulips, iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, Bath pinks, snow-in-summer, blue flax; spirea and lilacs were having a wonderful year until the frost killed the flowers; catalpa and black locust leaves destroyed by snow and cold temperatures; sweet alyssum, California and Shirley poppy seeds germinating; leaves emerging on wisteria; flower buds on Persian yellow rose and perky Sue.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, house finches and other small brown birds, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Snow Sunday that turn into ice on plant surfaces before it melted; cold temperatures Tuesday morning formed frost on plants; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:49 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: If peonies didn’t bloom every year in the village I never would have planted them. I associate the large, voluptuous flowers with the humid midwest where a friend of my parents in Michigan had a row growing in the narrow strip between the foundation of the house and the concrete drive that got the runoff from 35" of precipitation a year. Every June we’d admire her border.

Until this year nothing happened to challenge my childhood perceptions. I planted bare roots of Festiva Maxima in the fall of 2003, knowing, in the best of places, the rhizomes would take at least three years to become established. Mine struggled along on an average 10" of natural water a year, supplemented by hoses. They only bloomed in 2006 and 2009, while the ones in the village flowered each year, bathed in the moist air that rises from the river and the ditches.

Mine finally grew dramatically last spring after our unusually wet winter. They were covered with buds that simply stopped developing when conditions suddenly changed the end of May from cool and wet to hot and dry. When they’d bloomed in the past, it’d been the first week of June.

This winter was unusually dry. I expected nothing. After all, the daffodils didn’t bloom. I was surprised when the plants emerged in early April as vigorously as they had last year. I finally realized it was last year’s cold that had been important, not last year’s moisture.

The life of the peony is governed by temperature, not water or sun angles.

After they finish blooming in June, the plants begin developing buds at the bases of their stems that will be next year’s stems and flowers. The existing verdancy doesn’t increase, but continues supporting the underground activity which changes from bud to root formation in late summer. Before the first frost, the current year’s vegetation turns tan and sere.

During winter, the underground buds need more than 900 hours of cool temperatures to produce flowers. Once the quota is filled, nothing more happens until the soil warms in spring. Then the eyes push up red stalks that rise to carry the season’s complement of compound green leaves and terminal round buds. The flowers open soon after, so long as temperatures remain moderate.

I’m sure my perception that peonies require a warm, moist climate can be traced to the fact the plants come from China and entered the midwest after they’d been hybridized by Europeans. Festiva Maxima was released in 1851 by Auguste Miellez, a rose breeder in Esquermes-les-Lille, an area that gets 25" of rain a year and average January temperatures only fall to 32.

Nothing in their early Chinese history would have disabused me of my beliefs. They were first described by Zhang Zhong Jing of Changsha in modern Hunan province and by Hua Tuo of Bozhou in modern Anhui. The first averages 52" of rain a year and a January low of 43 degrees. The other has 31” of annual precipitation and a January average low of 33.

What’s extraordinary about the two men is not that they lived in areas with similar climates, but that they lived at the same time, when the Chinese civilization was first developing as a civilization. For centuries past, peasants had endured the wars between men who were trying to centralize power and those who resisted.

The Han dynasty had been founded by Liu Bang in 202 BC, and been disrupted by wars, before being reestablished by Liu Xiu in 25 AD. There followed years of prosperity, when trade was opened along what would become the Silk Road to the west, and knowledge began to be valued: Hua could study with a man trained in Ayurvedic medicine, while Zhang learned from Zhang Bozu.

When Cai Lui improved the methods for producing paper in 105 AD, he not only freed silk for trade, but also gave the sons of bureaucratic families a way to record their work.

When Hua and Zhang were living late in the dynasty, war fare and epidemics were threatening again. Instead of turning to traditional remedies or superstitions to treat the sick and injured, as people had in the past, the two applied what we recognize today as scientific principals.

Hua grew every plant reputed to be efficacious, and tested them. He found peony plants and flowers to be worthless, until he had a vision of them as a woman. Popular tradition says he’s the one who then discovered the roots were useful for treating gynecological problems.

Zhang classified plants into three groups, those that could be taken in any quantity, those that should be taken carefully and those that were dangerous. He mixed white peony root from the second category with the safer cinnamon, Chinese licorice, and Chinese jujube into a broth to treat fevers.

Chinese medical theory defines diseases as hot (yang) or cold (yin), and prescribes medicines with the opposite attribute to restore balance within the body. The stripped white root of the herbaceous peony is considered cold while the red root still encased in bark is considered cool.

The healing properties of shao yao must already have been known by Zhang’s and Hua’s ancestors because the species isn’t native to either Hunan or Anhui. Paeonia lactiflora grows in the woods and grasslands of the more northern and western provinces and beyond into Mongolia and Siberia where the climate is both colder and dryer. It was deliberately brought to their areas.

My plants have had their requisite period of cold, and now await the opportunity to bloom. Last Sunday night the buds were covered with snow that turned to ice when the sun rose the next morning. Tuesday, temperatures again fell below freezing and frost developed on any warm, organic surface. The spirea and lilac flowers that survived the snow were dead Wednesday afternoon.

The peony buds were still covered by their calyxes, which may have insulated them, but on Wednesday the buds had expanded enough to begin to split that protective coating. Now, I’m reduced to that state before Hua Tuo and Zhang Zhong Jing when men were helpless in the face of fate and could only watch things unfold, unable to influence events in any way.

The peony buds will either open or not. The flowers will either be magnificent or deformed. This will either be the year of the peony or it won’t.

It all depends on tomorrow’s weather in northern New Mexico.

Notes:
Hong, Deyuan, Kai-yu Pan and Nicholas J. Turland. “Paeonia lactiflora Pallas,” efloras Flora of China website.

Hua, Tuo. Texts destroyed.

Rodrigo-Lopez, Maria Jose. Floriculture as a Diversification Option for the Rural Economy of Northern Ireland, 2010.

Zhang, Zhong Jing. Shanghan Zabing Lun; text lost and reconstructed by Wang Shuhe.

Wang, Guangyao. “The History of Chinese Herbal Medicine,” available on line, on Zhang.

Photograph: Festiva Maxima peony about 8:00 AM Monday morning, 2 May 2011, as the snow was turning to ice before melting completely.

Tree of Heaven

What’s blooming in the area: Apples, iris, moss phlox, donkey tail spurge; lawns and hay fields beginning to green near road where water flows from ditches.

Beyond the walls and fences: Choke cherry, fernleaf globemallow, cheese mallow, western stickseed, bractless cryptantha, hoary cress, tansy and tumble mustard, alfilerillo, bindweed, gypsum phacelia, purple mat flower, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grass; buds on Virginia creeper; milkweed and ragweed coming up.

In my yard: Sour cherry, spirea, Siberian pea tree, lilacs, tulips, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria, blue flax; buds on snowball, peonies and Bath pinks; tomatillos coming up.

Bedding plants: Pansy, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird and bumble bee on Siberian pea; smaller bees around lilac; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain early Monday and Tuesday mornings, followed by cooler nights and more winds; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: There’s something worse than a Siberian elm. Trees of heaven not only produce viable seeds and resprout when pruned like elms, but they also sucker from their roots into copses and exude chemicals that keep other plants from their territory.

The team writing the environmental impact statement for widening the road from Española to Los Alamos on the other side of the river found Alianthus altissima growing around Santa Clara creek and recommended it be eradicated as a class B pest. Siberian elms are only class C nuisances and so not proscribed by the state. They can, however, be destroyed during construction without penalty.

Trees of heaven have gotten started along one of the village ditches at the northern end where water from the Santa Cruz enters the acequias. In one area, they’re competing with Siberian elms between the ditch and the pavement. This past winter both were cut back to keep the narrow road clear, but neither was fazed. One is bright green with new leaves. With last week’s warm weather, the other was beginning to leaf at its branch tips.

Ch’un shu is known in China as the spring tree because it’s one of the last to break dormancy, and thus signifies the end of winter famine. According to Shiu Ying Hu, it was primarily used for cooking fuel. However, the dried bark removed from felled trees could also be sold in markets for medicinal purposes as ch’un-po-pi.

The tree entered the western world under false pretenses. A French Jesuit priest, Pierre d'Incarville, thought he was sending back seeds of the tree the Chinese used to make lacquer. When they germinated in Paris, the saplings were mistaken for sumac, because the long leaves broken into pairs of smaller leaflets were similar.

William Prince introduced it commercially in this country as Sicilian Tanner’s Sumac, after Archibald Thompson sent him plants under that name from his West End nursery outside London. Once Prince realized the confusion and offered it as Chinese Ailanthus in the 1820's, the tree began to sell so well his Flushing nursery had problems meeting the demand because he only had male trees. They’re more floriferous than the females and the taller form was considered more aesthetically pleasing.

The market had already been created in Paris where American visitors saw Grand Vernis du Japon growing along the boulevards, especially on the left bank in the fifth arrondissement of Montparnasse. In those years of early industrial life, when coal was burned to produce steam and heat homes, the air was polluted with soot that killed many species. Insects attacked others. The fact the five-petaled male flowers smelled didn’t matter when horses were used for transport.

By the 1840's, Andrew Jackson Downing, the primary popularizer of romantic landscapes in this country, noted the Celestial Tree was “much planted in the streets and public squares” of New York and Philadelphia and that it was especially picturesque on lawns where “the foliage catches the light well, and contrasts strikingly with that of round-leaved trees.”

The tree grows rapidly its first years, concentrating its efforts on height. After about five years it begins to branch. After ten to twenty years, the females produce seeds. Then, home owners discover the problems with seeds, suckers and the smells they released when gardeners try to remove them. By 1851, Downing had turned against the grey barked tree and was recommending “graceful elms and salubrious maples” for street use.

However, a hundred years later Rosalie Doolittle was still telling Albuquerque gardeners that, despite its “reputation for being untidy,” a tree of heaven was “really attractive when the sprays of pods turn brilliant red and yellow as falls approaches.” Even a few years ago Baker Morrow advised New Mexicans the much maligned tree “can make a very pleasant shade or street tree in the right setting.”

They’re correct the tree is attractive when allowed to grow naturally into a wide, low canopy. Both males and females are covered with yellow-green flowers at their branch tips in late spring. Then, in late summer, pink seed heads appear above the leaves, resembling mimosa from a distance.

In Santa Fe, I’ve seen trees growing in courtyards shading working class homes built in the 1950's. Although they tolerate a wide variety of soils, the strong tap roots prefer the lime rich soil of the area. Unfortunately, they need more water than the arid west provides, a minimum of 14" a year, and so they send out suckers to the water conserving yard walls and foundations. Seeds, and possibly discarded suckers, found their way into the nearby ditch, neglected since it was no longer used for irrigation.

Here, trees of heaven not only are growing along the ditches and road sides, but it looks like the member of the tropical simaroubace family has been planted deliberately by a few people, probably from free suckers. In one place down the road, a mature tree shading a double-wide deflected a flying seed, and now has a Siberian elm sapling amongst its suckers.

Notes:
Doolittle, Rosalie. Southwest Gardening, 1953, revised 1967.

Downing, Andrew Jackson. A Treatise of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1841.

_____. “How to Popularize the Taste for Planting,” The Horiculturalist 7:297-301:1852, quoted by Behula Shah in “The Checkered Career of Alianthus altissima,” Arnoldia 53(3):21-27:1997.

Gannett Fleming West, Inc. NM 30 Improvement Project, Environmental Assessment, January 2011.

Hu, Shiu Ying. “Alianthus,” Arnoldia 39(2):29-50:1979 .

Morrow, Baker H. Best Plants for New Mexico Gardens and Landscapes, 1995.

Murrill, William A. Shade Trees, 1902; on use in Paris.

Prince, W. R. “Introduction of Lombardy Poplar,” The Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser 3:80:1861; on his father’s activities.

Photograph: Tree of heaven leafing along a ditch near the village already colonized by bright green Siberian elms, 24 April 2011.

Crab Apple

What’s blooming in the area: White and pink flowered trees, including apples and choke cherry, iris, moss phlox, donkey tail spurge; honey locust and grapes leafing.

Beyond the walls and fences: Cottonwood, western stickseed, hoary cress, tansy mustard, alfilerillo, goat’s beard, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grass; buds on fernleaf globemallow; tree of heaven and Virginia creeper leafing.

In my yard: Sour and sand cherries, Siberian pea tree, lilacs fragrant, tulips, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, yellow alyssum, oxalis, small-leaved saponaria; buds on spirea, snowball, peonies and Bath pinks; black locust, catalpa, snowball, forsythia and rose of Sharon leafing; red hot poker, baptisia, sidalcea, Rumanian sage, Saint John’s wort, Maximilian sunflower, chocolate flower and coreopsis coming up; planted sweet alyssum, California and Shirley poppy seeds.

Bedding plants: Pansy, sweet alyssum.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Heard bees around lilacs; small brown birds were mining seeds under the sour cherry after they decided the flowers weren’t to their liking; gecko ran from the sprinkler; cabbage butterfly, grasshoppers, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Windy days and warm nights; arroyo bottom bleached out last Sunday; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; last rain 3/8/11; 14:05 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The season for white and pink flowering trees is passing. Some I knew, the apples, the choke cherries, the purple leaf plums. The rest could have been anything I’ve seen sold locally, white flowered plums, sweet or sour cherries. Apricot and Bradford pear flowers came and went.

The pinks are a mystery. In other parts of the country they would be Japanese cherries or flowering crab apples. Here peaches arrive late in the season, and already are leafing, perhaps skipping reproduction this year.

I’ve seen more crabs in local stores than ornamental cherries. When I went to the local hardwares early this week, only one had anything pink, and they were the unlikely eastern redbud and crape myrtle. Either the stock was picked over, or the big boxes have driven the smaller retailers to offer less from fewer suppliers.

Crab apples are the hardest to identify from the road. Although a few varieties are pink, many have pink buds that open white, while others have pink flowers that fade to white. Many species and cultivars that are white from start to finish merge into the general background of anonymous flowering trees.

Thomas Jefferson planted Hewe’s crab apples at Monticello. The juicy fruit, widely used then for cider, is thought to have been a hybrid between the domestic apple brought from England, now simply called Malus domestica, and the native Malus angustifolia.

George Washington asked to have crab apples planted with other trees beyond the south end of his house at Mount Vernon in a grove whose main intent was aesthetic. It’s not known if he meant the pink flowered angustifolia or Hewe’s, which opens pink before turning white. He only specified flowering trees.

The distinction between useful and ornamental crab apples was well established when I was growing up in Michigan. The native Malus coronaria, which grew on the feral land between the housing development and the farms, had nasty thorns. The hard fruit was too sour to eat fresh, although it supposedly produced good jelly. The flowers changed from rose to white.

Flowering crab apples grew in town and were descended from species imported from northeastern Asia. The Siberian crab apple, Malus baccata, with white flowers, was introduced to westerners in 1784. After Perry forced open Japanese ports, nurseries offered Malus floribunda which has rose flowers that turn white. They’ve since been crossed and recrossed to produce the trees currently sold.

The distinction we had between useful and decorative Malus varieties exists here, but is maintained between apples and flowering trees. Orchards lie near the ditches in the front or side yard, often serving as a barrier between the house and the road. Pink crab apples, for only the pink can be distinguished when white flowers abound, usually are grown near the house, often behind a wall that protects their roots and trunks from the hostile winds and unrelenting sun.

While boundaries between ornamental and edible apples exist to most people, there are those who ignore the classification. Some believe flowering trees pollinate their orchards. In Yugoslavia, researchers found they got heavy fruit set on Golden Delicious with floribunda, baskatong and robusta crab apples, but that floribunda’s natural flowering time was earlier than the apple’s. In India, a group found floribunda bloomed with Red Delicious but didn’t produce as much fruit as Snowdrift and Manchurian varieties. Golden Hornet worked best for them with Golden Delicious.

Baskatong is a Malus baccata-adstringens hybrid developed in Canada with rosy purple flowers that fade pink. The pinkish flowered adstringens resulted from crossing a baccata with a domestic apple. Robusta is probably a Malus baccata-prunifolia hybrid from China with pink or white flowers.

Snowdrift was bred by the Cole nursery, perhaps from a white flowered sargentii, while the Manchurian crab apple is a subspecies of baccata with pink buds and white flowers. The white flowered Golden Hornet is probably a Malus zumi selection made by John Waterer and Sons. Zumi itself is possibly a baccata-sieboldii cross from Japan with pink buds and white flowers while sieboldii, sometimes called the Toringo crab, is a Japanese dwarf with pink buds that turn white.

Red and Golden Delicious are the most common apples grown today. Both were introduced by the Arkansas Stark Brothers, the one from an Iowa tree.

Plant breeders have gone farther in eroding the distinction between large sweet and small acrid species. They introduced a crab apple gene into domestic apples to create resistence to the apple scab fungus. Ironically, they only know they used the floribunda clone 821; they don’t know if it was a pure floribunda from Japan or some hybrid spawned by the collectors at Arnold Arboretum who sent them the original seed.

The distinction between an apple and a crab apple may be as much an artifact of culture as the one I grew up with between wild and domesticated crab apples. They’re all members of the same genus of the rose family.

The thing that has always stopped me from using crab apple as the generic term for any unknown pink tree here is that I was always told crab apples prefer acidic soil like that found east of the Mississippi. Either the soil is different closer to the river than it is where I live or hybridization has produced lime tolerant cultivars, or the pink trees remain a mystery.

Notes: For more on the two Delicious apples, see entry on orchards for 14 December 2008.

Cultivar and species information from Liberty Hyde Bailey and Ethel Zoe Bailey, Hortus, 1934; Harrison Leigh Flint and Jenny M. Lyverse, Landscape Plants for Eastern North America, 1997; and Alfred Rehder, Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs, 1947.

Dalzell, Robert F. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America, 2000.

Gautam D. R., D. D. Sharma and Ali M. Rashil. “Evaluation of Crab Apples for Pollination,” Indian Journal of Plant Genetic Resources 13(2):2000.

Gvozdenovic, D., Z. Keserovic, J. Ninic-Todorovic, and L. Vujic. “Wild Apple Species as Pollinators for Golden Delicious Clone B,” Savremena Poljoprivreda 44(spec.no.):13-19:1996.

Hokanson, S. C., W. F. Lamboy, A. K. Szewc-McFadden and J. R. McFerson. “Microsatellite (SSR) Variation in a Collection of Malus (Apple) Species and Hybrids,” Euphytica 118:281-294:2001; on clone 821.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Hewe's Crab Apple,” information and tree available on-line.

Photograph: Pink flowered tree grown lacy under Siberian elms behind a wall outside the village, 17 April 2011.

Drought

What’s blooming in the area: White and pink flowered trees, including apples and choke cherry, scatty forsythia, first lilacs, tulips, moss phlox; local ditch running.

Outside the walls and fences: Cottonwood, western stickseed, tansy mustard, alfilerillo, native and common dandelions, cheat grass; buds on fernleaf globemallow; Russian olives leafing, but still have last year’s fruit; Juniper berries forming; Siberian elms beginning to drop seeds; Russian thistles germinating; new pigweed seedlings up.

In my yard: Sweet, sour and sand cherries, Siberian pea tree, baby blue iris, grape hyacinth, vinca, yellow alyssum; buds on daffodils; new leaves on sea lavender, Goodness Grows veronica, Mönch aster; lilies and hostas emerging; peach, beauty bush, weigela, caryopteris and Russian sage leafing; mahonia leaves turned green in center after the plant was soaked by a hose leak.

Bedding plants: Pansy, sweet alyssum; buds on snapdragons. The big box where I bought the alyssum is selling plants three times the size as the nursery where I got the pansies and the local hardware where I found the snapdragons at nearly half the price.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Bees around Siberian pea; house finches and other small brown birds flee when I get near; gecko, small black ants, house fly outdoors.

Weather: Winds and no rain; snow remains in Sangre de Cristo; last rain 3/8/11; 13:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: At work, I talk with a woman who believes global warming is directly responsible for her allergies. Since scientists report the one is increasing, she anticipates years of worsening problems with the other.

Would that causality were so simple.

Recently a team led by Ulf Büntgen published its survey of tree rings in central Europe for the past 2,500 years that suggested between the years 250 and 550 the climate changed every decade or so, alternating between wet and dry, cool and warm. That was centuries before the next major climate change, the ice age that began in North American in the 1300's, and apparently was totally unrelated.

He told Michael Marshall, those oscillations were particularly difficult for farming societies like the Roman Empire, because they were long enough to “harm agriculture but are not prolonged enough for people to adapt their behaviour.”

The Goths, who invaded the Empire, probably weren’t any better at adapting to change, but their migratory lifestyle made it easier for them to move when conditions worsened, then settle when things improved.

Historians are too aware of the many factors involved in the decline of the Roman Empire, to accept the possibility that an unstable climate alone was responsible, or even basal. Likewise, anthropologists haven’t been able to build a defendable case that the coming of the ice age was the reason the Anasazi abandoned the Four Corners. They can agree the move was preceded by drought and increased violence, but they can’t agree if diminished resources were the primary factor or human urges and egos were more important.

The arid southwest probably has had an unstable climate ever since the Rockies rose to divert moisture laden winds millions of years ago. Last winter and early spring were unusually wet and cold; then in late spring, temperatures rose abruptly and the rains stopped. We had almost no snow this winter and no rain until last week. Winter temperatures were abnormally cold; this spring has been unusually warm and windy. Our geographic location makes it difficult to know if these variations, and are our allergic reactions to them, are part of a long-term planetary trend, or just another cycle.

Native trees, like the one-seeded juniper, adapted to environmental stress centuries ago. Last year, after an unusually wet winter, male junipers produced more pollen than they had in a decade, 2,245 grains per cubic meter of air. This past March 8, during the drought, pollen levels reached 3,364 grains, nearly 50% more than last year’s record set on March 24.

I didn’t notice a larger berry crop last fall, but the heat and drought that followed the spring pollen release could easily have intervened to offset the effects of male activity. Last weekend, the female tree near my house had begun to produce purple fruit, but not enough yet to suggest it has the same response as the males to severe conditions.

I blame the high pollen counts on variations in moisture. Others blame the cold winters. The man measuring the pollen for Albuquerque’s Environmental Health Department, Dan Gates, blames an abrupt warm period just before the pollen was released for the concentrated density.

My Siouxland cottonwood is supposedly a sterile male. This year it produced mounded rosette fountains along its branches before it leafed, as if it were doing everything in its power to produce pollen. The native male is now blooming down the road, but it’s too soon to know if the flower chains will be longer or more pollen laden.

In contrast to the dioecious natives which have responded to stress with greater attempts by males to perpetuate the species, imported hermaphroditic members of the rose and olive families have given up trying to reproduce, and are concentrating their resources on their own survival.

For two years past, the bountiful flowers on forsythia shrubs were killed by frost. Some plants in the area this year are blooming fine, but most are chartreuse from a distance with sparse bits of yellow up close. Mine doesn’t even have a flower on every major limb.

Apricots, for the most part, simply didn’t bloom. My tree had two flowers, each at the tip of a vertical branch. A week after I watered it for three hours, it produced a few more. When I walked over to my neighbor’s tree, which usually is cloaked in white, his only flowers were way at the top and not every branch was fruitful. Apial dominance, that tends to limit fruit production to stem ends, even in good times, was defining what was allowed to reproduce.

Again, I tend to blame the lack of water and assume they'll leaf when they get some moisture, but others are blaming that February cold spell and fear the trees have already died.

If people here were still dependent on what they grew, these would be hard times. Last year, there was no fruit, the tomatoes were meager and the corn didn’t grow much. The men who run a truck farm down the road abandoned their field in July. This year there will be few apricots.

Unlike the recent settlers, who haven’t yet had time to adapt to climatic oscillations, the grasses and annuals that were here first will do fine. On the prairie last Sunday, a few days after our only spring rain, there was more green at the bases of the needle, rice and blue grama grass clumps. The ring muhly is beginning to revive in my yard.

The first seeds up along the road were the allergenic pigweed, which promises reinforcement for the woman’s perception that her well being is determined by something greater than mere weather and my view that pigweed is simply exploiting our constant abuse of nature.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity suggested a person couldn’t perceive the true pattern of motion while sitting in a moving train. Likewise, we can’t recognize geologic trends until they’re finished. We have clues. But, when we try to apply the general to our personal situation, our expectations define what we experience. We can’t know definitively why this year is so hard on trees and shrubs, if it’s the cold or the drought or the winds, if it’s global warming or routine climatic instability, if it’s human behavior or something beyond.

We can agree, it’s been one tough, colorless spring.

Notes: See entry on vinca, 21 December 2008, for literary-cultural responses to one of those periods of agricultural failure.

Büntgen, Ulf. Quoted by Michael Marshall in “Fall of Roman Empire Linked to Wild Shifts in Climate,” New Scientist, on-line 13 January 2011.

_____, Willy Tegel, Kurt Nicolussi, Michael McCormick, David Frank, Valerie Trouet, Jed O. Kaplan, Franz Herzig, Karl-Uwe Heussner, Heinz Wanner, Jürg Luterbacher and Jan Esper. “2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility,” Science, on-line 13 January 2011.

Uyttebrouck, Olivier. “March's Yellow Smoke,” Albuquerque Journal, 17 March 2011.

Photograph: Siouxland cottonwood, 10 April 2011.

Bedding Plants

What’s blooming in the area: White and pink flowered trees, including Bradford pear and choke cherry, forsythia still sparse, first lilac, tulips, daffodils, moss phlox; apples leafing.

Outside the walls and fences: Western stickseed, tansy mustard, native and common dandelions, cheat grass; prickly pear, blue grama and rice grass greening; leather leaf globemallow, sweet sand verbena, bindweed and heath asters emerging; chamisa leafing; leaf buds on tamarix and Russian olive; many new leaves on the prairie are emerging next to clumps of grass, not in open spaces.

In my yard: Sweet and sour cherries, Siberian pea tree, hyacinth, tiny pushkinia; coral bell leaves turning green; peonies, Maltese cross, lady bells, tansy, pink salvia, catmints, Parker’s Gold and Moonshine yarrows poking up; cottonwood, spirea, purple sandcherry, privet and Japanese barberry leafing; buds on yellow alyssum.

Bedding plants: Buds on pansies and snapdragons.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Uncovered an earthworm when I was planting pansies near the Japanese barberry; bees around Lapins cherry; stink bugs are back.

Weather: Winds all week, rain Wednesday night; last weekend the arroyo bottom was dry enough to work the calves; 13:27 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The 1970's energy crises changed the definition of early blooming.

When the tetraploid Sensation cosmos was introduced in 1930 as an earlier blooming plant, advertisers meant it would flower before frost. Now, when seed companies tell growers a plant blooms early, they mean it requires less time in an energy-intensive greenhouse.

When OPEC stopped shipping petroleum to the United States in October of 1973, in response to this country’s support of Israel’s war against Egypt and Syria, greenhouses were particularly hard hit by sharply increased prices during their winter growing season. Owners replaced glass and plastic, insulated, improved their lighting, and took whatever other steps they could afford.

However, no sooner did they make an improvement, than increased prices ate the savings, and left them where they were. In 2008, Walter Nelson figured heat represented 13% of the production costs for western New York nurseries, while Wayne Brown found total energy, including heat, light and irrigation, was 25 to 30% in neighboring Ontario. Both suggested it would take only a very small increase in petroleum prices to severely damage the profits which were simultaneously being squeezed by big box customers who were setting low contract prices for vendors while making demands for more services that increased their labor.

Some nurseries tried saving energy by growing their plants at lower temperatures, something pansies especially like. However, Erik Runkle found that, while the resulting plants were more vigorous, they required a longer crop time, so the actual costs were higher. In Grand Rapids, the total energy cost for a 288-cell plug of heat-demanding petunias transplanted on January 29 for sales on April 1 and grown at 58 degrees was 56¢, while it was 31¢ for plants grown at 68 degrees after being transplanted on March 2.

Others have looked at lowering their labor costs, which Nelson says were 45% of the total in New York and Brown set at 30 to 35% in Ontario. The latter suggests larger operations, with greater financial resources, had been adopting some of the automation used in Europe to do such tasks as seeding, transplanting, mixing soil and filling cell packs.

Traditionally, bedding plant growers planted seeds in shallow flats, then hired seasonal help, often women, to transplant the small seedlings into sale packs. Some would eliminate the transplanting by planting several seeds in each cell, then hire local people to prick out all but the most viable plant from each unit. With plants like moss roses, they left the extras to give a fuller look with smaller individuals, even though the plants were probably weaker from having to compete for resources.

When I planted out my pansies last weekend, I discovered the consequences of these attempts to save money. The sale packs had the usual four legs for roots, but the top third wasn’t subdivided. I assume this was done to make it easier for unskilled labor or machines to drop seeds.

In one pack, there was an empty cell. In another, one seed had taken root on the bridge between two legs, and its roots hadn’t been able to develop. In the third, the one that had landed on the bridge sent its roots into the leg with another plant, making them impossible to separate. In effect, each four cell pak had only three plants, which effectively increased my purchase price from 55¢ to 74¢.

Seed companies have responded to higher energy costs by developing seeds that are ready for market sooner. Once people were told to plant pansies in late summer and let them winter over for spring blooms. Now, Sakota tells growers the elapsed time between sowing and marketing for the Crown series is ten to eleven weeks. Stokes tells nurserymen that Karma and Mammoth are ready in ten to twelve weeks, while HPS suggests the total crop time for its pansies is twelve to fourteen weeks. In other words, seeds can be planted in January for April sales, saving five months of worry that something will destroy the seedlings.

The problem for home gardeners is that ready for market means “in flower,” not “strong enough to survive transplanting.” My largest pansy plant is three and a half inches high and four inches wide; the smallest is one and half by two inches. It would take a great many plants to create a massed effect of color, at least nine per square foot at a minimum cost of $6.66.

Brown found consumers had responded to these changes by no longer buying bedding plants, but would buy larger plants in containers and hanging baskets. They simply weren’t willing to nurse along puny seedlings or look at bare ground while immature plants gradually came to size. Plants like pansies, after all, are only good for about a month before rising temperatures stop them from blooming.

The problem with the new seeds for growers is they are more expensive. A thousand Swiss Giant open-pollinated pansy seeds are sold for $3.63 by Stokes and for $4.75 by HPS. In contrast, a thousand Majestic Giants II F₁ hybrid seeds are $32.50 and $42.50 respectively. According to Nelson, seeds and plant stock represent 16% of the total cost of production in western New York, more than is spent on heat.

HPS suggests the cost of the Majestic Giant II seed is somewhat offset by the fact the plants are naturally compact and don’t require growth regulators. Most of the chemicals nurseries use, as well as their plastic packages, are ultimately dependent on the same energy conglomerates that supply the natural gas for heat and gasoline for transportation. All these additional overhead costs increase when the price of a barrel of crude oil rises.

I no longer expect much from bedding plants. I only buy those like tomatoes and snapdragons that I can’t grow from seed and that have proven their ability to survive. However, if I ever want to see more than the usual yellow composites in summer, I’m dependent on nurseries to provide me with plants. They must continue to exist for me to be completely happy.

Ironically, while energy costs have radically changed the industry since 1973 - sending cut flower production to South American and Africa where labor costs are cheaper and moving winter vegetable production to the southwest and México where energy costs are less - the high cost of transporting bulky, perishable products with low profit margins has kept bedding plant growers near areas with large population centers. Even though California, Texas and Florida were three of the top five bedding plant growers in the middle 1990's, Michigan and Ohio were still in the top five, while Ontario increased its exports to this country since the middle 1980's.

The pansies I bought two weeks ago came from Colorado.

Notes: 2011 catalogs from Stokes Seeds, Inc., and HPS, the Horticultural Products and Services division of RH Shumway’s.

Brown, Wayne. “A Profile - The Ontario Greenhouse Floriculture Industry,” 1 June 2003, reviewed 18 March 2010.

Nelson, Walter E. “Greenhouse Energy Management,” 2008; it’s possible his price for seed and plants combines the costs of nurseries that specialize in germinating seeds and those that buy the plugs to grow for market; petunias were more severely affected by being grown at lower temperatures than were pansies.

Runkle, Erik, Jonathan Frantz and Matthew Blanchard. “Energy-Efficient Annuals: Scheduling Bedding Plants,” Greenhouse Grower, April 2009. He’s not including the cost of the time for germinating seed when temperatures can’t be manipulated, and heat and moisture requirements are usually higher. For Pansy Crown, Sakota Seed says the pre-transplantation time is 5 weeks and post transplanting time is 5-6 weeks.

Sakota Seed America, Inc. “Pansy Crown,” revised 15 August 2007, available on-line.

Photograph: Pansies, 6 April 2011, 15 days after purchase and 3 days after transplanting; snapdragon in back

Pansy

What’s blooming in the area: Few apricot or forsythia flowers, perhaps because of the dearth of snow and rain; daffodils, lavender moss phlox; silver lace vine leafing; lilacs leafing with buds emerging; village ditch running.

Outside the walls and fences: Dandelion, cheat grass; Siberian elm bright green.

In my yard: Lapins cherry, hyacinth, oxalis; leaves opening on Bradford pear and roses; buds forming on sand cherry; Silver King artemisia emerging.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium; first aptenia flower since the cold of winter.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, light colored snake, gecko, harvester ants, hornet in the house.

Weather: Warm afternoons and winds; last rain 3/8/11; 12:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I have strong memories of pansies, but, strangely, no recollection of what they looked like.

The first comes from my childhood when pansies were the only bedding plant my mother would buy - perhaps the only ones she could afford, and possibly the only ones available. They were put in the shade of the apple tree where they survived until fall, blooming off and on. I suppose most were purple, as pansies were then, but they could have been white or yellow. I don’t remember.

They probably hadn’t changed much since the late nineteenth century.

Pansies had begun as wild members of the violet family. The first were natural hybrids of Viola tricolor and Viola arvensis grown in the gardens of Mary Bennett and James Gambier in the early 1810's. James Lee, a nurseryman, introduced new species from Europe to encourage men like Bennet’s gardener, William Robinson. Gambier’s gardener, William Thompson, produced the first modern blotched flower in 1830.

While the English aristocracy was primarily interested in cultivating perfect individual flowers for exhibition, seeds of the improved viola crossed the channel where French and Belgium breeders experimented with massed plantings grown as annuals. By 1900, the major growers of what was soon called Viola wittrockiana were Bugnot, Cassier, Oldier, and Trimardeau.

When my mother was buying her plants in 1950's, the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog still reflected the aesthetic distinction between England and France. Swiss Giants, which won an All-Selection award in 1933, were bred for cut flowers, while Westland Giants were listed as a “Continental variety.” The rest of the 26 cultivars were individual colors or strains, including Maxima, advertised as a mix of show varieties “saved from one of the finest prize collections in England” and Roggli, introduced in 1930.

By the time I began trying to grow pansies in Michigan in the mid-1980s, the British seed catalog had expanded to 40 choices, divided by bloom size. They still carried Coronation Gold, King of the Blacks, Roggli, and Ullswater Blue, but the abilities to survive adverse conditions and look good in beds were mentioned.

A great deal had changed between the two publications. Sakota Seed had introduced the first F₁ hybrid, Majestic Giant, in 1966, and breeders’ knowledge of ideal conditions had increased. Today, Sakota recommends its Crown series be planted in acidic soil with a pH between 5.5 and 5.8 and fed nitrogen and boron. Humidity should be 100% , with the germinating temperature between 64 and 69 degrees and 3,000 foot candles of light. As they grow, the temperature should be reduced to 55 to 65 and the light increased to 7,000 foot candles.

Not everyone follows those instructions. When researchers at the University of Florida tested pansies, they improved their germination potting mixture with dolomite, superphosphate and hydrated lime, then planted them out in fields of augmented fine sand. On their ranking scale of 1 to 10, most were judged fair (6) to good (7). Crowns, evaluated by color, varied between 6.6 and 6.7, Sakota’s Crystal Bowls were between 5.5 and 7.3, Sluis and Groot’s Roc between 6.4 and 7.6, and Goldsmith’s Universal Beaconsfield was 6.6.

Needless to say, when I’ve tried to grow pansies, my conditions were less than optimal, and my experiences haven’t matched those of my childhood. After trying two years in Michigan with what was available, Majestic Giant, Crystal Bowl, Universal Beaconsfield and Roc, I gave them up as a waste of money. The Majestic Giants and Crystal Bowls I bought in alkaline New Mexico in 1995 and 1996 died within a week of being planted.

My next memory of pansies comes from my only visit to Europe in the mid-1980's, where my hotel was a converted hunting lodge near Chantilly. The grounds were small, but the owners wanted to give the illusion of Versailles or the Tuileries, which they did with a large mound of pansies placed at a middle distance from the entrance. I think they were planted in tiers of color, but I don’t remember. I suspect, as soon as they went out of bloom, they were replaced with some other flowering plant.

The inability of the new cultivars to survive was unimportant, so long as they bloomed for several weeks. Pansies served the same function as cut flowers, disposable symbols of elegance whose very ephemeralness was a sign of luxury.

This year I decided to try the squarish stemmed flowers again, in a place so shaded that whatever grows there leans across the path after the sun. I figured if I treated them like the French, as a temporary spot of color to be replaced in a month, they were worth the 55¢ I paid per plant.

Alas, I’ve gotten older. I’ve lost by childhood illusions that wonderful flowers last all summer. I’m now forced to sample the more sophisticated European acceptance of fleeting beauty captured for an instant. To paraphrase Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, “I remember them well.”

Notes:
Cuthbertson, William. Pansies, Violas and Violets, 1910.

Howe, T. K. and W. E. Waters “Two Year Evaluation of Pansy Cultivars in the Florida Landscape,” Florida State Horticultural Society Proceedings 109:311-318:1996.

Sakota Seed America, Inc. “Pansy Crown,” revised 15 August 2007, available on-line.

Thompson and Morgan. Catalogs from 1955 and 1986.

Photograph: Rose Crown pansy, 30 March 2011.