Blue Gilia

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, brome and pampas grasses; squash leaves turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, leatherleaf globemallows, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, scarlet creeper, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, chamisa near river, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy aster, sandburs; buds on broom senecio and heath aster; buffalo gourd gourds.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pied snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster; buds on Silver King artemisia.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; long green pod on butterfly weed.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Rain several days, with a lot of standing water along the road late Thursday afternoon; saw smoke in the Jemez yesterday afternoon; last rain 9/3/11; 12:51 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The monsoon rains have finally arrived. The roadsides, prairie and arroyos are reacting, each in their own way.

The shoulders are a refuse of summer annual seeds that wait for the right conditions to germinate. Some, like sunflowers, pigweed and ragweed, seem to have missed their time. Those that emerged early were about a foot high when the rains began. They’re not much taller now, but are blooming. Toward the village, where there’s been more moisture from the ditches and river, plants are their usual selves, tall and in full bloom.

Russian thistles aren’t so easily discouraged. There were few during the summer and they too only got about a foot high before turning spiny. Since the rain, in openings here and there, dense grass is about half an inch high. Much is young cheat grass; the rest will soon push up single spears that reveal their true identity.

Goat’s heads apparently have been taking advantage of the lack of competition from overshadowing weeds. Where bright green pairs of smooth-edged, oval leaves have sprung up, the ones nearest the road are putting out plump red stems with eight tiny leaflets. The existing plants have already expanded their territory. The other seedlings still could be next year’s white sweet clover or this year’s áñil del muerto: the one has already peaked for this season, the other is still scarce.

Earlier bindweed grew luxuriantly in abandoned vegetable gardens and corn fields when the usual pigweed and Russian thistles didn’t appear. By the time the rains came, they’d already exhausted themselves. Those that weren’t cleared by the vigilant had disappeared with the unrelenting heat and dryness, leaving the usual ones blooming along the road.

The related ivy-leaved morning glories are now sprouting in the wash, while an occasional scarlet creeper is finally opening in the village. However, while toothed spurge has been up for a few weeks, it’s no where dense as usual. Purslane and clammy weed simply haven’t appeared.

The dry river beds are very different - nothing is growing. The waters rushed through with such force two weekends ago they washed everything away. The near arroyo, where Russian thistles had colonized the bases of the newly reinforced walls, is now bare. The bottom, leveled by heavy equipment and the wind, has been resculpted.

In the far arroyo, the carpet of leaves and dead plant debris that had collected under the tamarix are gone. The grasses and small chamisas are prostrate, pasted by mud. The only green leaves are on short plants hiding under the protection of the largest chamisas whose roots can resist the compulsive force of passing floods.

The waters reached both sides, with mud still caked several inches up the western bank. On the east, it was strong enough to undercut the base and collapse the wall in places. Some scurf peas are hanging by their white roots.

Downstream on the flood plain, cream tips had earlier become raised islands when the wind dislodged sand around their lower stems. Now, one that had grown near the edge of the active bottom is held prone by a thick, exposed root. The water removed the protecting inch high bank.

In between, the prairie hasn’t changed much. Some grama grass, probably blue grama, is putting up new sprouts, but needle grass is responding slowly. In my yard, where I started watering the native grasses a few weeks ago, the black grama and needle grass are turning green, but in the areas left to nature, things are still brown. Either the messages from the sun angles or the continuing alternations of moisture and evaporation are signaling restraint.

In places where forbs do exist, usually closer to the arroyo bank or the ranch road, some that went dormant are coming back, the strap-leafed asters here, a stickleaf there. The golden hairy asters, which have been blooming everywhere for weeks, are still low clumps crouched within the cages of last year’s dead stems.

The blue gilia has had one of the toughest years. The low growing shrub usually is covered with five-petaled flowers from the end of April until mid-June. Last year, two large plants were living near the base of the deep road cut just north of the arroyo. Smaller plants bloomed in a small waterway leading to an arroyo feeder to the west of the shaded parents.

This year, the smaller plants began blooming in mid-April, but I almost never saw their flowers fully open. When they did unfurl, it seemed to be just before ten in the morning. I never saw flowers on the two larger plants, just lantern-shaped buds and greyish spent blooms.

The Polemoniaceae that most resembles mossy phlox is native to the dry southwest. It’s found from Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma down through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo León.

Taxonomists can’t agree if blue bowls should be called Gilia rigidula or Giliastrum rigidulum ssp. acerosum, but do agree the genus emerged early, probably in Texas or northern Mexico when the climate was drying in the mid-tertiary period and swamps were giving way to grasslands. Leon Stuchlik believes our plants represent “the most primitive species in the genus,” with pollen very similar to its supposed Loeselia ancestor.

The response of the herbaceous perennial to cyclic droughts is to reduce its activity, to stop blooming when moisture disappears in June and maintain its fading, needle tipped leaves until the monsoons. Last year, a few brightened the end of July and bloomed the first week in August. Their leaves stayed green until temperatures fell into the low 20's last November, then fell away leaving twiggy skeletons that faded from red to white by mid December.

The central stem, with its main limbs that branch into a dense ground cover, rises from a reddish taproot that doesn’t penetrate particularly deeply into the soil. The normal equilibrium that’s maintained between the fleshy root and hairy, glandular leaves was challenged by this year’s prolonged drought. The leaves turned brown by August.

When rain finally trickled down the slopes of the road cut, the roots revived and in the past weeks new growth has developed. In the spring this happens about a month before the funnel shaped flowers appear with white-rimmed yellow centers and yellow stamens.

The color of those petals is the rich jewel shade painters seek to paint the virgin Mary’s cloak. It’s a hue more likely found here than in the lowlands. Muriel Wheldale Onslow found the purple anthocyanin pigment needs alkaline sap to turn blue, and the higher the altitude, the more intense the color. She said drought and heat also increase production of the pigment, which may be why the flowers are darkest in June, just before the summer hiatus.

Notes:
Grant, Verne. “Classification of the Genus Gilia (Polemoniaceae),” Phytologia 84:69-86:1998.

Onslow, Muriel Wheldale. The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants, 1916.

Stuchlik, L. “Pollen Morphology and Taxonomy of the Family Polemoniaceae,” Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 4:325-333:1967.

Photograph: New blue gilia leaves on the bank of the ranch road near the arroyo, 28 August 2011.

Broad-leaf Arrowhead

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, less Sensation cosmos than usual, alfalfa, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, some snake weed, native sunflowers, chamisa, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy aster, sandburs; buds on broom senecio; with rain, Russian thistle and ivy-leafed morning glories are sprouting, as well as something that could be goat’s head, áñil del muerto or next year’s white sweet clover.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pied snapdragon, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, hummingbird moth, cabbage butterfly, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Monsoon winds brought rain several evenings this week; last rain 8/25/11; 13:44 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Last Saturday I was surprised by a clump of arrowheads blooming in an Española ditch.

The herbaceous perennial is a semiaquatic plant whose roots live in water, but has leaves on narrow stalks that rise above the surface. With the broad-leafed species, Sagittaria latifolia, the bases of those bright green, triangular leaves are wide in swallow water, but so narrow in deeper water they can’t be distinguished easily from the arum-leafed Sagittaria cuneata. Both have been reported in Rio Arriba County.

The three petaled white flowers appear in whorls of two or three on spongy, erect stalks. The lower ones are female, with their centers filled with green pistols. Those above, with twenty to forty yellow stamens, are male. Each group opens from the bottom up with a space between that begins to resemble a plucked grape cluster of denuded pedicels.

Round, green pods replace the lower flowers. Inside those furrowed fruits, plants can produce up to 20,000 seeds that are eaten by ducks and geese. Indeed, in Michigan the Potawatomi in the southern part of the state and the Ojibwa/Chippewa in the north encouraged the Alismataceae to attract fowl.

The flat green seeds must pass through a winter, a summer, and another winter before they germinate, and then only when temperatures range between 80 and 90 degrees in direct sun. Once they undergo their two-year dormancy, the seedlings do well.

The plants, however, have found other, more reliable ways to reproduce. As the days of summer wane, they transfer carbohydrates and other nutrients to tubers that form towards the ends of their milky, radiating rhizomatous roots so they can survive the winter without photosynthesizing leaves. A mature plant may produce up to forty tubers, each of which can send up clusters of tall stalked leaves for three new plants.

The reason they didn’t quickly overrun their resources in the wetter north was women gathered the white tubers in fall, often using their toes to loosen them. The golf-ball size corms floated to the top and were dropped into floating baskets.

The Potawatomi, along with the neighboring Meskwaki and Menominee in Wisconsin, boiled them, then strung slices for winter food. The Ojibwa dried them. A great many other tribes in the plains and far west also boiled or roasted them. Some even traded them.

The thing that surprised me wasn’t that arrowheads were growing in Española. After all, they’re found almost everywhere in the New World where six to twelve inches of water stands for any period of time.

In New Mexico the arum-leafed species also grows in the Four Corners where the San Juan flows, in the northeast with tributaries of the Canadian, and along the western side of the Rio Grande down to Albuquerque. Latifolia is also found in northwestern San Juan, northeastern Union and eastern Roosevelt counties.

What did surprise me was that there was a running ditch where I was standing near the highway on the west side of the river. The soils are poor and the terrain between the San Juan and Santa Clara tends to be broken badlands that quickly drop to sandy wastes along the river. The only evidence of old farmsteads is a few square houses with steeply pitched, four-sided, steel roofs and dormers, a style I associate with the influence of the French in the early to mid nineteenth century.

When the Spanish returned after the Pueblo Revolt, Antonio de Salazar requested land in 1714 near the confluence of the Chama and Rio Grande he claimed his maternal grandfather had settled earlier near the San Juan settlement. His father, Agustín, was a blind Indian who served Diego de Vargas as a translator when he was leading the reconquest.

On the northern edge of the Santa Clara, near the confluence of the Santa Cruz with the Rio Grande, José López Naranjo claimed land south of that owned by Salazar. It became the ridge and valley settlement of Guachupangue. Naranjo also acted as a go-between with the Indians for Vargas. His father Domingo was active in Taos during the revolt.

At some time the land between was purchased or claimed by descendants of Francisco Montes Vigil, who came north from Zacatecas in 1695 when Juan Páez Hurtado was recruiting settlers for an area north of Albuquerque. He and his wife, María, who was described as an española, relocated to Santa Cruz a few years later.

Angélico Chávez suggests that, while Juan de Oñate had specified all settlers in the north be españoles, his own children had mixed blood. His wife was the granddaughter of Hernán Cortés and Tecuichpotzin, Moctezuma’s oldest daughter and heir. The term came to be used for the children or grandchildren of mixed marriages or liaisons who had become sufficiently acculturated to be restored to their status as Spaniards.

The badlands on the west side of the river, then, were settled by people who openly lived outside society, neither in pueblos nor in the Roman Catholic village of Santa Cruz. The great-great-granddaughter of Vigil’s illegitimate son, Josefita Vigil, married a descendent of Naranjo, Benedito Naranjo. He sold what was then known as La Vega de los Vigiles to the Denver and Rio Grande railroad.

If the name Vigil’s Meadows is any clue, the land was then being used for cattle. It’s unclear when or why the Acequia de los Vigiles was dug.

The ditch begins just below the junction of the Chama and Rio Grande, and flows between the old rail bed and the river until it reaches the city limits. At that point, the older Acequia de Los Salazares turns to empty into the Rio Grande, and the Vigil ditch turns inland to continue what could have been an older path of the Salazar ditch.

From that point the Vigil ditch moves southwest to skirt the bottom of the highland where Frank Bond built his home. Today that land is used by the community college, the hospital, various churches, and public buildings like the library. For most of the distance it’s buried in culverts, but at the point I saw it, the land was dropping steeply and modern engineers apparently had decided it was cheaper to let it fall in the open than try to encase it.

At various times city planners have coveted its right of way, most recently when it was seen as a possible conduit to move water from the Rio Grande to a proposed new water treatment plant that could handle the city’s allotment from the diversion of the San Juan over the Rockies through the Chama to the Rio Grande. That merger of the rivers in 1971 could explain how the plants got here, if they didn’t just fall off some truck headed back north to Colorado.

The open section of the ditch has been carefully maintained. No trash had accumulated and none of the nastier weeds were growing there last week. At the upper end, showy milkweeds were growing on the west bank. They gave way to sunflowers. Then, on the east side, there was some bright green grass. Just before the waters reentered a culvert to cross under the highway horsetails grew on the bank and broadleaf arrowheads flourished in the water.

Rather like the Salazars, Naranjos and Vigils who lived on the west side of the river beyond the constraints of organized society, the arrowheads are exploiting a part of the ditch freed of the concrete and steel walls that confine it before it finally flows west to empty into the Arroyo de Guachupangue.

Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

_____. Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico, 1989, on españoles.

Esquibel, José Antonio. Entry on Francisco Montes Vigil posted on Cybergata.com.

Garcia, Lisa K. Entries on descendants of Francisco Montes Vigil posted on Genealogy Place.com. Benedito’s son, Alejandrino, married Delfinia Vigil; their son was Emilio Naranjo.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including Frances Densmore, “Uses of Plants by the Chippewa Indians,” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnography Annual Report 44:273-379:1928 (cites latifolia); and articles by Huron H. Smith which appeared in the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee Bulletin - “Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians,” 4:1-174:1923 (cuneata); “Ethnobotany of the Meskwaki Indians,” 4:175-326:1928 (latifolia); “Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians,” 4:327-525:1932 (cuneata); and “Ethnobotany of the Forest Potawatomi Indians,” 7:1-230:1933 (latifolia).

United States. Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. Germplasm Resources Information Network. Distributions for cuneata and latifolia.

_____. Department of the Interior. Geological Survey. 7.5 quadrangle maps for San Juan Pueblo and Española.

Photograph: Male flowers on broadleaf arrowhead growing in the Acequia de los Vigiles, 20 August 2011.

Catalpa

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, Japanese honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, brome grass; orange berries on pyracantha; pods reddening on trees of heaven; local grocer roasting green peppers in parking lot.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, snake weed, native sunflowers, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, golden hairy and strapleaf spine asters, sandburs, sideoats grama.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower, Maximilian sunflowers; buds on Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, hummingbird moth on large leafed soapwort, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, hear crickets.

Weather: Brief downpours have been good for the garden, but haven’t remained in the unirrigated yard long enough to help; last rain 8/21/11; 13:58 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The catalpas are in trouble. Their leaves have turned white, with only green veins, much like caladiums.

The problems first appeared last July on trees growing in a town medium. On July 24, I noticed the leaves on some were yellowing. A few days later I noticed others appeared more lime green than usual from the car window.

Catalpa bignonioides and Catalpa speciosa are native to the eastern Mississippi valley where they’re warm season plants. The trees don’t leaf until late April. Their leaves begin turning yellow early, usually the first part of October here.

This winter was unusually cold and dry, much colder than they like. On May 1, just after the leaves began emerging, it snowed. The broad, horizontal leaves caught flakes that would have melted quickly into the warm ground. Within days, the leaves turned black and fell.

When new leaves appeared a week or so later, they emerged from buds a bit back from the branch tips. Leaves on branches nearer the ground, that also were protected by shrubs, grew larger and denser than those on higher, more exposed limbs which never formed a canopy to provide normal levels of chlorophyll. Trees like mine and those along the highway, up and away from the comforting winter river, never recovered from the effects of the cold.

I first noticed the caladium effect on leaves on the west side of my tree on June 29. Some in town were yellowing. In the village there now are trees that are completely white, some that are green and sparse, and some that are normal. They may be across the road from each other, they may be near a ditch, they may be tall or young.

I began watering my tree in late June, but nothing stopped the march of white leaves. There now seems to be two toward the end of each branch, sometimes with another slightly discolored one below them. Some on the west, the first to fade, are turning brown.

Kim Coder says chlorosis is a sign that trees growing in soils with a high pH are unable to absorb minerals, especially iron, from dry soil. Since the trees have been growing here for years, this suggests at least part of the problem is there’s not enough water many feet down to dissolve minerals.

However, I suspect more is involved. Unlike this year, the winter before was wet and followed another wet winter which would have replenished soil waters after a decade of dry years that hadn’t affected the trees in town. Mid-July of last year was simply too soon for deep soil to be so dry.

The alternative is that somehow the soils have become more alkaline. Certainly, over time, irrigation from the aquifer would have that effect. When my well was tested in September of 2002, the water had a pH of 8.6, where 7 is neutral. It also contained detectable quantities of dissolved iron.

Most of the area trees, if they’re tended at all, are watered from ditches supplied by the Santa Cruz reservoir. The snow fed lake is probably less alkaline than groundwater, but its primary fish are still rainbow and German brown trout. The Pacific coast species should have water with a pH between 6.5 and 8.5. The European import does best with it between 6.8 and 7.8.

A high pH is usually associated with limestone, but it’s been a great many years since we’ve been under water. The last time was before the Cretaceous Seaway that covered much of the west receded some 70 million years ago While calcium carbonate is eroded from outcrops and transported by rain, we haven’t had enough precipitation this year to add anything to the surface.

Neither missing iron nor additional lime fully explains this year’s etiolated leaves, perhaps because each is only a symbol we use to denote chemical reactions we never question. We’re quite happy to accept the possibility that tests for pH levels are magical divinations of soil qualities, when, in fact, they’re measures of hydrogen ions found in solutions.

In 1884, Svante Arrhenius suggested two molecules of water (H₂O) often recombine to form one hydroxide molecule (OH^-) and one hydronium one (H₃O⁺). The first is missing an electron the second has absorbed. The first thus has a positive charge; the other is negative.

If either ion is absorbed into another molecule before they can recombine into two molecules of water, the chemistry changes. A base condition results when the number of positive ions increases.

The question becomes what chemical could have created a hostile environment for the catalpas last summer and this. I’ve been pondering the ash from the Las Conchas fire ever since I noticed sun beams crossing the Jemez were highlighting fine ash in updrafts that delineated the ridges and canyons. This effect occurs around eight in the evening, just before the sun colors the clouds, when the land is cooling and the air has begun rising.

Burned wood is alkaline. Some recommend using wood ashes to sweeten acidic soils. Early settlers in this country made caustic lye soap by mixing ashes with water. Most people this year have been concerned with the heavier black fragments which have threatened to clog the water treatment equipment in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, or which may have smothered fish on July 31.

My thought is that when the finer invisible dust lands on a leaf, some base molecule reacts with the naturally occurring negative hydronium, and leaves a positive hydroxide. When that occurs enough times, the tree’s surface water turns alkaline. We know leaves absorb that water because Coder says it’s possible to temporarily green a catalpa by spraying the leaves with chelated iron.

We’ve certainly had enough dry ash the past two years. Last year the South Fork fire was started in the Santa Fe National Forest by lightening on June 10 about 25 miles west of Española and maybe 10 miles north, in the Jemez between the Santa Clara and Abique land grants. By the time it finally rained with hurricane Alex on July 3, it had charred 17,086 acres and was only 80% contained.

This year we haven’t just had the Las Conchas fire that raged across the river from June 26. We also had smoke and ash from Arizona fires in early June, followed by the Pacheco fire which started north of Tesuque on June 18.

Both years the monsoons were delayed. There were no rains last June, and the next major rainfall after Alex came with Bonnie on July 23, a twenty day pause between hurricanes. This year, while the burned areas in the Jemez have seen rain, there’s been little here in the valley. No hurricane has yet been serious.

Last July and this, after the fire fighters were less active and ashes had a chance to dry, my nose itched or dripped, my eyes were gummy or burned. I’m not a tree. Unlike the catalpa which lets surface water seep through, my skin and nasal passages act as barriers to prevent irritants from entering my body.

I don’t know if ash is the problem, but like any superstitious being facing an unknown I’m open to any explanation that might help the tree. I followed the standard operating procedures, watered the roots. When that failed, I consulted the oracles, laid down Ironrite and watered it in. When that achieved nothing, I turned to folk science, washed the dust off the leaves in the morning.

And lo, no sooner did I begin spraying the tree, than we started getting brief downpours, either in the afternoon or middle of the night. A belief in sympathetic magic is easily reinforced.

Notes: See entry for 25 November 2007 on why catalpas were introduced into the arid west.

Coder, Kim D. “Southern Catalpa: ‘The Fish Bait Tree’,” University of Georgia, Warnell School of Forest Resources website.

Cowx, Ian G. “Oncorhynchus mykiss (Walbaum, 1792),” FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Cultured Aquatic Species Information Programme website, 15 June 2005.

Raleigh, Robert F.. Laurence D. Zuckerman and Patrick C. Nelson. Habitat Suitability Index Models and Instream Flow Suitability Curves: Brown Trout, 1986 revision.

Wikipedia. Entries on “Acid” and “Hydrogen Ion,” retrieved 14 August 2011.

Photograph: Catalpa with full-sized, discolored leaves growing in Española medium; Jemez in far background; 20 August 2011.

Sideoats Grama

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, Heavenly Blue morning glories, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa; pods on honey locust; sweet corn and green chili for sale down the road.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, lemon scurf pea, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, ragweed, snake weed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, heath, golden hairy and strapleaf spine asters, sideoats grama; pods forming on showy milkweed.

In my yard, looking east: Hosta, garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and Maximilian sunflowers; new leaves emerging on oriental poppies.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed; hips turning red on rugosas.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, perennial four o’clock, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens; first fruit developing on Sweet 100 tomato and Sandia pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, gold finches, other small birds, gecko, back dragonfly, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants, cricket.

Weather: Air cleared last weekend and temperatures got lower at night, higher during the day; then the clouds and invisible, but irritating ash returned; temperatures returned to normal and rain passed over; last slight rain 8/13/11; 14:17 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Several weeks ago, when we got our first slight rain, I talked to a local woman who thought it had been enough to put out the Las Conchas fire. At my place, the gentle shower lasted 15 minutes. Smoke was still rising in the evenings.

We’ve had more rain since, about the amount we get in a typical August monsoon front with no hurricane behind it. There were days when I could see the Jemez shrouded in rain clouds. The fire may be out, or smoldering, in many places, but it’s still burning to the north.

I must confess, however, I made an assumption as naive as that woman’s. I thought now we’ve had some rain, things will green up.

Then I walked through the arroyo last Sunday. There was no sign of the moisture in the top inches of soil I’d seen the previous Tuesday. The sun had sucked it out. The only things blooming were scattered golden hairy asters and a tamarix. Scurf peas and four-wing saltbushes were the only large masses of green. Everything else was gray or the color of dry sand, even what remained of last year’s grasses.

During the great drought of the 1930's, John Weaver was “impressed with the bareness of the soil” in Nebraska. Gone were the layers of vegetation that began with mosses and lichens. Gone was the “former mulch of fallen leaves, flower parts, stems.” For a while, fungi had feasted on organic matter left by dead roots and crowns in the soil, but finally even they disappeared, leaving not even their smell.

The land didn’t begin recovering until the spring of 1941, when normal levels of humidity, temperature and wind patterns returned. Even then it took months with three times the normal amount of rain for water to percolate through the dry soil to collect at depths needed by roots.

During the dust bowl years, the common prairie grass, little blue stem, died and was replaced by western wheat grass with an understory of blue grama or buffalo grass that was fleeing the even dryer lands to the west. In many places, that wave was followed by sideoats grama. It went from being insignificant to the second most common grass in parts of Nebraska.

Bouteloua curtipendula has perhaps the widest distribution of any warm season grass, growing from Ontario to British Columbia in the north through Nicaragua and Guatemala. It disappears in the isthmus, but appears again to the south in Venezuela, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Within its range, it tends to prefer rocky, limey soils. Early in the last century, the perennial grew in the mountains in this area where Mexican peddlers gathered the stalks in August, then dried them to sell to Tewa speakers who used them for brooms. When the ends broke, women used the remains to brush their hearths and metates. When little was left, they used bound bunches on their hair.

More recently, sideoats grama has been reported growing with one-seed juniper in the Jemez on “steep, colluvial slopes of escarpments, and hill or mountainsides” with a slope greater than 15 degrees and 15" to 19" of precipitation a year. Around Los Alamos, it’s found on canyon sides and mesa tops, including in Jemez and White Rock canyons. Occasionally, it blooms along the shoulder down here.

While it’s widespread, sideoats grama normally is not particularly common. Before 1933, it appeared in many of the prairie plots observed by Weaver, but never reached 1% of the vegetative cover. The seed has a short life span and doesn’t bank. However, it germinates easily, develops quickly and can survive on 12" of precipitation a year. With its competitors gone, it flourished.

By 1937, there were reports that some plants were diseased. By 1939 the unknown problem had spread. However, by then, the USDA had collected seed from vigorous plants and was developing disease-free alternatives. One of the first was Vaughn, found far east of the Manzanos in 1935 and released in 1940.

The seed I planted in 2005 came from a retailer in Wisconsin. The catalog didn’t mention a cultivar, perhaps because the existence of a name would have countered the image of it as a true native plant. I suspect it was one intended for that area, since very few seeds germinated here.

Sideoats grama has adapted itself so well to its environment, that two subspecies exist in this country, curtipendula in the north and caespitosa in the south. In México, a research team collected samples from 577 populations in 13 states. They identified 177 ecotypes that fell into six different groups. Germination success depends in part on the geographic origin of the seed.

Still, one plant survives from 2005, and several come up where seed was scattered among the rugosas the following spring. Most of the year, they resemble June grass. The clump of long, wide green blades stands above the neighboring Bermuda grass. If you’re so inclined, Richard Wynia says you can look for long hairs at the edges of the leaves near their bases to distinguish it.

However, when it blooms, and it’s blooming now, there’s no mistaking it. The stalk rises one to three feet. The seeds hang from one side and their weight bends the culm. In more favorable climates, the spikes are composed of rows of spikelets like those of blue or black grama. The Lakota called it “banner waving in the wind.” Kiowa warriors, who had killed in battle, wore it because it resembled a feathered lance.

The purple bracts surrounding the spikelets protect two flowers, one fertile, one sterile. Hanging from the first are bright red anthers that wait for the wind to blow pollen to the waiting feathery, white stigmas. Each flower can produce one seed. The rudimentary floret is often three awns above the fertile one. In fall, the spikes drop, leaving behind the purple attaching stems.

While side-oats grama has proven itself able to survive drought and pioneer devastated lands, its success with fire is more ambiguous. It does better after early spring fires, than summer ones like ours. The southern subspecies recovers better than the northern one. In the best of cases, it can take two or three years for new seedlings to reach maturity, and that’s when you have enough rain.

Notes:
Chadwick, Amy C. “Bouteloua curtipendula,” 2003, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System; includes studies on fire, seed banking, viability and germination.

Morales Nieto, Carlos Raúl, Adrián Quero Carrillo, Alicia Melgoza Castillo, Martín
Martínez Salvador and Pedro Jurado Guerra. “Forage Diversity of Sideoats Grama [Bouteloua curtipendula (Michx.) Torr.] Populations in Arid and Semiarid Regions of Mexico,” Técnica Pecuaria en México 47:231-244:2009.

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

Schmoller, David. “Side-oats Grama (Bouteloua curtipendula),” 1994, Northern State University’s The Natural Source - An Educator's Guide to South Dakota's Natural Resources website; on Lakota name.

United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Plant Associations of Arizona and New Mexico. Volume 2: Woodlands, 1997 revision; on Jemez.

Vestal, Paul A. and Richard Evans Schultes. The Economic Botany of the Kiowa Indians, 1939, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Weaver, John E. and F. W. Albertson. “Major Changes in Grassland as a Result of Continued Drought,” Botanical Gazette 100:576-591:1939; on bareness of soil, role of fungi. University of Nebraska Digital Commons has made many of Weaver’s papers available on line.

_____ and _____. “Resurvey of Grasses, Forbs, and Underground Plant Parts at the End of the Great Drought,” Ecological Monographs 13:63-117:1943; comments on 1941 as a wet year.

_____ and R. L. Fowler. “Occurrence of a Disease of Side-oats Grama,” Torrey Botanical Club Bulletin 67:503-508:1940.

Wynia, Richard. “Side-oats Grama,” USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service plant guide, 2007.

Photograph: Sideoats grama spikelets, 7 August 2011.

Lemon Scurf Pea

What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, Sensation cosmos, squash, alfalfa.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, lemon scurf pea, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, pigweed, snake weed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Hopi tea, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, áñil del muerto, sand burs, sideoats grama.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies, cutleaf coneflower; buds on hosta, Autumn Joy sedum and Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, lead plant, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbirds, other small birds, gecko, large orange dragonfly, small bees on Apache plume, hornets, harvester and small black ants, cricket.

Weather: Hurricane Don sent us some rain from the Gulf; not enough to replenish the reserves of deep rooted trees and shrubs, but enough to reach the roots of grasses; last rain 8/4/11; 14:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: This year’s drought has been tough on even the plants one assumes are adapted to a dry climate. Buds formed on prickly pear cacti, then shriveled without opening. No flowering stalks emerged from narrow-leaved yuccas. Many summer blooming grasses are still dormant.

Scurf peas have been sparser in some places, produced fewer white clusters everywhere. In a good year all you usually notice are bright green, branching plants that get about a foot high. The usual trefoil is reduced to three long, narrow segments rather like chicken’s feet which overlay one another to give an illusion of bushiness.

From a distance the flower heads look like Dutch clover balls buried deep in the foliage. Nearer, they resemble small locos on stems jutting from beneath leaf junctions. In some parts of the country, especially west of the Rockies, the flowers are blue, lavender or purple.

Psoralidium lanceolatum is native to the Great Plains from Saskatchewan and Manitoba south to Texas and west. In the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley said it was found west of Santa Fe and in Tesuque edging the east side of the Rio Grande valley, in Coolidge and Zuñi in McKinley County to the west, and the Mogollon mountains and Plains of Saint Augustin in Catron County to the southwest.

There are two populations near my house. One clings to the gravel and sand sides of the large arroyo and in the sandy feeder above that brings water down from a higher bank. They usually begin blooming in mid-May, and have more bumpy, sticky pods than flowers by the first of July. The florets appeared a week or so later this year; the seeds, so far, are few.

The other group grows in a sunken section that looks like a nascent arroyo aborted by harder soil toward the river. Some plants are growing in the clay and sand bank fill where the road was built to cross the wash, while others are growing along the sandy bank beside the gully where the road was cut to level itself.

The herbaceous perennial produces new growth from both the tap root and root buds. This year, plants in the clay loam wash either stayed dormant or only the main stems emerged from the roots. The plants have been shorter and the stand less dense. There have also been far fewer flowers. The plants in the sand fared better.

The nitrogen-fixing legume is one of the few flowers able to grow in pure sand dunes. In the Chico Basin dunes southeast of Colorado Springs, it grows with sand muhly and blowout grass (Redfieldia flexuosa). In the Great Dunes north of the Rio Grande, it’s found with prairie sunflowers and blowout, needle and rice grasses.

The roots form extensive systems of fleshy branches that reflect the availability of water. John Weaver has a drawing that shows a thin taproot that extends down 4.5' before it expands into a fat tube with more lateral roots. Seven feet down the root branches are dense with many ending in nodules.

In the wetter grasslands east of the Rockies, the fleshy section isn’t buried so low. Cheyenne women used wooden digging sticks to gather mohk ta en in early summer for food. By the 1920's, they had changed to iron rods.

Here, the water conserving organ must be deeper. I used a flat stone to dig around one of the smaller plants in the arroyo, and found only a narrow, pliable white taproot that had no taste beyond what one expects biting into a grass stem. As I chewed, it became woody and broke into strips surrounding a white, flat section. In the drier Great Basin to the west of the Rockies, native people used the available fibrous roots to make string and nets.

The Navajo living in the drylands at Ramah near Zuñi in the 1950's didn’t use scurf peas for food, although Paul Vestal suggests the sedentary herders did still dig some roots like wild potatoes (Solanum jamesii) and mariposa bulbs. Instead, they used the roots with other plants to treat venereal diseases.

They were more interested in the above ground parts whose habit they called winding. The knobby leaves are covered with glands. When you rub them, you release an oil that smells of lemon. Only, of course, they didn’t know about lemons until the Spanish arrived. The Diné thought it smelled more of buffalo water, and used ayani biliz ha-lcin as a lotion for Gameway, a ceremonial relic of a nomadic life dependent on hunting in the far north where drought was rarely so common.

Notes:
Bovin, Phyllis Pineda. “Plant Adaptations to Active Dune Systems,” San Luis Valley Environmental and Conservation Education Council Natural Resources Education Quarterly Fall 2005; on Great Dunes.

Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians, vol 2, 1928; treated as Psoralea lanceolata.

Kelso, T, N. Bower, P. Halteman, K. Tenney, and S. Weaver. “Dune Communities of SE Colorado: Patterns of Rarity, Disjunction and Succession,” 2004 Southwestern Rare and Endangered Plants Conference; on Chico Basin.

Nickerson, Gifford S. “Some Data on Plains and Great Basin Indian Uses of Certain Native Plants,” Tebiwa 9:45-51:1966, cited by Dan Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952; treated as Psarolea lanceolata.

Weaver, John E. Root Development of Field Crops, 1926.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972; treated as Psoralea micrantha.

Wyman, Leland C. and Stuart K. Harris. Navajo Medical Ethnobotany, 1941; treated as Psarolea lanceolata; they translate the name as “odor of bison urine.”

Photograph: Lemon scurf pea, 31 July 2011.

Large Leaf Soapwort

What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, few Sensation cosmos, squash, alfalfa.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Russian thistle, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod, áñil del muerto; buds on snakeweed.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded and new morning glories, sweet alyssum and zinnia from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, David phlox, ladybells peaked, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; buds on hosta.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Some rain last night; 14:58 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Clusters of a pink-flowered soapwort have been filling the space between the taller sidalceas and invading hollyhocks since the first of July. At first, the five-petaled trumpets were near the front of the bed, but those are now tinker-toy spheres formed from shuttered bulbous pipes. The current flowers are hidden at the back. With luck, new ones will continue to open until mid October.

When I bought the woody rooted perennials in 2004, the label simply said they were “hybrid giant flowered soapwort” and “saponaria x lempergii.” The 3" pots were next to the more popular rock soapworts, and marketing placement was intended to suggest uses for the plant without actually committing the nursery to any definitive opinion.

The absence of facts, or even romantic narratives, seems the fate of this plant that’s outlived the era that called it into being. The historical context is gone. Fritz Lemperg, for whom it’s named, has become a Cheshire cat surviving as a shadow of himself on a few branches of the internet.

The red stemmed plant is a cross between Saponaria cypria and Saponaria haussknechtii. The first is found only in the Troodos mountains on Cyprus. The endangered perennial was first reported by Pierre Edmond Boissier, whose maternal grandfather was a Swiss physician and naturalist who took him hiking in the Alps as a child. He trained with Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in Geneva, then went searching for plants in Spain. In the 1840's he explored Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt where he accumulated the best collection then existing of plants from that region.

Gudrun Simmler, a Swiss botanist who published a monograph on soapworts in 1910, defined the second pink-flowered perennial as a separate species that grows in Albania, southern Yugoslavia, and northern Greece. Others believe it to be a subspecies of Saponaria sicula found in Sicily.

The nineteenth century development of botany as an academic field that valued the analysis of existing plants over the discovery of new ones favored men like Simmler over those like Boissier and relegated plant hunting to a hobby for the wealthy. Lemperg may have been an heir to this tradition, for he explored Albania in the 1930's and distributed plants and seeds he brought back to national botanical gardens.

There’s no indication whether Dr. Limperg actually tried crossing different plants or some patient, employee or colleague named the plant after him. All we know is he developed a large alpine collection at the sanatorium he opened in 1924 outside the capital of Styria in southeastern Austria, and by 1931, when Magnus Johnson went there to train as a gardener, it had some magnificent clematis.

The interest in plant hunting often followed from the more pragmatic training of doctors before the emergence of pharmaceutical conglomerates. Then, physicians were expected to know the healing characteristics of plants and natural history was part of their education. Many developed private botanical gardens as symbols of both their medical and social positions.

Some of the most intrepid searchers in this part of the world were German emigres who preferred the wilderness to medicine. Frederick Adolphus Wislizenus left his practice with Georg Englemann in Saint Louis to explore northern México where he found coral bells. Englemann, who developed the botanical garden in Saint Louis, would send the specimens he received from travelers to Asa Gray at Harvard, who then identified them using current scientific theories.

Sanatoriums themselves devolved from this utilitarian view of the natural world. In the 1850's, Hermann Brehmer abandoned the study of botany for medicine. After completing his degree in Berlin, he converted his sister-in-law’s spa in the Silesian mountains into a facility to test his theory that tuberculosis could be cured with fresh air, good diet and exercise.

There’s an oft repeated tale that Brehmer himself suffered from TB, and went to the Himalayas to study plants and treat himself. Peter Warren found no evidence for the veracity of the story that didn’t appear until a generation later and believes it part of the romantic aura associated with the alpine sensibility.

By the time Lemperg opened his institution, the idea of the sanatorium had expanded to include any facility in a suburban area that used fresh air and nutrition as part of the treatment. They often became places where people went to recuperate from stress or illnesses, differentiated from the neighboring spas by having a medical staff.

Sanatoriums disappeared after streptomycin was proven effective against the bacteria that causes tuberculosis in 1944. Perhaps equally important to limiting the spread of the infectious disease was the parallel transition to electric heat generated by power sent from remote utility plants that cleared the atmosphere of one factor that had weakened lungs, the dust and fumes of coal burning in every basement.

Nineteenth century medical training in natural science instilled the view that physicians were members of a scientific community dependent on one another’s experience. Much like plant collectors were expected to send their choicest finds to botanical gardens, students were told they should send descriptions of their most unusual cases to society journals.

F. Lemperg was continuing this tradition in the 1920's when he sent notes on knee and ear surgeries, along with descriptions of x-ray and anaesthesia techniques, to publications in Leipzig.

I don’t know if he’s the same Lemperg. German language medical journals from that era that would include the location or affiliation of an author aren’t yet available on the internet. All that survives from the time before malpractice rules limited what doctors learned or said and before drug companies alone provided continuing education for physicians are contemporary bibliographic entries from the publications that sought to keep their readers informed by giving them abstracts of current research.

In the nineteenth century, plant hunting, with its necessary hiking in remote areas, and the removal of the ill to country estates were entwined with the Romantic view of nature as a force for spiritual healing. In the twentieth century, that idea led to the rise of fresh air camps for the urban poor and exclusive summer camps for the upper classes.

Camps like the one I attended as a child failed to survive the 1970's when those run by middle class organizations were forced, by new charity rules, to open themselves to children unprepared for life outdoors. The ensuing clashes of cultures drove those interested in camping into private activities, while stranding the poor in remote cabins without electricity or running water. Many would have sympathized with Kate Gosselin who said, after spending a day with Sara Palin in the wilderness, “Why would anyone pretend to be homeless?”

The thing that most destroyed summer camps and the romantic view of nature, however, wasn’t the proliferation of celebrity lifestyles, but Adolph Hitler. Even today, many, especially those like Glenn Beck who didn’t go to summer camp as children, see any communal rural retreat as a Nazi program to brainwash the young.

Lemperg may, in fact, have been a Nazi supporter. Thomas Ster says that his political commitments lead to the decline of his business after the fall of Hitler’s Germany, and that the sanatorium closed after his death. It was taken over by Styria for the state’s agricultural and forestry school, which cut down the arboretum. Their reasons, like Lemperg’s politics, are obscured by postwar amnesia.

The hybrid soapwort, itself, is dependent on the continuity of human culture for its survival. The hairy ovaries are barren. When people no longer want their smooth green leaves, nurseries will no longer produce them. Then, when gardeners no longer make their own cuttings, the member of the carnation family will become extinct, less retrievable than information about Fritz Limperg on the web.

Notes:
Beck, Glenn. On his 25 July 2011 radio program he said the Norwegian camp targeted by Anders Behring Breivik "sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics?" The connection he made is commonly held by people with very liberal views who are more knowledgabe about the rise of Hitler than they are general nineteen century German culture.

Boissier, Pierre Edmond. Flora Orientalis Sive Enumeratio Plantarum in Oriente a Graecia et Aegypto ad Indiae, supplement 83, 1888.

Gosselin, Kate. On the episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska that first aired 12 December 2010. A girl at the camp I talked to made it clear she’d rather be at a resort with a swimming pool and hired help.

Johnson, Magnus. Interview with John Howells reproduced as “John Howells Talks to Magnus Johnson,” available on-line.

Lemperg, F. “Duplicate Roentgenogram with One Exposure,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 56:1933:1929.

_____. “Gangrenous Dissecting Cystitis,” Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, Leipzig 50:1203:1926.

_____. “Induced Ankylosis of Knee,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 48:486:1921.

_____. “Rectal Anaesthesia with Ether Oil,” Zentralblatt für Chirurgie, Leipzig 56:43:1929.

Lemperg, F. “Northern Albania,” New Flora and Silva 7:79-83:1934, cited by Peter Barnes and Petrit Hoda, “Plant Exploration in Albania,” Curtis's Botanical Magazine 18:170-179:2001.

Simmler, Gudrun. “Monographie der Gattung Saponaria,” Denkschrift der Akademie der Wissenschaft, Vienna 85: 433-509:1910.

Ster, Thomas. “Der Alpengarten Rannach,” Joannea Botanik 5:9-21:2006, says “sein politisches Engagement riss ihn mit dem Untergang Hitler-Deutschlands in den Abgrund.”

Warren, Peter. “The Evolution of the Sanatorium: The First Half-Century, 1854-1904,” The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 23:457-476:2006.

Photograph: Large-leaved hybrid soapwort, 30 July 2011.

Silver-Leaf Nightshade

What’s blooming in the area: Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, corn.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy asters, gumweed, Santa Fe thistle; toothed spurge germinating.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cutleaf coneflower.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories, sweet alyssum from seed.

Looking west: Caryopteris, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster; buds on David phlox.

Looking north: Blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Parker’s Gold yarrow, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, moss rose, nicotiana, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, gecko, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Despite a bit of rain Tuesday night, it’s still so hot and dry I’m watering twice as much and not staying even; last slight rain 7/19/11; 15:34 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The origins of cheese are shrouded in Neolithic mists when people in the near east were first domesticating plants and animals.

Once they learned to milk their cattle, sheep and goats, they needed methods to preserve the harvest. Milk was churned, boiled and fermented. Historians believe cheese was discovered when they stored milk in animal pockets, specifically the fourth stomachs of young calves which contain an enzyme, chymosin, that reacts with casein in milk to precipitate solid curds and leave liquid whey.

No one knows where the discoveries were made: evidence points to central Asia. The knowledge of rennet spread west when groups moved across the Danube. There’s some possibility people living in the area of modern Switzerland were raising cattle for milk and using baskets and wooden tools to process it in middle Neolithic times. Otto Tschumi thinks it possible a form of goose grass, Galium palustre, was used as a curdling agent.

The subsequent development of copper tools created a need for ores that moved the emerging Bell Beaker cultural complex into the Iberian peninsula around 2500bc. Animal remains suggest there were more female than male animals in Beaker settlements and those animals were older when they died. That, in turn, implies dairy practices accompanied the mines. Perforated bowls have been found at many sites which archaeologists believe were used to strain cheese.

No one knows when the technology of cheese moved through the south. The first pictorial record comes more than a thousand years later from a painting in the tomb of Ipy, sculptor to Rameses II. The first written record is from The Odyssey in which Homer described Cyclops milking ewes and kids to make cheese that he strained through wicker.

The Phoenicians, then the Romans conquered Spain and the north to consolidate and centralize trade. In the decades after Christ’s death, Pliny the Elder listed cheeses coming to Rome from as far away as the Alps, Nîmes, and Bithynia.

Within the Empire, Columella, who had family in southeastern Spain, said Romans commonly used lamb and kid’s rennet, although thistle flowers, false saffron seeds and fig tree twigs could be substituted. The cardoon thistle is still used on the steppes of Estramdura with merino milk to make the semi-hard, whitish Torta de la Serena.

Centuries later, when the conquistadores left Estramadura for México, they took cheese and the idea it could be made with vegetable rennets with them. Someone, or somebodies, experimented with local plants to discover the pea-sized fruit of silver-leaved nightshade would work in place of the European Cynara cardunculus.

Trompillo is still used to make the semi-hard, white asadero cheese in Chihuahua where it’s used in any food that requires melted cheese. Javier Cabral says his mother’s foster sister in Zacatecas still makes it daily from the “extra-fatty” leche de apoyo the cow reserves for her calf. He says his Aunt Marta “adds rennet” while the milk’s still in buckets, then lets it set. When the curds have formed, “she wraps them in cloth, places them in a hollowed-out log with a drainage hole drilled in it, then sets heavy stones on top to press out some of the whey.” Later she adds salt.

The knowledge of vegetable enzymes, if not cheese making, moved north both with the Spanish and through native communications networks. When Matilda Coxe Stevenson visited the relatively isolated Zuñi in the late nineteenth century, they were using ha’watapa berries with goat’s milk. Instead of waiting for the curds to congeal, they used the first stage as “a delicious beverage.”

To the west, the Pima, who had even less contact with Europeans until the Gadsden Purchase, combined the Spanish use of Solanum elaeagnifolium with European methods by mixing powdered berries in milk with “a piece of rabbit or cow stomach” to produce a drink.

To the east, where Spanish influences were stronger, the Cochiti used ashika to curdle milk like the local Spanish speakers, who called the blue-flowered plant tomatillo del campo. The more nomadic Navajo used dried or fresh berries with goat’s milk, while the Davis Apache in Texas used berries to thicken the goat’s milk they carried with them when they traveled. The tiny tomatoes survive on dead stems into the next blooming season.

Silver-leaf nightshade has a wide range, from northern México to Colorado and Nebraska east, but hasn’t been utilized outside the southwest settled by the Spanish where it may have proliferated on lands disturbed by the settlers. Many of the areas to the east were settled by Germans who had such a strong cheese making tradition based on cattle rennet that it would have been hard for them to imagine a vegetable substitute.

Today, when cheese can be bought at the grocers, the one to two-foot high members of the nightshade family have been abandoned to bloom along the road. If the webbed flowers, with their five petals pulled back and yellow stamens pushed forward, are considered at all, it’s as a pest. Not only do the fruits produce 60 to 120 seeds that can live ten years in the soil, but the herbaceous perennial can reproduce from root fragments that crowd out crops like cotton.

However, if you go into an Española grocery, to the side of the packets of highly processed American and Swiss cheeses and bags of shredded Monterrey Jack, cheddar and mozzarella, you’ll see packages of sliced asadero from California made from pasteurize grade A and skim milk, sea salt and enzymes along with sodium citrate and soy lichen.

If you look a bit more, you’ll find some piles of octagonal white cheeses in square vacuum-sealed packages that have come from México through Anthony, Texas. They only say they’re made from pasteurized milk, salt and rennet.

Notes:
Cabral, Javier. “Mexico Feeds Me: Exploring Mexico's Culinary Heritage,” Saveur website, 2 May 2011.

Castetter, Edward F. “Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest I. Uncultivated Native Plants Used as Sources of Food,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 4:1-44:1935, on uses by Cochiti and Spanish-speakers.

Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus. De Re Rustica, anonymously translated in 1745 as L. Junius Moderatus Columella of Husbandry.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. By the Prophet of the Earth, 1949, on Pima.

_____. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore, on Davis Mountain Apache.

Garrido-Pena, Rafael. “Bell Beakers in the Southern Meseta of the Iberian Peninsula: Socioeconomic Context and New Data,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16:187-209:1997.

Homer. The Odyssey, eighth century bc.

Ipy. Photograph of wall painting depicting cheese making available at the Sabor Artesano website page, “A Brief History of Cheese.” Rameses II reigned 1279-1213bc.

Jacob, Mandy, Doris Jaros and Harald Rohm. “Recent Advances in Milk Clotting Enzymes,” International Journal of Dairy Technology 64:14-33:2011, on la Serena cheese.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Morris Steggerda, “Navajo Foods and Their Preparation,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 17:217-25:1941.

Organisation Européenne et Méditerranéenne pour la Protection des Plantes. “Solanum elaeagnifolium,” Bulletin OEPP 37:236-245:2007.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus). Naturalis Historia, book 11, section 92, translated by Harris Rackham, 1940.

Rodríguez-Torres, K., J. A. López-Díaz and N. R. Martínez-Ruiz. “Physicochemical Characteristics and Sensory Properties of Asadero Cheese Manufactured with Vegetable Rennet from Solanum elaeagnifolium,” 2008 Food Science and Food Biotechnology Congress.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915.

Tschumi, Otto. Urgeschichte der Schweiz, vol 1, 1949, cited by Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory: A Survey, 2002.

Photograph: Silver-leaved nightshade growing in Virginia creeper near an alfalfa field, 17 July 2011.

Asiatic Lily

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, red yucca, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa; corn tasseling, tomatoes visible; bleached leaves on catalpas having problems.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, amaranth, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, dandelion, Santa Fe thistle.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Shirley poppies; buds on Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, reseeded morning glories.

Looking west: Caryopteris, lilies, ladybells, Goodness Grows speedwell, blue flax, catmints, calamintha, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein, Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, snapdragon, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, hummingbird moth, small bees, hornets, cricket, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: A few minutes of rain last Sunday was not enough; afternoon humidity low since; it gets harder every evening to replace the water that’s been lost in the day; 15:36 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The plants we value most tend to be those that made the great leap from species to domestication so long ago their ancestors can only be guessed.

Despite their many symbolic uses, lilies have only been hybridized since new varieties were imported from Asia some 170 years ago. For the first time we can see how botanical innovation occurs and how quickly, when conditions are right.

The Japanese began experimenting with closely related forms of Lilium maculatum in the middle 1600's. The descendants of their highly selected cultivars were among the plants Philip von Siebold began sending to Holland in 1830.

They arrived at a time when Europeans were already experimenting with crosses between newly introduced species and their familiar ones. Henry Groom, whose observations on geraniums were read by Charles Darwin, began breeding the new maculatum varieties with the European bulbiferum to produce what were called Lilium hollandicum hybrids.

The next generation of nurserymen continued working with hollandicum lilies to produce Sappho, a soft orange, slightly shorter lily, and Alice Wilson, a lemon yellow dwarf. According to Brain Porter, both appeared in 1877. While each remained popular for years, the commercial stock became infected.

Following the recognition of Gregor Mendel’s work, experimentation became more deliberate as academic professionals began work. Isabella Preston was crossing maculatum with a subspecies of davidii in the 1920's. A few years later, George Slater was experimenting with Alice Wilson, while Foreman McLean was mixing tigrinum with maculatum and the maculatum-bulbiferum hybrids.

Soon their discoveries and techniques moved back to the shops of commercial growers. Jan de Graaff, heir to a family of bulb traders, moved to Oregon from Leyden in 1934 where he began taking bulbs from other breeders and making his own crosses, especially between the child of a tigrinum-Sappho cross called Umtig 8 and Alice Wilson. In 1941 he released the coral orange Enchantment, with upward facing flowers on plants that were disease free and vigorous enough to survive the American climate.

Others continued his experiments with lily cultivars and closely related species to produce two distinct groups of bulbs, Asiatic lilies that followed from Enchantment and Oriental lilies. More recently, botanists have been using new techniques to try to cross the natural barriers each group developed against exogamy.

Once the Asiatics were introduced into the Netherlands in 1960, they were seen as potential cut flowers because they weren’t susceptible to the ethylene that escapes ripening produce and the upward thrust of the flower clusters fit the cellophane sleeves used by sellers. They also were relatively inexpensive to grow, had no fragrance to pervade crowded rooms, and some released no pollen to soil table cloths.

What’s important to me isn’t that I can buy a few stems of Asiatic lilies in the local grocery store, but that I can grow them in my yard. Most of the forebears of Asiatic lilies tolerate a wide range of soils and that trait has been retained.

In the fall of 1998, I bought several lily varieties. The Asiatic white Avalanche have bloomed every year, usually with clusters atop stems that get about two feet high. I can’t tell if they’ve actually expanded underground, but they do produce more stems and have lived longer than the ten years Schulte’s Greenhouse suggests I could have expected “under ideal conditions.”

This summer another plant failed to appear and I thought I would add more Avalanche bulbs, rather than experiment. Alas, Van Engelen stopped carrying them in 2000, and doesn’t even carry any reasonably tall white alternatives. Indeed, they are offering fewer varieties now than they did in 1998.

I don’t know if that’s a consequence of changing tastes, market saturation, or bankers who are less willing to lend money to breeders and importers. The first two are prods that can influence the direction of new experiments, but the last can sap the entrepreneurial spirit and kill the spark of innovation that only appears sporadically.

Notes: Maculatum is now known as Lilium pennsylvanicum; it’s also been called dauricum, elegans and wilsonii. Tigrinum is now called Lilium lancifolium.

Anderson, Susan Heller. “Jan de Graaff, Tamer of the Wild Lily, Dies at 86,” The New York Times, 9 August 1989.

Benschop, Maarten, Rina Kamenetsky, Marcel Le Nard, Hiroshi Okubo and August De Hertogh. “The Global Flower Bulb Industry: Production, Utilization, Research,” Horticultural Reviews 36:1-115 :2010.

Darwin, Charles. Letter to Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 14 Sept 1844, on something Groom wrote in the previous issue.

McRae, Edward A. Lilies: A Guide for Growers and Collectors, 1998; McRae apprenticed with Graaff.

Porter, Brian. “A look at Asiatic lilies of the Past 3 Centuries. Are They Still Here?,” on his Old Lily Hybrids and Species website.

Schulte’s Greenhouse and Nursey. “Avalanche Lily,” on-line catalog.

Photograph: Cluster of Avalanche Asiatic lilies, 10 July 2011.

White Mullein

What’s blooming in the area: Trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall and red yuccas, daylily, Russian sage, buddleia, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, purple phlox, larkspur, Shasta daisy, purple coneflower, zinnia, squash, alfalfa, brome grass; pods on sweet peas.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, whorled milkweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, Queen Anne’s lace, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, horseweed, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native and common dandelions; buds on old man cactus and Santa Fe thistle; berries formed on Russian olive, beginning to emerge on junipers.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess peaked, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort; buds on Shirley poppies; oriental poppy leaves turning brown.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla; raspberries dried up before they were fully ripe.

Looking west: Lilies, Rocky mountain beardtongue, ladybells, Goodness Grows speedwell, blue flax, catmints, first calamintha florets, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein; buds on Mönch aster.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana, tomato; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, other small birds, small bees, hornets, grasshopper, cricket, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants. Someone’s black cat has taken to coming into the yard at night to hunt whatever burrowed under the cholla and hide from the surrounding dogs and coyotes.

Weather: Heat and fire continue to take more out of the ground than I can replace; short gentle rain Friday night; 15:46 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: My white mullein sat out last year. When it didn’t appear, I assumed it had finally died in the cold winter.

I bought it in the fall of 1997 when I was trying white flowering plants along the garage that were tall enough to see from the house. The nursery said its spike could reach 36" and the base spread to 24.

Album is a horticultural selection of Verbascum chaixii, a species with light yellow flowers on towering stalks that rise from nests of fuzzy grey leaves. Once the plants become established, the stalks branch.

My spikes never got more than a foot high, and were always hidden by the surrounding phlox. There’s only ever been one stalk, and some years not even that. Indeed, there have been years when the leaves didn’t emerge.

The native range of nettle-leaved mullein reaches across central Europe from Italy to Poland. On its southern boundary, from Spain to Yugoslavia, it evolved into the subspecies, chaixii. From the Balkans north it’s identified as austriacum, a plant used in the Giulia region of Italy’s Friuli-Venezia to treat hemorrhoids, clean eye problems and for a "spring cure." To the northeast, from Romania into Russia, it morphed into orientale.

In southern Poland, Wohciech Baba found austriacum was a migratory plant in semi-arid limestone grasslands. He observed 100 plots in the upland Ojców National Park each June for five years. Mullein was one that persisted in some, disappeared from others only to reappear another year, disappeared completely or appeared in new locations.

Some of the movement could easily be attributed to the fact the species easily self-seeds. With his annual visits, he couldn’t judge if the reappearing plants were new seedlings or ones like mine that had gone dormant for a year.

This year I discovered the paddle-shaped grey leaves the first of June when I was planting seeds in the area. Two weeks later a flower stalk shot up. It began blooming June 22 and has been opening florets if different locations up, down and around the spike since.

I must confess I not only stopped looking for the perennial member of the figwort family in spring, but didn’t pay it much notice when it did bloom. I saw the florets flushed with deep pink as I walked by, but never stopped to look.

Then, two weeks ago, I sat on the ground to look for the beard of the Husker White penstemon and noticed the flowers for the first time. In the center of the five white petals was a yellow-green ring that threw out a long, nearly translucent tongue to catch pollen from passing insects. On each petal, a thin arch of purple supported by three pillars bordered the ring.

More extraordinary than the style were the five purple filaments that resembled a spider’s hairy legs. Each ended in a bright orange shoe.

My mind flashed back to someone I hadn’t thought about in 30 years, a woman in Chicago who edited a science fiction fanzine called Purple and Orange. Young and outrageous as we were in those days before punk was even a word, ready to redefine ourselves every day, Joy would sometimes come to work with her hair dyed orange, sometimes purple.

She wasn’t particularly interested in plants. She published, and sometimes wrote, fiction based on characters from Battlestar Galactica. However, she did tell me about the recently released cult film, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

My white mullein belongs in such a film. It has the necessary europamittel ancestors.

Notes:
Baba, Wohciech. “The Small-Scale Species Mobility in Calcareous Grasslands - Example from Southern Poland,” Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae 74:53-64:2005.

Lokar, Laura Coassini and Livio Poldini. “Herbal Remedies in the Traditional Medicine of the Venezia Giulia Region (North East Italy),” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 22:231-279:1988.

Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Notes on Verbascum chaixii distribution on Flora Europaea website.

Photograph: White mullein, 4 July 2011.

Summer and Smoke

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, trumpet creeper, Japanese honeysuckle, silver lace vine, tall and red yuccas, daylily, Russian sage, buddleia, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, larkspur, Shasta daisy, squash, alfalfa, brome grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, cholla cactus, Virginia creeper, fernleaf and leatherleaf globemallows, cheese mallow, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, velvetweed, bindweed, stickleaf, purple mat flower, goat’s head, white sweet clover, buffalo gourd, silver leaf nightshade, western goat’s beard, Hopi tea, spiny lettuce, paper flower, golden hairy and strap-leaf spine asters, native and common dandelions; buds on horseweed, prickly pear and old man cacti.

In my yard, looking east: Persian yellow rose, winecup mallow, sidalcea, coral bells, baby’s breath, snow-in-summer, Jupiter’s Beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Saint John’s wort, reseeded morning glory.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, oxalis, tomatilla.

Looking west: Lilies, Rocky mountain beardtongue, ladybells, blue flax, catmints, flowering spurge, sea lavender, white mullein; buds on Mönch aster and purple coneflower.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, Hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, Mexican hat, Moonshine and Parker’s Gold yarrows, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, black-eyed Susan; buds on chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, impatiens, nicotiana; buds on snapdragon.

Inside: Zonal geranium, aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, house finches, other small birds, gecko, bumble bee, smaller bees, hornets, small flying insects, harvester and small black ants; hear crickets.

Weather: Afternoon temperatures in 90's; high winds Sunday and Thursday day spread fire in the western mountains and broke off small branches from cottonwood trees; a storm passed over yesterday that left us without power but with 1/8“ of water in dry ground; 15:52 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Last Sunday morning I walked north beyond the narrow arroyo to see if the prickly pear cacti were blooming yet. As near as I could see none were or had been. Many had had a tough winter and the drought continues.

As I was standing in the field of needle grass, I realized that land must once have been flooded through the break in the hills to the east. The arroyo comes from somewhere back there and marks the southern edge of the small plateau.

It was in that opening that I watched smoke from the Pacheco fire near Tesuque rise through the rows of foothills like a quiet volcano.

I returned to the house for a few minutes, then walked out to the main arroyo to the south. As usual, I was wearing thick wool socks to protect my feet from seeds armed with harpoons, static electricity and velcro.

The ground was so dry the clay was no longer detectable; the land was reduced to a shallow beach hot enough to send heat through my shoes. When I reached down to see if it was the sand or my socks, it was the land.

Few things were blooming. Everything that’s come into bloom has rushed to maturity, producing seeds as quickly as possible. Almost nothing on the prairie has stayed in flower for more than a week. Trees and shrubs in town have leaves that are losing color. The lack of water is felt everywhere after the hot solstice.

The winds started tossing the black locust around 1:00. An hour later I took a nap. When I woke about 4:00, I noticed the light coming in the east window of my bedroom had changed. The sere needle grass was silvery white. I couldn’t see it as well from my back porch. When I started round the building I noticed why the light had changed: a huge plume of smoke was rising from the area of Los Alamos.

The Las Conchas fire had erupted while I was sleeping.

Smoke dominated the view during the day. At night, I could see a line of orange. The next morning the smoke shut down visibility. There were charred pine needles in the drive.

The fire settled into a routine marked by changes in smoke patterns until Thursday when ferocious winds returned and the fire spread north across P’opii Khanu, the headwaters of Santa Clara creek. After dark, I could see another line of orange, this one backlighting bare tree trunks about twelve miles from my porch.

People, forced from their homes in Los Alamos by potential winds capable of driving such rapid variations in fire behavior, have been fretting that someone might sneak past the guards and loot their homes.

The Santa Clara tribal governor Walter Dasheno reported two-third of their forest had been destroyed and added the burned out land “is the source of our Santa Clara Creek that we rely upon for irrigation” It was their source for “wildlife, clean water, culturally-significant trees and medicinal plants.”

Fortunately, almost everyone can now buy most of their food, because the destruction of the acequias is yet to come. When it finally does rain, and this drought can’t last forever, the waters will rush over the charred land, strip off the fragile top soil, and send the silt and dead wood down towards the river.

Native plants will eventually recover. Most adapted to fire long ago. Unlike humans, they haven’t yet forgotten.

For now, their reactions can be read in chromatic changes. I’ve learned many plants alter their chemistry during the heat of the day, moving from absorbing the sun’s light in the morning to rejecting it by noon. The reflection of light by their chemicals creates the sensations I perceive as color.

Friday when I was driving home from Santa Fe, the grasses in the fields beside the road were silvery when the sky was grey.

As I approached Pojoaque at the base of the canyon that leads up to Los Alamos, the sky turned brown. The grasses retreated back into a bleached neutrality that blends into the soil, while the limestone layers in the rocks became more prominent. They too are alive, organic compounds of calcium carbonate that will burn when heated enough.

Later that evening, as the light faded, the grasses turned golden brown and the grey-green native salt bushes were bright green. Only the non-native Siberian elms were unaffected, still green to view.

Notes:
Dasheno, Walter. Quoted by Joe Baca, “Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.

Photograph: The fires, 1 July 2011. The smoke coming from behind the mesa is from the Los Alamos area. The smoke rising from the ridges at the right is from Santa Clara land. The dark green of the Siberian elms and lilacs is relatively normal for 7:15 at night. The four-winged saltbushes are a much brighter green and the grasses more golden than in normal light. The white square marks the border of a patch of Santa Clara land on the east side of the river.