Piñon-Juniper Belt

Weather: Rained Sunday night; frost in the mornings and sunny afternoons since; changed into my heavier weight winter clothes yesterday; 10:06 hours of daylight today.

Can smell wood smoke some mornings. Seven pickup trucks were filled with firewood for sale in the parking lot of the local grocers Tuesday afternoon.

What’s blooming: Pansies.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, roses, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, coral beard tongue, snapdragons, soapworts, ladybells, Saint Johns wort, hollyhocks struggling, winecup, cheese, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, anthemis, chrysanthemum, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses; next year’s leaf buds on peach.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Japanese honeysuckle, Husker’s and purple beard tongue, coral bells, pink evening primrose, alfilerillo.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, winterfat, young chamisa, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, sea pink, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium; fruit on pomegranate split open; aeonium put out new branch.

Animal sightings: Small birds, rabbit out in my neighbor’s yard where it lives.



Weekly update: Many people in this country may no longer live on a flat Earth, but they can still garden in two dimensions.

The earliest settlers only recognized latitude. They knew the sugar that grew in Barbados wouldn’t do in Virginia, that the tobacco that made Virginia wealthy wouldn’t survive in Boston, that Boston was more congenial to farmers than Maine or New Brunswick.

As people moved west, they gradually became aware that longitude mattered. However, it wasn’t important until they reached the 100th meridian where they saw the beginning of what they called the great American desert, the great dry plains that only supported settlement after they introduced artesian wells.

With the acquisition of the southwest from Spain after the Mexican War, US citizens moved into mountainous areas and discovered the importance of altitude. In 1889, Hart Merriam went to Flagstaff to investigate vegetation by elevation in the San Francisco mountains and Grand Canyon. He defined seven life zones: Lower Sonoran, Upper Sonoran, Transition, Canadian, Hudsonian, Timberline and Arctic-Alpine.

His terms, especially Sonoran, were specific to Arizona: the Chihuahuan desert south of New Mexico is considered a different ecological sphere. The labels used by the Forest Service have evolved to identify trees or plants characteristic of an altitudinal band: chaparral and grassland, piñon-juniper woodland, ponderosa pine forest, fir-aspen forest, fir-spruce forest, arctic-alpine-timerline, and alpine tundra.


This part of New Mexico lies in the Upper Sonoran or piñon-juniper belt between 5000' and 7000'. While Merriam was thinking specifically of Colorado Piñon and Utah Juniper, here it’s Colorado Pinus edulis and single-seed Juniperus monosperma that are common.

One of the things that’s always puzzled me about the category is the exact relationship between piñon and juniper. Did the hyphen imply they would be found together, or was it more of an and/or slash distribution.

Francis Elmore says that in some places the two coexist in equal numbers, but that generally juniper are found in the lower elevations and piñon in the upper. Along Pajarito Road, which runs between 7000' White Rock and 7500' Los Alamos, a lab team found large junipers tended to be associated with smaller piñons, and larger piñons with smaller junipers.

In this part of the valley, piñon are found in and around the village, especially near irrigation ditches, and juniper exists in the wild. I haven’t seen a piñon tree on the 5650' prairie, and many of the junipers I’ve see along the roads to the 5600' village could have been, judging from their positions, transplanted.

The piñon may originally have been moved for dietary reasons. Now nostalgia may be more important. Once introduced, they spread themselves by following lines of water, eventually finding my yard.

After I transferred some seedlings from under my eaves to the drive five years ago, I’ve been treating the new volunteers next to my garden hoses as prickly nuisances. The rate of growth for the transplanted trees slowed after they were moved to the dryer area. This summer the saplings reached above the protecting winterfat; their tips are just over 5' high.

When you drive around the village, you see place after place where piñon have taken over and people have done their best to accommodate them by trimming the lower or upper branches.



I drove north this week past Ojo Caliente and back south through El Rito to see if the distribution of juniper and piñon in this area is typical or anomalous. The only piñon I saw along the road were near homesteads. Juniper was almost everywhere, with denser stands at elevations near 7500' approaching the next vegetation zone where an occasional small pine was growing.

In this part of the piñon-juniper belt piñon can naturalize in the most domesticated of circumstances, but they don’t behave like true natives.


Notes:
Elmore, Francis H. Shrubs and Trees of the Southwest Uplands, 1976.

Merriam, C. H. and L. Steineger. Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and the Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, 1890.

Reid, Kevin D., Bradford J. Wilcox, David D. Breshears, and Lee MacDonald. “Runoff and Erosion in a Piñon-Juniper Woodland: Influence of Vegetation Patches,” Soil Science Society of America Journal 63:1869-1879:1999.

Photographs:
1. Piñon growing above the covered irrigation ditch that towers above the one-story house indicated by the utility wires, main road, 14 November 2011.

2. Juniper growing on the prairie, 8 November 2011.

3. Piñon growing in the village with lower branches cut up to the roof line so people could enter their house; 18 November 2011.

4. Several cropped piñon growing inside a yard wall; the roof line is just visible from the main road, 14 November 2011.

5. Pine growing with juniper going south on route 554 in the northern part of Wild Rivers National Recreation Area before the crest that leads down to the Carson National Forest and El Rito, 15 November 2011.

6. Piñon I transplanted from my garden to an area protected by winterfat along the drive in 2006, 19 November 2011; it’s still in the puppy stage when it looks like it’d be nice to have around the house.



See entry for 27 August 2006 that provides more information on piñon and describes my attempts to transplant them.

Cottonwood Copse

Weather: Morning temperatures settled into low 20's, last rain 11/05/11; 10:20 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Pansies, sweet alyssum, other plants in sheltered positions may have one or two flowers left.

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other evergreens, prickly pear, yuccas, grape hyacinth, red hot pokers, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, oriental poppy, golden-spur columbine, purple and coral beards tongue, sea pinks, coral bells, Saint Johns wort, oxalis, hollyhocks, winecup, sweet pea, alfalfa, clovers, bindweed, yellow evening primrose, vinca, gypsum phacelia, tansy, Hopi teas, anthemis, blanket flowers, coreopsis, strapleaf and purple asters, June, cheat and other grasses.

Pepper plant dropped its drying red pod when the stem holding it was killed by the cold.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, leaves on purple leaved plum and sand cherry, leathery Bradford pear, raspberry, privet, Japanese barberry, Husker’s beard tongue.

What’s blue or grey: Piñon, leaves on four-winged saltbush, California poppy, loco, catmints, snow-in-summer, pinks, baby’s breath, blue flax, stickleaf, winterfat, chocolate flower, creamtips, hairy golden and heath asters.

What’s yellow-green/turning yellow: Leaves on weeping willow, Siberian elm, Apache plume, rugosa rose, snakeweed, perky Sue.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Berries have disappeared from my Russian olive along with the leaves that covered them. Berries are also gone from the pyracantha near the village. With the drought leaving less food for local animals, those passing through seem to have taken more that I can see than usual.

Weekly update: Cottonwoods have become endangered in this area because their habitat has been altered, partly from draining malaria incubating wetlands, party by dams that have stopped tributaries from flooding the banks of the Rio Grande, and partly by generally drying weather the past decades.


A few weeks ago I walked out in the far arroyo and discovered a cottonwood copse in the process of forming. There were mature trees near the point where the arroyo and the county road intersect. Trees about three feet tall were growing back by a high sand and clay bank. Much younger seedlings were growing in raised areas in the arroyo bottom itself.

Cottonwoods don’t easily reproduce themselves. The seeds are only viable for a couple weeks after they mature, which is in the spring, but they germinate within 24 hours if they land on bare, moist soil.

They then need to stay moist at the level of the young roots, but the leaves need full sunlight to feed the roots, a difficult balance in this environment. During the time the roots are reaching down to the water table, seedlings can tolerate very wet conditions. However, young plants don’t always survive heavy water flows.


In the wild, good conditions for developing new trees occur periodically, maybe every five to ten years. The existence of three generations of trees so close to each other means these ideal conditions have been met at least twice in the past decade.

The mature trees are growing where water would have collected or washed from the river ford.

The dirt road through the arroyo has been there for more than 60 years; it shows on the USGS map from the early 1950's. It dropped from relatively high, maybe 15' high, banks. Work must have been done by the county to keep the banks stable and provide a slightly sloped route in and out. I saw the remains of one protecting drain pipe that had emptied water upstream.

The upstream trees lie in the path of water that flows along the arroyo bank from the point where local acequia water enters the arroyo. That area gets lots of water during the summer, but the rate is probably slow and constant so the water supply is fairly reliable. Still it has cut a channel around an island which also supports a tamarix and some chamisa.

Trees could have germinated there any time. The fact they have not is probably indicative of the difficult balance of water and sun young trees require.

One set of young trees are growing between these saplings and the ford, very close to the island bank. I’ve noticed in other parts of the arroyo, those short banks seem to retain water later than the bottom itself.


The other set is in the wide bottom itself on the other side of the island, still closer to the ford. They look about the same age, but were battered by the scouring water that poured through earlier this fall.

I’m guessing these may all have germinated in the spring of 2010 when we had a cold, wet winter followed by a wet spring that lasted long enough for the seedlings to get established. The drought began that summer and lasted until this fall.

Their survival may be helped by changes made to the road this summer. They finally built a bridge over the arroyo. This narrows the water channels and creates a need for a larger area for water to back into while it waits to flow through. Those areas may become pools if the surface is rough enough to prevent the lowest level of water from moving when the flow drops and islands may develop around the area where the young trees are growing.

Notes:
Braatne, Jeffrey H., Stewart B. Rood and Paul E. Heilman. “Life History, Ecology and Conservation of Riparian Cottonwoods in North America” in R. F. Stettler, H. D. Bradshaw, P. E. Heilman, and T. M. Hinckley, Biology of Populus.

Photograph: Cottonwoods taken in the far arroyo, 25 October 2011.

Weeds

Weather: After weeks of morning temperatures just below 32, they fell to the low 20's Thursday; last rain 11/05/11; 10:36 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses.

Even before Thursday’s cold temperatures, trees were dropping their leaves.

Beyond the walls and fences: Cheat grass bright green under Siberian elm in wash; Siberian elm leaves getting golden bronze tinge; choke cherries turned red-orange.

The arroyos and prairie: Chamisa in sheltered locations, broom senecio and purple asters going to seed; new loco plants up; more gypsum phacelia and stickleaf seedlings up.

With last week’s rain, the soil crust became active in the prairie and arroyo and other places near my house I explored. Bright green moss appeared and more of those grey-white mushrooms pushed through, and didn’t seem to have been affected by Thursday’s cold. I also saw one cream colored, flat-topped mushroom along the ranch road.

Juniper berries on the tree I visit near the far arroyo disappeared. Since it seems a little early for local birds to have striped the tree, I assume something passing through ate them.

Four-leaved saltbush, whose root was exposed when water washed away the surrounding dirt in the arroyo, put out tiny leaves along the exposed area.

In my yard, looking east: Large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose.

Looking south: Floribunda roses.

Looking west: Flax leaves beginning to turn yellow.

Looking north: Sheltered blanket flowers, chrysanthemums; privet leaves have burgundy leather look.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragons.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Goldfinches on Maximilian sunflower seed heads; bee on florist mum.

Weekly update: Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian born detective, told Dr. Burton that when he had time “I am going to attend - seriously - to the cultivation of vegetable marrows,” not as a mere gardener, but as someone who improves their taste.

Then, when he’d actually had time to grow them, he told Dr. Sheppard that “a man may work towards a certain object, may labor and toil to attain a certain kind of leisure and occupation and then find that, after all, he yearns for the old busy days and the old occupations that he thought himself so glad to leave?”

My retirement coincided with a change in my garden. I’d never before been in one place long enough to get beyond the discovery phase, the one where you buy all sorts of new seeds and plants while trying to learn what will actually grow.

After some 15 years, my garden has been refined to what works here most years. I could still be lured into buying things just to see how they do, but the economy has caused nurseries to retrench, to offer less and less, to grow what banks will finance. Few new plants have been introduced recently to tempt me. There’s little left to read about.

I began wondering what to do next. I could see how people might concentrate on the one or two plants that thrive and give pleasure, how one could, in fact, become a rabid rosarian.

However, I also knew that, if I truly cared about deadheading and weeding, I’d have found a way to do it before now, that the demands of my job weren’t the real reason my garden was always a bit slovenly - Bohemian or natural I’d say - but overgrown and slovenly none the less.

To escape such tedium, I’d begun creeping out onto the prairie to discover the local wildflowers and weeds, for I’ve never been snobbish about anything that blooms. For a while there was always something new. Then, given the limits of this arid environment, I encountered fewer and fewer new species. I’ve now written about all the ones I can identify.

What to do next?

Now that I actually have quit working, I’ve discovered that after a certain time each day, I can’t stand to be in the house. This doesn’t mean, like Poirot, I want to return to some sort of volunteer version of what I used to do.

It means literally, I can’t stand to be in the house. I want to be out walking beyond my old paths or driving about the area.

Two weeks ago I stopped when I saw something red in a field, and discovered those peppers I photographed. To get a better angle, I’d done something I almost never do, crossed through someone’s barbed-wire fence. After all, I had time. I was only going into town to finish something the new person didn’t need to learn. I could get there whenever.

On my way out I noticed someone across the road watching me unhook my sweater. When I went across to say hello and otherwise defend myself, I discovered Rod, for that was his name, had graduated from Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Farm School sometime around 1950 and lived in a trailer on land owned by the man who also owned the pepper field.

He told me about the family that had leased that field to grow vegetables and that he and the land owner had helped put up that pesky fence after people like me had stopped to look. Only they had helped themselves to the produce.

I’d been watching that field all season, had noticed it seemed to have three sections, squash on the north, corn in the center, and something that didn’t seem to have done much on the south. I’d seen the man, his wife, and children out cleaning the fields.

Then, the middle of July I noticed weeds were taking over the aisles.

I thought they were like so many people here who begin ambitiously with a new vegetable plot, improve the soil, keep things neat, then retreat with the heat of summer and find themselves overwhelmed when weeds germinate after the monsoons. Just when the weather’s most foul, the work doubles and triples.

Like Poirot when he threw a marrow over the fence because, after some months of effort, he’d become enraged with its failure, people simply give up mid-summer.

I noticed the same thing happening in another field where someone had planted some kind of melon for the first time, then let pigweed take over. However, they may simply have abandoned the crop in early September after the listeria breakout make all melons suspect. This week they finally got around to plowing the field to remove the weeds, but left melon remnants.

When I made some comment to Rod about people here not understanding the dangers of weeds as competitors for resources, he denied the people across the road were unwise. They’d gotten several sweeps of their peppers before they cleared the dead vegetation the end of September. This week they removed the last vestiges of the chiles.

Now I think those weeds were left deliberately to prevent people from seeing the bright colored vegetables, for it was that part of the field that was most overgrown. Pigweed may have been a useful camouflage, for we all react negatively to it. It had become a defender, not a predator.

Poirot discovered “we miss the daily toil.” He hadn’t grown marrows before, only thought about it. He found his continuity as a private investigator.

For me, the routine of work has always been a way to support my hobbies. I’m not ready to substitute manicuring a garden for paid labor. I still want to explore, do something new, but without moving again.

Nature is still the greatest source of surprise. Only now, novelty is no longer some new flower, but the ways of the familiar. I want to find a way to comment on the pepper farmer and the melon field when I notice them, not wait until I can focus on some plant.

The immediate challenge won’t be in the noticing, for nature trains you to look, but in finding a way to describe the seeming mundane. I don’t know what format will work best as I change from writing about specific plants to writing about the processes of growing, but something always arises from experiment.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. “How It All Came About” in The Labors of Hercules, 1939, first quote.

_____. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, second quote.

Photograph: Melon field overrun by pigweed, 26 October 2011.

Peppers, Part 2

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves dead and dropping, apricot leaves dropping.

Beyond the walls and fences: Clammy weed, stickleaf, chamisa, broom senecio, golden hairy and purple asters; leaves on Virginia creeper killed by cold temperatures; Russian olive dropping leaves and uncovering clusters of berries; leaves on blue gilia and leatherleaf globemallow turning yellow.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; snowball leaves turning red; Japanese barberry leaves turning bright orange; sidalcea leaves turning yellow.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; first ripe raspberries of the season; cold temperatures killed the zinnias.

Looking west: Calamintha; leaves on Rumanian sage, Mönch aster, David phlox, Silver king artemisia and chives turning yellow; leaves on caryopteris turning yellow and dropping.

Looking north: Chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; catalpa leaves turned brown and dropping; Bradford pear leaves turned dark red; cold temperatures killed yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens, moss rose; tomatoes ripening, peppers drying.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Rained day and night Wednesday; after days of temperatures falling below freezing, we got our first frost Saturday morning; 10:45 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Red or green turns out to be more than a trick question sprung on visitors. Habits of taste may have been determined by the pepper plant’s growing cycle.

There are some 25 species of peppers, of which most eaten in this part of the world are some variant of Capsicum annuum derived from a selection or hybrid developed by Fabien Garcia at New Mexico State University. His inspiration was the Anaheim, developed for a California cannery around 1900. His first release, New Mexico Number 9 in 1921, was aimed at providing a uniformly sized, predictably mild pepper for commercial canners that would appeal to Anglos and could be grown around Hatch.

Peppers, of course, had been grown in northern New Mexico long before Garcia was born. In the 1830's, Josiah Gregg said red pepper “enters into nearly every dish at every meal” in Santa Fé while chile verde was considered “one of the great luxuries.”

A hundred years later chile had become one of the few cash crops in the Española valley. People would take their ristras into Abiquiú or Española where Bond and Nohl examined them carefully before accepting them for credit. They shipped the chiles north on the Denver and Rio Grande.

People in Chimayó remember that if their crop was rejected by store keepers, their fathers would go to places like Mora or Truches or Peñasco to swap the chiles for beans or potatoes or goat cheese. Some had connections through a relative in Mora. Elsewhere, Tila Vila remembers strangers would open their doors if they realized the pedlars were from “good” Chimayó families.

Despite the Latin name, chiles are perennial plants that can bloom their first season, but need time to do so at temperatures above 60. When the real heat arrives, they tend to bloom less until late summer. The bell-shaped flowers drop when night temperatures are above 75 degrees, and fruit development is delayed if daytime temperatures reach 90. The first peppers tend to be larger than the later ones.

To speed the growing season, Leonora Curtin says people used to plant seeds in April or May in tins or boxes they kept on their window sills until the weather warmed enough to transplant them. The move should have been made by May 3 for them to develop their glossy green skins by the middle of September.

Even then, the growing season for a pepper is so long it may never reach the red stage in the mountains or in a summer like this when drought and heat send plants into periods of quiescence. A typical green chile is ready to harvest 120 days after planting, but the red needs 165. By necessity, dried green may have become the standard.

Now we can buy good sized bedding plants. Each time I went into a garden center this past April, there was some man unhappy that peppers hadn’t appeared yet.

I finally settled on what was available, Sandia, a cross between the original Garcia pepper and an Anaheim which Roy Harper released in 1956 through New Mexico State. It’s primary virtue is that it matures earlier. During the summer heat, it sets fruit lower on the plants which makes it less vulnerable to the high winds that can come with the monsoons.

When I put the seedlings out the middle of May in a relatively protected area, they wilted every afternoon. The members of the nightshade family have shallow roots and need lots of water. They only stabilized after I stopped watering them each evening with a garden hose and gave them their own soaker that ran at least 15 minutes a day.

In July the light-green plants finally put out a few white flowers, that produced some rather fat, crooked fruits by mid August. About the time the chile roasters were leaving the end of September, the skins turned darker and glossier. The first of October they were turning red and beginning to dry.

There was a very short period when they were at their prime. People, both local and in Hatch, sweep through their fields several times a season picking the green chiles.

My neighbors across the road have four strings of red peppers hanging from their eaves, two long and two short. The latter look redder and fatter, as if the strings represented different croppings, and they were the most recent.

In the 1980's, Roy Nakayama and Frank Matta, also of NMSU, crossed Sandia with “a Northern New Mexico strain” to produce Española, an even earlier maturing red chile.

The famed Chimayó peppers were smaller than others and may have been some special variety brought north by migrants from Zacatecas that self-selected itself into something special in that high environment. In the 1930's, the area along the Chama river produced more strings of chiles per acre than any other part of the valley, but none were considered as flavorful.

The distinctive flavor may have come from the seed’s genetics, from the altitude or soil or water, or it may have come from timing. The chiles may have reached their most flavorful stage at just the right time to fire up the hornos to dry them.

For the past two weeks morning temperatures have hovered around freezing. Pepper plants can’t handle cold temperatures. Mine are probably still alive because I put them next to a southwest facing wall protected by some shrubs that haven’t lost their leaves yet.

My neighbors have picked their corn and peppers, removed the corn stalks and squash vines, and left the tomato and chile plants with unripe fruit to continue to redden. At some point soon, the remaining chiles will need to be picked and dried, because the weather will change. When we get our first heavy frost, the internal cells will rupture, release sap and incubate internal mold.

Notes:
Bosland, Paul W. and Stephanie Walker. “Growing Chiles in New Mexico,” 2004 revision.

_____, Danise Coon and Eric Votava. “The Chile Cultivars of New Mexico State University,” 2008.

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

Epicentre. “Chile Pepper Varieties,” The Epicentre Spices website.

Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.

US Department of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975, on 1930's.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Tila Vila.

Photograph: Sandia chile beginning to dry, 23 October 2011.

Peppers, Part 1

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, dahlias, silver lace vine, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds; grape leaves brown or yellow, apple leaves golden orange; woman down the road has been putting nightly covers over the plants that are still blooming in front of her house wall; man down the road planted alfalfa this week.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallows, clammy weed, goat’s head, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, gumweed nearly gone, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, mushrooms; cottonwood leaves turning yellow, some Apache plume leaves yellow, tamarix and choke cherry leaves turning orange; more Juniper berries a grey blue; gypsum phacelia seedlings grown larger.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, Shirley poppies; Autumn Joy sedum leaves have coral tinge, Maximilian sunflower leaves turning yellow and falling.

Looking south: Floribunda roses; zinnias turned brown, rose of Sharon leaves turning yellow, raspberry leaves bronzed.

Looking west: Calamintha, Silver King artemisia; sea lavender leaves mottled, red at the tips, then yellow and green toward the stem; purple coneflower leaves turning yellow or dirty brown.

Looking north: Nasturtium from seed, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, blanket flower, yellow cosmos from seed, black-eyed Susan, chrysanthemum; black locust, apricot and sweet cherry leaves turning yellow, Siberian pea dropping its leaves.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, snapdragon, nicotiana, impatiens; moss rose blooming despite many dead leaves.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: More birds flitting about the arroyo yesterday late morning; don’t know if it was the time of day or the time of year; harvester and small black ants.

Weather: First morning temperatures below 32; last rain 10/07/11; 11:03 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: As soon as you arrive in New Mexico and need to find a place to eat while you await the moving van, you’re confronted with the great question, red or green.

There’s no right answer. You say green. You like the taste of the peppers or don’t. The next time, you say red. You like, you don’t. You notice how others respond to your choice, and the time after you follow their lead.

Unless you’re from Texas, where they eat jalapeños like the rest of us eat celery sticks, it doesn’t hurt to do what others do in public, and eat what you like when you’re alone.

In theory, the distinction between red and green is simply a preference for a particular food preservation technique. If you pick a chile pepper when it’s green, it has a milder taste because the chemicals that give it the hotter flavor don’t develop until it ripens and the skin turns red.

In Chimayó in the past, people preferred to eat them when they were green, but used the red for medicine. Don Usner was told chile caribe was especially effective against colds and sore throats, while Leonora Curtin was told to use chile colorado for rheumatism.

Unfortunately, unripe Capsicum annuum spoil when they’re picked, while red ones will dry and last a very long time. It’s very difficult to dry the unripe fruits because their skins toughen to prevent premature evaporation in this arid climate. The trapped water supports bacteria, that leads to rot.

People in México, probably those who lived in Teotihuacán northeast of modern Mexico City around the time of Christ, discovered they could preserve unripe peppers in their milder state by smoking them.

When Phillip II sent Francisco Hernández to report on plants from the New World in the 1570's, people on Hispañola, where Christopher Columbus had first eaten chiles 80 years before, were drying and smoking one species so it lasted it a year. Texochilli was a soft pepper, with a light spiciness and was “usually eaten with corn or with tortillas.”

Smoking peppers enough to remove all the water takes time. According to Wikipedia, chipotles are jalapeños that have ripened red and dried on the plant. At the end of the season in Chihuahua, the ones that ripened late are picked for smoking that can take several days. Chuck Evans experimented with smoking peppers over hickory wood with a modern rack smoker and found red pods took three days to dry at 110 degrees.

People realized that, instead of completely drying peppers with heat, they could simply heat chiles long enough to make the skins easier to remove.

In Chimayó, Benigna Chávez remembers they would roast red chile “in the horno, on coals of the wood.” I’ve talked to a young woman in her 30's in Santa Fe who says when she was a child her father would roast green peppers in the stove’s oven in pans. Now every August, a section of the local grocer’s parking lot is fenced off for the propane fueled burners that roast chiles dumped from 50 pound burlap bags into spinning wire cages.

Half cooked peppers still spoil if they’re not eaten within a week. In the past, Chávez said they “peeled it and tied it and hung it outside to dry on the clothesline” before putting the dried chiles “away in a flour sack that was not very thick so it would get air and hang it in the dispensa for the winter.”

When people are given their clear plastic bags of roasted chiles in the parking lot today, they still have to remove the skins and seeds, and cut them. Since electricity was introduced after World War II, many have frozen diced pieces instead of drying slices.

Such progress, of course, changes the taste of and for peppers. It also alters that primal New Mexico question, (almost) fresh or dried?

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

DeWitt, Dave and Chuck Evans. “Chipotle Flavors: How to Smoke Chiles,” Fiery Foods website.

Hernández, Francisco. The Mexican Treasury,” edited by Simon Varey, 2000.

Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995, includes quote from Benigna Chávez.

Wikipedia entry on “Chipotle.”

Photograph: Peppers from different generations this summer left to ripen down the road, 20 October 2011.

Mushrooms

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid tea roses, Russian sage, silver lace vine, red yucca, datura, Sensation cosmos, French marigolds.

Beyond the walls and fences: Indian paintbrush near chamisa, leatherleaf globemallows, blue gilia, narrow-leaved collomia, clammy weed, bindweed, ivy-leaf morning glory, goat’s head, stickleaf, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, amaranth, pigweed, chamisa, native sunflowers, snakeweed, gumweed, Hopi tea, áñil del muerto, broom senecio, golden hairy, strap-leaf, purple and heath asters, cockle bur; cottonwoods yellowing.

In my yard, looking east: Winecup mallow, sidalcea, large-leaf soapwort, pink evening primrose, Rose Queen salvia, 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.

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

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.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Harvester and small black ants.

Weather: Early morning temperatures in mid-30's have put everything on notice; last rain 10/07/11; 11:23 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Perhaps because I first saw mushrooms in fairy rings in the woods at summer camp in southern Michigan, I’m always surprised to see them in this part of New Mexico.

I don’t know now if someone told me or I surmised those fairy rings were toadstools living on the outer edges of dead trees.

When I first saw mushrooms appear here after the rain, I thought of them like the neighboring mosses - dormant spores that sprang to life when they got sufficiently wet. I assumed the spores themselves just blew here, probably from the Jemez.

Douglas Smith says the fungi come out in profusion in the Los Alamos area in early fall for six to eight weeks after the monsoons have begun.

They don’t appear here every year and their appearance changes. I don’t know if that’s a function of species or life cycle. Their fruiting time varies from season to season, but their affinity for moisture is obvious.

I saw one in the gravel drive in 1999, and another flat-topped, whitish one in the garden bed on the north side of the house in mid-June of 2000. In 2001, I saw one by the back fence the end of July.

In 2003, I found two large, flat ones that resembled pancakes in the well in May and another type on the west end of the house in late November. I next saw some in 2007, one with a tall domed, light tan cap in early July and another in early August.

At the end of May of 2009 I saw two next to a hose by the back fence that again had pointed white caps that were slightly flared at their bases. In June I noticed one on the prairie, slightly taller than mine, with a thin, ridged stem. All that remained of the cap was a plate of black fringe.

Later in the summer, in August, the ones were back under the peach tree on the west side of the house. By the time I photographed them, they were tan with caps more spherical than pointed. One had a dark mark in the center of the top.

Last year nothing appeared in my yard until early August when three were growing in the back drip line. However, I saw a colony on the prairie in March that I nearly missed because they still looked a bit like raised pebbles. One had a triangular, whitish grey cap and some darker markings on the stem.

Later in the summer, in early August, I saw one that had had a flat round tan cap that then was splitting to reveal an interior filled with darker, reddish brown matter. It resembled scale on a rusting beam.

This year there was nothing until we finally got some rain in September. They might be the same type I saw last spring. They came up in disturbed land on the prairie where I tend to walk and had the same slightly puffy, slightly rounded white caps. I couldn’t find them the following week: the ATV’s had been through.

Two weeks later I noticed one had survived, but was laying down with a dent in its cap. Last Sunday, after a rainy week, it had revived a bit, and a couple others were growing nearby with some baby Russian thistles.

There are far too few to think of them as a colony. So far, they seem the result of a group of spores caught by the wind and dropped in the same area. They developed some threads underground, the mycelium, that then produce the familiar stem and cap necessary for reproduction. In my yard, none have survived for more than two seasons.

In more favorable conditions the mycelium live a perennial existence underground. Scientists believe fairy rings are caused when fungus grows out from the center like ring muhly grass. As they grow, they exhaust the nutrients so only the outer rings can produce the familiar tan fungi once a year. About 60 species have been identified that grow in this pattern.

Notes:
Smith, Douglas. “Species of Northern New Mexico (50),” posted 19 August 2008 on the Mushroom Observer website.

Wikipedia entries on Mushrooms and Fairy Rings.

Photograph: Mushroom growing in an ATV path on the prairie, 9 October 2011; it emerged before September 9, after the monsoons, and revived last week after days of clouds led to a night of rain.

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.