Narrow-Leaved Collomia

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, pampas grass; grape leaves turning yellow.

Beyond the walls and fences: Indian paintbrush near chamisa, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, clammy weed, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, scarlet creeper, goat’s head, bush pea, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, pigweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur, black grama grass; salt bush beginning to turn yellow.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley and California poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy fading.

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

Looking west: Calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, Silver King artemisia; skunk bush leaves turning yellow orange.

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

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens, tomato; peppers turned red.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain much of Friday night, snow in east and west mountains yesterday morning; 11:33 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The far arroyo goes back a couple miles from the ranch road. I don’t usually walk much farther than the section dominated by the high, hard right bank where the four-winged salt bushes creep up the base. If I do continue southeast, the base changes to the sorts of weeds I find along the road shoulder, pigweed, Russian thistle, sweet white clover, yellow hairy asters.

After that the bank drops, vegetation disappears and the rocks cross in what would be rapids if the arroyo were flowing. I can still see striations from water movements a month ago that haven’t yet dried and blown away.

From there the other bank sweeps out with a higher, hard edge, and the right bank slowly rises a few feet. In the area where the soft bank is only a foot high I’ve discovered a small section where late summer wildflowers bloom. Their seeds will occasionally settle in the ruderal section and a few will cross to land near the Russian olive at the ranch road, but if I want to see them I usually need to walk upstream a few weeks after the rain.

Narrow-leaved collomias were blooming there two weeks ago. A few plants were left last Sunday. I suspect I won’t find any when I wander out later today.

When you first come upon the flowering plant, you nearly pass it by as one more aborted purple aster. It has the same general habit, an isolated, reddish stem covered with dark, needle-shaped leaves, flowers at the ends. However, you soon notice they aren’t daisies.

When you stoop for a closer look you realize it’s a member of the phlox family. The five narrow petals fuse into long tubes that settle into dark green nests of individual retaining vials that persist after the corollas fall away, so eventually only the green shows. On some, the heads are full globes; on others they’re spread out like snapdragons or ladybells.

On a few plants, the leaves are long and luxurious. On others, they barely exist or have fallen away. On most in the arroyo, there are only a few reflexed lances alternating along slightly hairy stems.

In other parts of the Great Plains and in California, Dieter Wilken says the flowers are “white to pink,” but in Arizona he says they are “bluish violet to nearly white.” The local ones have light lavender petals and darker veins. Dark eyes dominate the centers, both from pigments in the petals and from the filaments. The anthers and tips of the stigmas are lighter colored.

In many places between the eastern edge of the plains and the Pacific coast ranges, the annual blooms sometime between April and August. With this year’s delayed rains, they didn’t get their chance here until September.

Adaptability seems one of the hallmarks of a plant Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley said was growing in “meadows in the mountains” of Tunitcha, Chama, Santa Fe and Las Vegas early in the last century. Al Schneider says it’s now common in the mountains of the Four Corners region.

When Wilken looked closely at two Collomia linearis populations from Larimer County in north central Colorado, he found more variation in external morphological traits from plants growing in a disturbed area than from those in an alpine meadow. Since the annuals can pollinate themselves, this means, so long as no environmental condition selects one genetic combination year after year, plants in any given location produce wide possibilities to survive whatever nature offers any particular year. Their ability to adapt is sustained.

Perhaps the oblong brown seeds provide some of the most useful adaptative mechanisms. When they’ve ripened, the capsules open to expel them. Sometimes, like this past week, that occurs when the ground is wet. The seed coat becomes sticky when it’s wet and the seed stays long enough to lodge where it landed, rather than being picked up again by the drying winds and dropped in some less congenial location.

In the arroyo, seeds from the primary population apparently have been sent downstream by either the wind or the rain. Only those that landed in areas where other vegetation helped trap moisture, the ruderal base of the high bank, the plants between chamisa and the Russian olive, have been able to germinate.

Next year, those isolated plants may expand their populations, or maybe other environmental factors will destroy their seed before the summer rains arrive. Presumably, they have the genetic variety needed to survive somewhere.

Notes:
Schneider, Al. “Collomia linearis,” Southwest Colorado Wildflowers website.

Wilken, Dieter H. “Local Differentiation for Phenotypic Plasticity in the Annual Collomia linearis (Polemoniaceae),” Systematic Botany 2:99-108:1977.

_____. “Collomia Nutt., Collomia” in Great Plains Flora Association, Flora of the Great Plains, 1986.

_____. Entries on Collomia and C. linearis Nutt., Jepson Flora Project website.

_____ and J. Mark Porter. “Vascular Plants of Arizona: Polemoniaceae,” Canotia 1:1-37:2005.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.

Photograph: Narrow-leaved collomia upstream on the arroyo bank in a slight breeze, 2 October 2011.

Impatiens

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, alfalfa, pampas grass.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, Indian paintbrush near chamisa, leatherleaf globemallows, blue trumpets, blue gilia, clammy weed, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, white sweet clover, bush pea, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur, sand bur, black grama and muhly ring grasses.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley and California poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda roses, reseeded and new Crimson Rambler morning glories; sweet alyssum, moss rose and zinnia from seed; spirea leaves turning orange-brown.

Looking west: Calamintha, sea lavender, lead plant, Silver King artemisia; white spurge leaves turned red.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; lower leaves of sand cherry turning red.

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

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Bees on west side of house, hornets on east, some kind of striped black buzzing insect on flowers in arroyo, miller moths nuisance in house at night, harvester and small black ants in drive.

Weather: Needed to water because last rain fell more than two weeks ago, 9/17/11; 11:43 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The final race of the year has begun, the one between newly germinated seedlings and the coming freeze. Pigweed’s blooming in the drive where it’s 3" high. Everywhere áñil del muerto’s tracing water paths in 6" high yellow drifts.

Last Sunday some clammy weed I hadn’t noticed the week before at the base of the arroyo wall had vestigial flowers on plants only a few inches high. The blue gilia was still putting out dark flowers and a few balls of sand verbena were bright white.

While they’re expediting their reproductive cycles, morning temperatures are falling into the low 40's. Chlorophyll is draining from the cottonwoods, the weeping and globe willows. Soon, the underlying yellow will be all that’s seen, before those leaves drop and bare branches are left for winter.

Nature isn’t restful nor does it run with the regularity of a clock. Men who depend on it to survive are constantly living with the consequences of drought or freeze or destructive insects. No apples, too much squash, what to eat this winter.

The first gardens were luxuries invented by those who could afford to escape such caprices, literal oases in the desert where palms were always green.

A craving for predictable beauty arises among those who spend days in drab cubes where work provides no satisfaction and the results please no one. Many don’t want a garden to reproduce the variations of nature, the frosted apples, the late blooming marigolds: they want it to stand as defiant proof that here at least they can control their environment.

For such people, nature created impatiens - tropical flowers that bloom day and night in the nursery and after they’re planted anywhere there’s shade, coolish temperatures and enough water. The five petaled flowers are simple. No complex patterns of stamens disturb the flat planes of brilliant color that can, in a good year, completely cover the fat, succulent stems and sticky dark green leaves.

Of course, nature didn’t create modern impatiens. The only plant it seems to have provided that’s constantly in bloom is the dandelion, and even that has a cycle. One day’s golden flowers are the next day’s bare stalks.

Only a human weary of feckless nature could have produced such a reliable bedding plant. Claude Hope was born in Sweetwater, Texas, a city best known for its annual rattlesnake round-up. It gets more water than we do, enough to grow prickly pear, but it’s still dry and windy and brown much of the year.

In an act that could only signify a desire to escape west Texas, he went to college in Lubbock where he earned a degree in ornamental horticulture. Alas, that got him a job with the USDA developing fungus-resistant cotton in Arizona. Cotton boles catch in the barbed wire on the road from Sweetwater to Lubbock where it’s the only crop that’s grown. The plants are shorter than in the deep south, the rows more widely spaced. People I knew in nearby Abilene, who’d been raised in northern Mississippi, shuddered when they saw them.

During World War II, the army sent him to Costa Rica to oversee quinine production after the Japanese captured the Philippines. They didn’t know enough about the plant to select a good site and their attempt failed. Synthetic drugs were developed instead.

After the war Hope joined other men in the country who were organizing Pan-American Seed to supply U. S. wholesalers. Temperature and day length are so even there, Hope believed he could get four crops of seeds a year with cheaper labor. He was given the opportunity to develop better petunias, those bright colored, smelly, sticky stemmed money makers of the 50's.

Others were the ones experimenting with the tropical Impatiens walleriana, which evolved in eastern Africa in the late pleistocene when temperatures were still cool and conditions wet. The rose colored Balsaminaceae, which could get 3' tall, had been taken to London in 1896, where it was treated as a house plant.

While he spent day after day staring at light deadening, red petunias to create one given the muscular name Comanche, men at Ball Seed in Santa Paula, California and West Chicago were competing to produce the best light-shy pastel impatiens with ethereal names. Rob Reiman’s Pixie White was introduced in 1958. Two years later rival Sluis et Groot brought an F₁ hybrid to market called Imp.

In 1961 Reiman and Bill Marchant gave their purified in-breed lines to Hope, who, by then, had his own farm in the highlands where he had disciplined workers mass producing F₁ hybrids. He worked to make the tender perennials more compact, with more branches to carry the terminal racemes. His first plants, Elfin, were offered in 1968 in eight colors.

He later told Allen Lacy he had no time for corporate busybodies who based their decisions of sales history because the past “can't tell you what people might buy in the future, if it happened to be available.” If asked what they wanted in 1970, many gardeners would have said a better petunia. Twenty years later, they were saying better impatiens.

But someone who grew up ducking tornados knows you never get exactly what you want from what’s on offer. As Hope said, to please those growers and homeowners who seek a comforting escape from the stresses of modern life, he’s “got to take risks, to use his imagination to dream up something new, and then work his tail off trying to make it a reality.''

Notes:
Howe, T. K. “Evaluation of Impatiens Cultivars for the Landscape in West-Central Florida,” Florida State Horticultural Society Proceedings 111:195-202:1998, on Reiman and Marchant.

Janssens, Steven B., Eric B. Knox, Suzy Huysmans, Erik F. Smets and Vincent S. F. T. Merckx. "Rapid Radiation of Impatiens (Balsaminaceae) during Pliocene and Pleistocene: Result of a Global Climate Change,” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 52:806-824:2009.

Lacy, Allen. “Claude Hope, the Seed King of Costa Rica” in Farther Afield: A Gardener's Excursions, 1998.

Photograph: Impatiens growing in deep shade near a leaky hose with vinca and golden spur columbine, 1 October 2011.

Wild Bush Pea

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia peaked, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds, alfalfa, pampas grass; red apples in one orchard, others still look barren.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, Indian paintbrush, leatherleaf globemallows, blue trumpets, blue gilia, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, newly sprouted goat’s head, white sweet clover, bush pea, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, 3" high pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, carpets of 6" high áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur, sand bur, black grama and muhly ring grasses, crust, green moss; gypsum phacelia up; leaves turning red on Virginia creeper and velvetweed.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum darkened, winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, 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, David phlox, Silver King artemisia; peach leaves turn yellow and drop immediately.

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

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

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Morning and afternoon temperatures lower; last rain 9/17/11; 12:02 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: It’s a pea. That’s what I said to myself when a flash of bright color stopped me from checking the juniper berries on the other side of the arroyo.

I knelt down to see better. No doubt, it was a pea. The bright rose purple flower was larger and more open than most, but it had the characteristic five petals: the wide top banner, a pair of wings that hung down like puppy ears, and the barely visible pair that makes the snout nosed keel.

There was only one flower to a stem, and the stems appeared in pairs. One bloomed before the other. In many cases, I saw a flower and the dark hammock of a bud. In other cases, one flower was open and the other was fading or tan.

It was the seed pods that most loudly shouted, “Yo! Pea here.” Flat green cases attached by reddish stems crossed by darker veins. When the light shone through, two to four round lumps were visible.

With Procrustean certainty, I know it’s a pea, but a week later I can’t tell you what kind. Botanists have reused terms and invented new ones so often, later taxonomists note the confusion and bypass it by offering their own, new definitions.

The problem began with Friedrich Pursh, who described both his work and the collection of Lewis and Clark. He called a large purple flowered pea with large pods from the Missouri river Lathyrus decaphyllus. However, no specimen survived in either the expedition’s or his herbariums, leaving a broad description that could be attached to anything, including the flower I saw last Sunday.

Thomas Nuttall thought the label really applied to Vicia stipulacea, while Nathaniel Britton used the term for a different large flowered plant from the Rocky Mountains. Frederick King Butters and Harold Saint John decided Pursh’s Missouri river plant was really Lathyrus venosa intonsus. They called the unknown species, which doesn’t reach as far east, Lathyrus eucosmus, and indicated it was partly Nuttall’s Lathyrus polymorphus, but not his decaphyllus. Their examples included some collected in Santa Fe in 1874 and 1897.

Needless to say little one reads can be trusted. No one can be more correct than his or her references. The actual distinctions are traits too minuscule to appear in normal photographs.

Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley used decaphyllus for a “rather handsome” plant with “larger flowers than most of the species” that grew in the “plains and open fields” where it “often becomes a weed in cultivated fields” and didn’t mention the other names.

Daniel Moerman standardized on polymorphus for the species eaten by the Cochiti, Acoma and Laguna and used eucosmus for the plant utilized medicinally by the Navajo. Leonora Curtin identified patito del pais as “Lathyrus decaphyllus (eucosmus" which Spanish speakers in northern New Mexico used to treat toothaches, mumps, tonsilitis, and headaches.

The only thing that says “maybe I’m not a pea, I’m only teasing” are the long, narrow leaves. They form rather shapeless grey-green masses clinging to the sides of the north facing slope of the ranch road that rather resemble some pictures Tom Chester published of Lathyrus brachycalyx zionis from the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon. That species, which Susannah Johnson and Kelly Allard says is often confused with eucosmos, has sessile pods and only appears in New Mexico around the San Juan tributary to the Colorado river.

More important, the leaves on the plants I saw don’t terminate in tendrils, a trait that separates both Lathyrus and Vicia from other legumes. However, Johnson and Allred suggest that while ecosmus has “well-developed and prehensile” vines at the end of the upper stems with leaves, the lower ones are “short and bristle-like.” No one has commented on the effects of environment on leaf variation, only quibbled on the difference between elliptic-lanceolate and oblong-elliptic.

I suppose it’s safe to call them bush peas, though they don’t all look like bushes, and simply enjoy them for what they are: bright colored pea flowers.

As for the juniper berries that led me up the road where they were blooming only a few have started to turn purple. Most are still grey-green.

Notes:
Butters, Frederick King and Harold Saint John. ‘Studies in Certain North American Lathyrus,” Rhodora 19:160-163:1917.

Chester, Tom. “Plant Species of the Bright Angel Trail: Bush Peavine, Lathyrus brachycalyx ssp. zionis,” available on-line. He wasn’t sure about his identification, since eucosmus has been treated by some as another subspecies of brachycalyx, and consulted Wendy Hodgson, an expert on Grand Canyon flora.

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

Johnson, Susannah and Kelly W. Allred. “A Taxonomic Review of the Tendril-bearing Legumes (Leguminosae) in New Mexico: I. Lathyrus,” The New Mexico Botanist number 25:1-7:1 January 2003.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

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

Photograph: Pea flower in full bloom and one fading; a pair of pods on another stem, with a dark bud on another; ranch road leaving far arroyo, 18 September 2011.

Rose Queen Salvia

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflower heads bending, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, pampas grass; red tomatoes visible.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth, pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, sandburs, muhly ring grass, crust, moss, mushrooms; buds on broom senecio.

In my yard, looking east: Garlic chives, Autumn Joy sedum, hollyhock, winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppies, Maximilian sunflowers, tansy.

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, 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, David phlox; buds on Silver King artemisia.

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

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

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Small bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rain several days, followed by morning temperatures in the 40's and fog on the river; last rain 9/17/11; 12:23 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: What with drought and fire and heat, it’s easy to forget that much of this year was dominated by unusual cold. When you’re still cutting dead wood from Dr. Huey roses, it’s even harder to remember that cold is essential for many plants.

Still, when autumn brings cooler temperatures and shorter days, some spring and early summer blooming plants, especially members of the rose family, resume flowering. It’s the time plants like chrysanthemums and cosmos, whose incipient buds need long exposure to daylight, begin to bloom.

Perennial salvias need both cold and long days to flourish. My Rose Queen didn’t do well until last year’s cold winter, and did better last summer than this. I bought four seedlings in 2006, but only one appeared the next year to put up a few stalks with two-lipped tubes jutting from their bases. The same scant squares appeared in 2008, not the flowered-filled stems one sees in catalogs.

Then, the winter of 2010 was cold and the moisture lasted until early May. A seedling appeared. The stalks were never full, but they continued to lengthen to accommodate new stamen-spitting florets into September. Instead of a great flourish, they were bits of color all season.

This past winter was cold and dry. The volunteer joined the parent, but they went out of bloom by the middle of August. Last week, with rain and cool temperatures, a new raceme appeared under a hollyhock leaf on the seedling. It now bristles with flowers, while several conical buds have appeared at the tips of other stems. I can’t find the older plant.

I’ve had the same disappointing experience with the more common blue flowered varieties. East Friesland and May Night didn’t survive a full season. The three Blue Queens I planted in 2007 are all still there, but only one ever bloomed, then just in June.

This summer, for the first time, they threw up a number of thin rods. Unlike the fat Rose Queens, each was dense with flowers. By July, only bare stalks remained with single flowers waving at the tops. While mine finally prospered, the ones in the village, that had produced the past two summers, were invisible, either shorter than usual, darker colored than normal, or intimidated by the weather.

Whether lavender pink or deep purple blue, for rose is a wistful misnomer, they’re all derived in some way from Salvia nemorosa, a clump forming European species more popular in Germany than elsewhere. In the 1930's, Louise Beebe Wilder noted it was rarely offered in this country. Thompson and Morgan offered no seeds in 1955, the year Ernst Pagles introduced Ostfriesland. He’d begun working with the species in 1949 at the suggestion of his mentor, Karl Foerster, who brought out Mainacht in 1956.

Both Foerster and Pagles relied of rigorous selection techniques to develop cultivars that could survive with little maintenance in the cold climate of East Germany. If their plants involved multiple species they were usually the result of unsupervised matings.

Blue Queen has no history: it’s simply described by Tony Avent as “an old seed strain.” The pink is equally obscure: Jelitto Seeds lists Rosakönigin without taking credit for it. Both were being offered by Thompson and Morgan in 1986 when I first got their catalog, but the pink flowered variety wasn’t sold by nurseries like Lamb or Milaeger’s Gardens until 1991, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Some taxonomists believe nemorosa is the same as Salvia sylvestris, a species found from middle Europe down through the Balkans and east into Kazakstan. Others believe sylvestris is a natural child of nemorosa and Salvia pratensis, which grows in much of temperate Europe. When Jay Walker’s team tested the DNA from a number of species in the mint family, it found pratensis and nemorosa so similar they must have had a common ancestor.

Whatever the differences in parentage, they’re expressed in the ways different varieties respond to the environment. When the Chicago Botanic Garden tested salvias in the middle 1990's, they found May Night much better than East Friesland or Blue Queen, and all were superior to Rose Queen which winter killed, had few flowers, and decreased in vigor over the years. While their experience with the pink variety paralleled mine, their luck with the others in a muggy, prairie lowland was the reverse of mine in a dry, high mountain valley.

Grete Waaseth found the interplay of vernalization and photoperiod for Blue Queen didn’t follow simple, predictable patterns. When Blaukönigin were not exposed to cold winter temperatures, then imitating high sun light with photosynthetic photon fluxes increased their ability to flower at the expense of developing normal levels of crinkled grey-green leaves. However, if the perennials were exposed to 41 degree temperatures for six weeks, then the added energy impulses made no difference when they were later exposed to light for twenty hours a day.

Blue Queens could survive the absence of cold if the sun was more intense, but if they had cold, greater amounts of light didn’t matter.

In contrast, a group led by Todd Lasseigne found that East Friesland, May Night, and a pratensis could all stand days with 104 degrees without injury, but that Ostfriesland and the pratensis didn’t flower, either because they hadn’t been winterized or hadn’t been exposed to the appropriate day lengths. If cold alone wasn’t enough, then neither was heat.

Garden suppliers, unlike botanical gardens, don’t truly care if a plant survives the first winter; they want it to be blooming when they sell it in the spring. Species that don’t bloom until days are long present a problem. When May Night finally did become popular, Avent says, “unscrupulous nurserymen found a plant that would propagate faster” that didn’t perform as well.

A team led by Gary Keever considered the possibility that a long day flower was simply a short night one, and tried to force plants to bloom by interrupting the darkness of their nights. The group shortened the time to first bloom for Blue Queen by seven to twelve days, but only if it treated them in February in Alabama. At other times of the winter, the trick didn’t work.

Why anyone would go to the trouble of growing perennial salvias in the deep south is another question. Both Allan Armitage, in the Georgia piedmont, and the Missouri Botanical Garden, in Saint Louis, say the plant needs cooler nights than they have. The spikes get tall, then floppy, making only the shortest varieties aesthetic.

So why does anyone bother? The pictures, of course, are always tempting, and blooming clumps always look so nice in places like Santa Fé where elevations are higher elevations and moisture greater. But after finally having some winters cold enough for mine to bloom in our long summers, I’m not sure they’ll be worth replacing when they die, which they most assuredly will, sooner or later. They’ve held on, but never acclimated.

Notes:
Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Avent, Tony. “Perennial Salvia: Ornamental Sages for the Garden,” Plant Delights Nursery website.

Chicago Botanic Garden. “A Performance Appraisal of Hardy Sages,” Plant Evaluation Notes Issue 14, 2000.

Keever, Gary J., J. Raymond Kessler, Jr. and James C. Stephenson. “Night-Interrupted Lighting Accelerates Flowering of Herbaceous Perennials Under Nursery Conditions in the Southern United States,” Journal of Environmental Horticulture 24:23-28:2006.

Lasseigne, F. Todd, Stuart L. Warren, Frank A. Blazich, and Thomas G. Ranney. “Day/Night Temperature Affects Growth and Photosynthesis of Cultivated Salvia Taxa,” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science 132:492-500:2007.

Missouri Botanical Garden. “Salvia x sylvestris 'Rose Queen',” available on-line.

Waaseth, G., S.O. Grimstad and R. Moe. “Influence of Photosynthetic Photon Flux on Floral Evocation in Salvia x superba Stapf ´Blaukönigin´,” Acta Horticulturae 711:235-24:2005.

_____, _____, _____ and R. Heins. “Effect of Photosynthetic Photon Flux and Temperature on Floral Evocation and Development in the Vernalization Sensitive Ornamental Perennial Salvia x superba `Blaukönigin’,” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science 131:437-444:2006.

Walker, Jay B., Kenneth J. Sytsma, Jens Treutlein, and Michael Wink. “Salvia (Lamiaceae) Is Not Monophyletic: Implications for the Systematics, Radiation, and Ecological Specializations of Salvia and Tribe Mentheae,” American Journal of Botany 9: 1115-1125:2004.

Wilder, Louise Beebe. What Happens in My Garden, 1935.

Photograph: Rose Queen salvia seedling blooming under hollyhock leaves, 11 September 2011.

The Monsoon Continues

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, rose of Sharon, Russian sage, buddleia, trumpet creeper fewer flowers, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, sweet pea, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, cultivated sunflowers, Sensation cosmos, alfalfa, pampas grass; some corn stalks dried; some sweet pea pods turned brown and emptied; people have cleared their vegetable gardens, leaving only still producing tomato plants.

Beyond the walls and fences: Apache plume, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, scarlet bee blossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, white sweet and purple clovers, stickleaf, buffalo gourd, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, lamb’s quarter, Russian thistle, amaranth heads long enough to curve, pigweed, ragweed, native sunflowers, chamisa, snakeweed, spiny lettuce, horseweed, gumweed, Hopi tea, goldenrod peaked, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisy, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, sandburs, muhly ring grass, crust, moss, mushrooms; buds on broom senecio; cheat grass coming up; Virginia creeper berries turning purple; pods forming on whorled milkweed.

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

Looking south: Floribunda and rugosa roses, 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, David phlox, Mönch asters fading, purple coneflowers nearly gone; buds on Silver King artemisia.

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

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, moss rose, nicotiana, impatiens; first Sweet 100 tomatoes ripe.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

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

Weather: Finally getting the long, slow rains we need, but temperatures dropping so low in the night the furnace is coming on; last rain 9/10/11; 12:32 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The healing’s begun.

We’ve been getting rains now for at least three weeks, much of it coinciding with hurricanes Irene and Lee. However, because they began in late August, and not early July, temperatures have been lower, days shorter and sun angles changing. The recovery has been more like spring, when seedlings and new growth emerge, rather than summer, when existing plants revive.

Along the roadsides, which responded first, the unknown pairs of oval leaves have transmuted into toothed spurge, purslane has arisen, and some ivy-leafed morning glories are blooming. All are plants of late summer.

The only mid-summer pigweed and áñil del muerto seedlings I’d seen before today were in my driveway, mixed with goat’s heads washing down from colonies in my uphill neighbor’s yard. Now, pigweed is sprouting up there as well.

In some barren fields down the road, prickly pear has revived. The pads are shiny enough to reflect light when I drive by in the evening, where before their dull surfaces rendered them invisible. The area between is filled with Russian thistles about four inches high, already capable of blooming and going to seed. In the past those weeds were probably so tall they hid the large cacti bed from the road and discouraged casual intruders.

On the prairie, in small depressions where water collects, or under shading grass clumps, water has remained between showers long enough for new grasses to emerge. There’s also a number of late-summer-germinating prostrate knotweeds. This morning there was new growth on some of the most desolate winterfats, but still only a few new blades have emerged from the established bunches of needle grass.

In the road cut before the arroyo, the broken remains of two bush morning glories someone dug out last spring have poked through the mud that slid into their deep holes. Protecting mud has also washed over the exposed cream tips root in the arroyo, and two tiny buds I saw Monday on the blue gilia were opening this morning.

In the arroyo itself, things have calmed since it last ran. The bottom is still wet in places, but goat’s head and knotweed were the first beneficiaries of the cool damp. However, this morning gypsum phacelia was beginning to germinate under the Russian olive.

The Apache plumes upstream from the tamarix are still blooming, but another in the arroyo bottom has passed and the ones on the prairie bank never bloomed. Chamisa is golden north of town on low land between the Chama and Rio Grande rivers, but only one small shrub had flowers in this arroyo this morning.

White prairie clover normally blooms in summer. Last year its plantain like heads began opening as soon as hurricane Alex brought water July 1. They continued into the first week of August.

This year, green leaves pushed up from root crowns in April, then stopped growing in May. While some were blooming near the road on Santa Clara land on the other side of the river at the normal time in July, I saw no flower buds in the arroyo until the first of August when a couple spikes appeared.

Dalea candida has a long taproot, but that root needs active bacteria to prosper. While W. P. Martin found a number of species in this legume genus lacked rhizobia in Arizona, Oscar and Ethel Allen believe that was an adaption to the arid time they were collected. One would guess the soil organisms need to revive here before the plants can truly prosper.

So far, new growth has emerged from the base of the plant that was blooming, and new stems have pushed up among last year’s bare yellowed stalks on other plants. I don’t know if there’s time for these to reproduce this year, or if they can do no more then prepare the root for another winter.

The more important microorganisms are in the soil crust, that thin layer of cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses that transform nitrogen and carbon from the air into soil nutrients necessary for the succession of grasses. While they spend most of the year as desiccated dark lumps, the blue-green algae resume photosynthesis within minutes of getting wet. Still, it’s taken some time for them to swell enough to be obviously alive and for moss and mushrooms to appear.

In my yard, a thin black layer skimmed the surface of the uphill land on Monday morning where grasses have never revived from grazing decades ago. Later in the day, the water had dried, leaving a lighter colored icing in slight depressions. The patina of cyanobacteria was no longer visible.

Wednesday morning the ground was wet again, apparently from heavy dew. Again, the dark coating appeared before the sun broke through around 9 am. This time I could see little dots of black that could, with time and moisture, grow into clods like those on the prairie. Even a bit of moss appeared in a clump of dead needle grass surrounded by ring muhly grass that had trapped a winterfat seed.

Yesterday morning, in the tail end of another night of soaking rain, the crust had begun to form swallow grey-green islands that mottled the surface, already able to direct flood threatening water away from themselves.

Down the south facing slope there were chaining black threads that, in places, looked more like decaying seaweed in an area where only stumps of bunch grass remain. I assume they’re some form of lichen able to emerge with the cloudy days that have kept the atmosphere cool and moist.

Here and there, in the marbled remains of water, streaks of black appear in the arroyo and the road that leads to it. The fire is still a presence.

On the other side of the river, in places where creeks have a clear path from the Jemez, the banks are covered with black soot. The run-off into Dixon’s Orchard near Cochiti has received the most publicity, but the same dark mud can be seen where the Rio del Oso crosses the Chama highway near Chili north of Española.

Directly across the river, on San Ildefonso land, the arroyos that cross the road rise in badlands that parallel the mountains. Water from the burned canyons can’t reach them. Even so, the ground is covered with grey sand, both in the bottoms and on the steppe, probably from an infiltration of fallen ash.

The Las Conchas fire is not gone. Around 1:45 pm last Saturday I saw a white cloud rising from a canyon to the southwest. Sunday, I saw two different plumes after the rain had stopped about 7 pm. I doubt the original fire flared up, and have no idea what was left for lightening to ignite.

I suppose the fire has been smoldering since July in those canyons, and the rain is finally putting it out in clouds of steam that are still capable of spreading ashes here that turn black when amassed into rivulets by the saving rain.

Notes:
Allen, O. N and Ethel K. Allen. The Leguminosae, 1981; as Petalostemon candida.

Martin, W. P. Observations on the Nodulation of Leguminous Plants of the Southwest, 1948, cited by the Allens.

Photograph: Ranch road, about 9:30 am on 5 October 2009, before the sun could destroy evidence of the previous night’s rain. This road is a continuation of the paved road by my house; there are no sources for the charcoal wash other than the rain or surface ash.

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.