Raising Flowers

Weather: Sunday night’s winds blew in some Russian thistle carcasses and blew pods off the catalpa; an insignificant amount of rain yesterday; last snow 2/23.

With the warm temperatures encouraging early leafing and flowering, it’s a good to live away from the river. The timing is faster there. I assume it’s a matter of time before we get frost or snow again.

What’s blooming: Siberian elms, forsythia. First apricot flowers were destroyed when morning temperatures returned to their normal levels below freezing, and now buds that were closed then are beginning to open.

What’s coming up: Hyacinth, first tulips, bearded iris, daylilies, bouncing Bess, pink evening primrose, bindweed, oriental poppy, violet, winecup mallow, larkspur, broom senecio, alfalfa, brome grass.

What has new growth: Vinca, moss phlox, dandelions. New leaves on weeping and globe willows. Arborvitae and alfilerillo have greened.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds, bee on one of the apricots, cricket.

Weekly update: Most of the flower designs on the odd pieces of flatware by mother collected were raised designs. I don’t know if that was because early designs and techniques were borrowed from coins or if there were some technical reason. I suspect the relatively strength of metals under manufacturing conditions influenced both.

I’ve only seen one silver design that was punched into the metal, and some of those pieces lost their plating in the indentations.

The importance of materials is most obvious in slatted spoons. It’s more difficult to cut wood against the grain, but cutting with it may introduce weaknesses that allow the opening to extend. The only ones I’ve ever seen had the simplest cuts.

Plastic spoons are equally simple, but I think that’s just cost. No one wants to pay for premium materials for a utensil that may not survive long.

Cost is critical to mass production, but it’s only recently that it’s been the only concern. The first serving spoon was sold by a company that first used flatware as a premium to motivate salesman. Charles William Stuart bought a nursery in New York in 1852 with an existing crop he peddled to local farmers. From there, he moved into direct sales.

In the 1920s, Phillip Durham says, C. H. Stuard began distributing flatware from Oneida as rewards. When those proved successful, the company, then called Empire Crafts Corporation, began the Nobility Club that used housewives to sell to their neighbors, much like Avon does today. They offered women "opportunities to purchase a piece of the ‘better life’."

The punched design was created by Oneida itself. That company had begun selling steel flatware blanks to another manufacturer, and only began selling its own products in 1881. When they couldn’t compete with higher quality companies they turned to advertising in magazines with large audiences.

Utensils made after World War II still were intended to be affordable and provide the purchaser with the mantle of upper class taste. The designs no longer were realistic like the Community Plate, nor conventional like the fleur-de-list, nor impressionistic like the Nobility Plate. They were reduced to the simplest elements that conveyed the basic design.

One slatted spoon of my mother’s had a daisy cut into the bowl.

Another had an abstract tulip.

The use of floral motifs encourages people to appreciate flowers, and possibly even to grow some. When utensils are reduced to bare functions like concrete walls and barbed wire fences, more is lost than manufacturing expenses. One can’t take time to smell the roses, if they’re not about.

Notes: Phillip Durham, "History," NobilitySilver.com website.

Photographs:
1-2. Serving spoon with raised design, Nobility plate, made by Oneida Silver under contract to C. H. Stuart’s Silver Service Club. Design may be Royal Rose, created by Lloyd E. Ressegger and manufactured from 1939-1958. Flower may be a rose or peony, but has been simplified.

3. Flatware set with punched design, Oneida, Community plate. Flowers include one with five petals that’s not a rose, a tulip (or possible simplified fleur-de-lis) and what look like snails.

4. Slatted wooden spoons made in Portugal, sold for 2.49.

5. Slatted plastic spoon, Ekco, made in US, heat resistant up to 400 degrees F, sold for .99.

6. Daisy design, slatted spoon, stainless steel with wooden handle, made in Japan.

7. Tulip design, slatted spoon, with two marks, Universal USA and Imperial, stainless steel, one piece with handle.

8. Same as #3, back side of handle; design is simpler, emphasizes the tulip motif.

Local Fleur-de-lis

Weather: We’ve entered the killing season when the days are unusually warm, the nights still below freezing, winds on some days, and the only moisture in the air water that has been sucked from the ground; last snow 2/23.

What’s blooming: Some apricots have started to bloom. More men were out pruning their apples this past week.

What’s coming up: More cheat grass visible along the road sides.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, gold finches; crickets and earthworms active.

Weekly update: Conventional fleurs-de-lis were less common in my mother’s collection of cutlery than were the variations within the motif mentioned in my last post. When they did appear, it usually was to solve a technical problem.

Three metals have been used to mass produce flatware: sterling silver, copper with a thin silver veneer, and stainless steel. Each has its own internal atomic structures that are modified by other elements added as alloys. Ricci Argentieri says sterling is "very pliable and lends itself to intricate designs," while the hardness of stainless limits it to simple designs.

Silver plating was first done in Sheffield, England, after Thomas Boulsover discovered how to merge silver and copper in 1743 with heat. The use of chemistry to electroplate copper with silver began with the work of Alessandro Volta in 1800. George Elkington applied the scientific discoveries to manufacturing in Birmingham in 1840. When English manufacturers tried to stop attempts to introduce the processes into this county by lowering their prices, John Russell introduced automation in the 1860s.

Silver plate had the malleability of copper, which is slightly harder than silver, but could still retain detailed impressions from dies. I suspect the manufacturing problems came from finding designs that took the plating on all their surfaces. Ezekiel James says designs carrying the William Rogers name were simplified after it was merged into International Silver in 1898, no doubt to lower manufacturing costs.

My mother had a spoon on which the plain surfaces became scratched with use. The border with four-petaled flowers is at the end of the handle. Parallel grooves were used to separate that area from the central section. Rather than end the design area with a point, a design motif was used that rounded the area. I suspect that was because a point was a potentially difficult area to plate uniformly, and therefore likely to chip or wear away.

The particular motif was a fleur-de-lis simply because it was familiar. It was widely used as a small pattern that could be repeated on fabrics or in stone. More important, it was used in iron work where its durability was proven.

The primary reason fences exist is to keep people or animals in or out. Sharp points were used at the top before barbed wire to keep invaders from going over the top. Wooden pickets were no problem, but iron rusted.

Pointed caps were installed which served the same purpose, but could be replaced without replacing the fence. Buckingham palace installed gilded fleurs-de-lis that had three points in 1911. The application, which existed before, has been much copied. The parts are easily available to modern fence builders.

Here in the valley fleur-de-lis finials are used on railings that top lava stone walls. Iron isn’t as pliable as silver or copper, so the reinforcing between bars is done with scrolls.

One local gate uses short vertical bars between the main bars in the lower section to keep out larger dogs. The rods are topped by fleur-de-lis painted the same color as the iron bars.

The other place you see fleurs-de-lis is on the iron rails constructed around graves in the local cemeteries. The one on display at Larry’s Auto not only has gilded finials but the cross in the center of one end uses the motif in repeating patterns in the four arms.

Like the name fleur-de-lis, which many have tried to trace, the use of a flower symbol on local garden walls is neither coincidence nor deliberate. To say it’s merely the continuation of a number of cultural preferences is to understate the importance of inherited traditions.

Notes:
James, Ezekiel. "How to Date Rogers Silver," ehow website.

Ricci Argentieri Company. "Flatware Care and Maintenance," company website.

Photographs:
1. Spoon handle, back side, "H, Wm Rogers Mfg Co, Original Rogers," purchased in Michigan in the 1960s.

2. Iris in my yard, 17 May 2009; two falls are still horizontal and resemble the classic fleur-de-lis form.

3. Same as #1, front side which reverses the direction of the fleur-de-lis.

4. Local iron fence with pickets.

5. "Fence with fleur-de-lis on Buckingham Palace in London," uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, April 2006, by Gryffindor. Fence was designed by Ashton Webb and manufactured by the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts in 1911. The gilding is actual gold, which lasts about 30 years.

6. Local iron railing on lava stone wall with fleur-de-lis on top.

7. Local iron gate with fleur-de-lis in lower section.

8-9. Cemetery railing, displayed at Larry’s Auto Sales, Riverside at the intersection with the road to Chimayó. Fleur-de-lis are at the four corners. They are solid forms in the four arms of cross, and repeated in the filigree extensions of the arms.

Fleur-de-Lis

Weather: Snow Tuesday was gone the next day; water is still in the top inches of the ground.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, garlic chives, hollyhock, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; pampas and cheat grass; new leaves on fern bushes and golden spur columbine, new white yarrow sprouts, new western stick seed rosettes. People continue to clean out leaves, burn weeds, and prune fruit trees.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues, alfilerillo, purple asters.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

Monday afternoon around 2:20 pm birds near the river were making lots of noise; assume geese or some other bird is migrating.

Weekly update: The fleur-de-lis is the oldest flower motif used on the oddments of flatware collected by my mother. The basic form of a flower rising from two leaves was used on a helmet recovered from the Scythian grave. The cutwork was done in gold sometime in the fourth century BC on the Crimean peninsula. The outward curving leaves resemble rams horns.

Michel Pastoureau found the basic motif was used on a Roman coin in Gaul in the first century AD, or "at least the upper-half of one, and a sort of triangle in the lower-half." Hugh Capet took control of the Île-de-France in 987, and from there extended Frank power over the territory now called France. Louis VI used the motif on his coins, his son Louis VII used in on his seal in 1150, and his grandson Philippe II elevated it to a symbol in 1211.

During those years when the Capets were consolidating their power as the first among the lords, they and the design assumed religious associations that obscure their origins. Fleur has always meant "flower," but "lis" didn’t appear in French until 1150 during the rein of Louis VII. It now means lily. Some extended the religious associations denoted to the kings to the symbol.

Lilies have six petals, but, depending on the form, are all open, or all reflexed, or nearly joined in bells. They don't have a pattern that fits the fleur-de-lis.

Iris do fit the pattern. Some mistake the way they see the flower for the design, and believe the cluster of three erect standards are the center of the symbol and the two visible falls are the side petals. That assumes modern aesthetics of perspective and realistic presentation. When the fleur-de-lis was created, artists drew what they knew existed, not what they saw. The three standards, then, would have been the top of the symbol, and the three falls the bottom.

For those seeking explanations, the word "lis" remains a mystery. Godefridus Henschenius may have been the first to argue in the 1600s that the flower was the yellow Iris pseudacorus. It then was called lieschblume in German, but in the past had been spelled lies and leys. The Franks were a Germanic tribe.

Pierre-Augustin Boissier de Sauvages went farther in 1756 to suggest the flowers were common along the river Leie in the northern French and Belgium homeland of the Franks. Its French name is Lys.

A century later Jean Rey suggested things were much simpler. He said French kings, especially those named Louis, were originally referred to as "loi’s" or "loys." The fleur de list was simply his flower.

Since its standardization by the French monarchs, the image has existed in both its original forms and in the conventionalized one. One of my mother’s spoons showed a four petaled flower between two leaves with a tree shape below that might have been roots in the mode of the Gallic coin.

A similar pattern was used on the ends of the handles in her wedding silver: a central flower, two leaves that curled from the handle rim, and a triangular root. The main difference was the pineapple motif was substituted for the flower.

In the 1960s she bought a shell-shaped sugar spoon because it happened to be engraved with her initials. The most complete of its highly stylized designs was on the back. It had the conventional three sections with the curving edge lines of the handle forming leaves. Below was a diamond-shaped shaft surrounded by the pairs of reflexed lines.

The five-fingered design was repeated at the tip of the handle on both the front and back.

A more stylized three-pronged flower rose from a set of leaves in the middle of the handle, on both sides.

Notes:
Boissier de Sauvages, Pierre Augustin. Languedocien Dictionnaire François, 1756, cited by Wikipedia entry on "Fleur-de-lis."

Henschenius, Godefridus. Cited by Velde, without specific reference.

Pastoureau, Michel. Traité d'Héraldique, 1979, cited by Velde.

Rey, Jean. Histoire du Drapeau, 1837, cited by Velde.

Velde, François R. "The Fleur-de-lis," Heraldica website.

Photographs:
1. Shell shaped sugar spoon, 1847 Rogers Bros. A1, purchased in Michigan.

2. Dutch iris in my yard, 10 May 2009.

3. Helmet, 4^th c. BC from grave (kurgan) on Cape Ak-Burun, Crimea, in the Hermitage museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

4. Open faced Asian lily in my yard, 28 June 2013.

5. No markings, purchased in Michigan.

6. Heirloom plate, purchased in Michigan in 1930s.

7 and 8. Same as #1.

Snow Melt

Weather: Sun directions changed, so it's shining in my eyes through a different window around 7:15 am. People have been out on warm days burning weeds in fields and along fences. Last slight snow 2/3.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, hollyhock, winecup mallow, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; pampas grass. Cheat grass coming up along the roadsides, garlic chives coming up.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues, alfilerillo, purple asters.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

Weekly update: Snow’s still visible when I look south toward the Jémez where I see the more northerly faces. I see less when I look directly across the river. That same area has streaks of white when I look at it from farther north when I’m in town.

As I watch the slow dessication of the snow fields I think about the final retreat of the glaciers that began around 19,00 years ago in Europe. Ice had buried vegetation for years. Moving rocks had removed any vestiges of top soil and left gouges that became mires, bogs, and kettle lakes. Denise Leesch’s team believed, the first plants had to be "capable of growing on mineral soils."

Mammoths moved north through the newly exposed Swiss plateau, but were gone when relative cold returned in the Oldest Dryas that lasted from 17,050 years ago to 14,650. Early in that period, reindeer were hunted. They’re the only ruminants that can live on lichens. In the later millennium, horses and ptarmigan were more common. The latter, a form of grouse, eat birch and willow buds in today’s arctic.

The plateau is rather like our valley, though it has a very different geological origin. On the southeast side are the Alps, which like the Sangre, were uplifted, then eroded to cover the plateau. On the northwest side are the Jura Mountains. Unlike the Jémez, they are limestone. The same calcareous rocks also overlay the Alpine skeleton. During the Pleistocene, granite and gneiss were left in the moraines that marked the boundaries of glacial advances.

Betula nana, which still grows in the far north of Europe, was adapted to the still barren landscape. Insects existed, but not ones that pollinated woody shrubs. The three-foot high birch was pollinated by the wind, which also dispersed its seeds.

Earthworms, which add calcite that neutralizes soil, hadn’t return. The tree grows on acid soils. During the summer, it stores nitrogen and phosphorus in its roots, so that it can feed its own new growth the following spring.

The nitrogen its roots stored probably wasn’t there when the glaciers receded. It was deposited by other plants that didn’t produce pollen. Betaproteobacteria combine ammonium in the soil with oxygen from the atmosphere to produce nitrite. Cyanobacteria capture nitrogen from the air and store it with carbon and phosphate. Because the microbes lack a waxy outer skin, these nutrients leak into the soil.

Cyanobacteria, which is a generic term for a group of species, are the dominant life form in "cold polar environments such as ice shelves, glaciers, glacial meltwater streams and ice-capped lakes," according to Warwick Vincent. They also inhabit the surfaces of rocks, and fissures within them. His team noted they colonize moraines and permafrost soils from those locations.

In water they form mats, with different species living at different levels. On land, they form a dark crust that encourages mosses. When the moisture disappears, they go dormant and merge with the dust. As soon as water reappears, they resume respiration. Within 30 minutes they begin photosynthesis.

Over time, the mosses and bacteria coalesce into more complex communities of lichen, in which the larger plants provide shade that preserves water, while the smaller ones provide sugars for their protectors. Many lichen attach themselves to rocks where the root-like hyphae of the moss penetrate the surface, breaking granite into its constituent parts. They also secret carbonic acid that dissolves granite. The cyanobacteria exude oxalic acid that dissolves limestone.

Jie Chen’s team looked through studies of different types of lichen colonies to estimate the time they took to weather rock. The group found one report from Antarctica suggested colonization began within 40 years on cement, a form of limestone. They found another that suggested it took nearly 10,000 years for a plant community to fully cover sandstone. The last Pleistocene thaw took 7,300 years, enough to create preliminary soils for the Holocene that began 11,700 years ago,

Notes:
Belnap, Jayne, Julie Hilty Kaltenecker, Roger Rosentreter, John Williams, Steve Leonard, and David Eldridge. Biological Soil Crusts: Ecology and Management, 2001.

Chen, Jie, Hans-Peter Blume, and Lothar Beyer. "Weathering of Rocks Induced by Lichen Colonization - a Review," Catena 39:121-146:2000.

Hendrix, Paul F. Earthworm Ecology and Biogeography in North America,1995.

Leesch, Denise, Jérôme Bullinger, Werner Müller, and Ebbe Nielsen. "The Magdalenian in Switzerland: Re-colonization of a Newly Accessible Landscape," Quaternary International 30:-18:2012.

Preusser, Frank, Hans Rudolf Graf, Oskar Keller, Edgar Krayss, and Christian Schluchter. "Quaternary Glaciation History of Northern Switzerland," Quaternary Science Journal 60:282-305:2011.

Tollefson, Jennifer E. "Betula nana," 2007, in United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line. I couldn’t find comparable information on the Salix retusa that was dominant at Champréveyres and Monruz.

Versteegh, Emma A. A., Mark E. Hodson, Stuart Black, and Matthew G. Canti. "Pleistocene and Holocene Temperature Reconstructions Using Earthworm-produced Calcite," Geochemical Society and European Association of Geochemistry, Goldschmidt conference, 2013.

Vincent, Warwick F. "Cyanobacterial Dominance in the Polar Regions," in B. A. Whitton and M. Potts, The Ecology of Cyanobacteria, 2000.

_____, Frédéric Zakhia, Anne-Dorothee Jungblut, Arnaud Taton, and Annick Wilmotte. "Cyanobacteria in Cold Ecosystems," in R. Margesin, F. Schinner, J.-C. Marx, and C. Gerday, Psychrophiles: from Biodiversity to Biotechnology, 2008.

Photographs: Crust and moss taken on the prairie; 2010 was a particularly good year for them.

1. Close up of moss in its green and brown phases, 13 March 2010.

2. Crust in its dormant black phase, 21 March 2010.

3. Green just beginning to appear as snow recedes, 19 February 2010.

4. Green and brown moss with black crust, 28 March 2010.

5. Close up of moss and crust, 13 March 2010.

Silver Roses

Weather: Very warm afternoon temperatures, ground getting friable on top, still hard below: snow still visible in the Jémez; last slight snow 2/3.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; pampas, and cheat grasses.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues, alfilerillo, purple asters.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

Weekly update: I’ve been sorting through the flatware that’s collected at the back of a kitchen drawer. Some of it my mother bought in antique stores in Michigan, some I picked up at local supermarkets when I suddenly needed something at work. Nothing of value and nothing carrying any memories.

I did notice, though, how many of the handles were decorated with flowers, often roses. Only one was a natural representation of a modern flower. The rest were five petaled, sometimes with the stamens visible.

Charles Fox-Davies says this is how the rose was always shown in English heraldry. The representation was earlier than its use in the War of the Roses. The Tudors sometimes showed two rows of petals.

My mother’s silver with the King Cedric design shown at the top comes closest to the traditional design. The stamens or what Fox-Davis called the seeds are prominent. The selection of pattern name indicates the allusions were deliberate. Cerdic, the Saxon king of Wessex from 519 to 534, is thought to have created the kernal of the English kingdom. Wikipedia says his name was transformed to Cedric by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe. Joshua Mark has published an image of square headed bow decorated with four, not five, petaled flowers.

An older spoon owned by my mother has a simpler five-petaled flower in the center of a design, surrounded by two four-petaled ones. The difference may have been manufacturing technology. Both were sterling plate, but Oneida began manufacturing the design in 1933 in silver plate, while International Sterling, who produced the other, was organized in 1898.

When the production of cutlery moved to east Asia, the rose motif was maintained, but sometimes with local variations. A Japanese company used the conventional rose with a much simplified center for the end of the spoon.

But in the middle of the handle, the Stylecraft designers for T and N used an impressionistic full rose in a shield. The edges were marked by half flowers that look like they had four petals.

The Taiwanese apparently copied the Japanese when they produced flatware for the American market. The spoon I probably picked up in an emergency in a supermarket is the same kind of simplified heraldic rose, though their stainless stamping was thin enough to bend or break with pressure.

Ekco Products Company was one of the major producers of kitchen utensils in the 1950s, but since has been manufacturing flatware in China. Their design, Country Gardens, which I brought at a local supermarket, used the same kind of impressionistic design as the Japanese had for their shield flower. However, the stainless steel die was cruder, substituting background patterns and simple edges for precision.

 
Notes:
Fox-Davies, Arthur Charles. A Complete Guide to Heraldry, 1909.

Mark, Joshua J. "Cerdic," Ancient History Encyclopedia, published online 30 December 2014.

Wikipedia. Entry on King Cerdic.

Photographs:
1. Oneida, King Cedric, manufactured in silver plate in 1933, and in sterling silver with hollow handles and stainless steel knife blades from 1949 to 1971. My mother bought this new in the late 1950s.

2. Betty Prior rose flower in my yard, 8 July 2015.

3. No markings, bought by my mother in Michigan.

4. Wm Rogers IS (International Sterling), no other markings, bought by my mother in Michigan.

5. T & N Stainless Steel of Japan, Stylecraft, with no other markings, end of handle, probably bought in a supermarket.

6. Same as #5, middle of handle.

7. Taiwan, stainless steel, no other markings, end of handle, bought in a supermarket.

8. Ekco Eterna, Country Gardens, stainless steel manufactured in China, bought in a supermarket.

9. Same as #7, middle of handle.

Peach Mortality

Weather: Jémez are so marbled with snow they look like limestone. Temperatures remained at least five degrees colder than normal in the mornings. Rained Monday night with snow in the air Wednesday.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; June, pampas, and cheat grasses.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues, alfilerillo, purple asters.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

Weekly update: I’ve always been told the life expectancy of Prunus persica is 15 to 20 years, and my peach tree is now 18 years ago. The bark has begun to split, and aphids attacked a couple years ago.

I’ve been wondering when it will die, and why. All I could learn on the web were the likely causes of mortality, which were nematode infestations, peach borers, and consequences of split bark. I didn’t learn much about the inherent life cycle of the tree itself.

That information is equivalent to being told the life expectancy for men is 46 years and for women 48 because that’s what it was in 1900. In 1950 it was 71 years for women and 66 years for men. What changed wasn’t something inherent in the species but the ability of doctors and governmental agencies to control the spread of infectious diseases.

Now, with more people living beyond retirement age, medical researchers are studying the effects of aging, and more important, what constitutes aging, or senescence. One important factor is the hormonal changes that divide a woman’s reproductive years into childhood, maturity, and post-menopause. Equivalent changes occur in men’s bodies but aren’t as visible.

The known botanical hormones follow annual cycles, with some encouraging growth in spring, and others preparing plants to survive the winter. As Oliver Rackham made clear, the above ground portions of all trees die every year and are rebuilt from the roots each spring. So why, if a tree has survived its initial exposures to drought and heat and cold and wet, would it die?

I got one hint from a group of Chinese anthropologists who quoted one study that said the "modern peach loses considerable productivity after 10-15 years," and another that indicated "early Chinese records report that productivity declined in years 7-8."

There are, no doubt, as many factors affecting peach fertility as there are influencing human life expectancies. Climate has changed in the thousands of years of peach domestication in China, and so has the species. The differences might also have been as simple as differences in fertilization methods and subsequent soil depletion rates.

Still, when a group in India asked orchard growers about the economics of growing peaches in Punjab and Uttrakhand they discovered incomes declined after 17 years. The horticulturalists saw no returns for the first four years after they planted trees, then earned 22,927 in year five. That increased to 31,790 in year eight and to 42,838 in year eleven. Income dropped to 31,793 in orchards that were 18 years old, fell to 21,443 in year 22 and 13,633 in year 25.

The three researchers didn’t provide their currency unit. They also wrote about orchard ages, not average ages of trees within those orchards. Thus, incomes may have been higher in older orchards because new trees had been planted when ones died. Even so, their data suggested age phases existed.

I wonder if decreases in fertility in peaches covary with decreases in the abilities of plants to survive stress caused by insects, bacteria and weather, the way age and flexibility seem to in humans.

Christina Wells and Desmond Layne found trees produced new fine roots at least three times a year, with "a significant flush occurring immediately after harvest." The plants they observed were four- to six-years old and in their first years of fruiting. Do trees grown barren have the same spurt?

Wells and another team found the age of fine roots had less effect on their life spans than "seasonal factors." In Italy, a team led by Elena Baldi found the roots "born later in the summer lived longer than those born in the spring." That in part is because "root numbers declined in the fall and remained low over winter" according to Wells’ group.

Age was important when it meant roots were larger or reached lower depths in the soil. In addition, with time, roots become more fibrous and brown. Wells’ group suggested that made them less attractive to pests and better able to handle drought. But age for them was relative to the roots themselves, and not to the parent trees.

So, I really know no more about the metabolism of my tree than when I started, because researchers aren’t interested in what happens to commercially important plants when they no longer are productive. After all, Lal Singh Gangwar’s team recommended growers replace their old orchards when their maintenance costs were greater than their gross profits.

Notes:
Baldi, E., M. Toselli, D. M. Eissenstat, B. Marangoni, and Peter Millard. "Organic Fertilization Leads to Increased Peach Root Production and Lifespan," Tree Physiology 30:1373-1382:2010.

Faber, Joseph F. and Alice H. Wade. Life Tables for the United States: 1900-2050, 1983.

Gangwar, L. S., Dinesh Singh, and Goutam Mandal. "Economic Evaluation of Peach Cultivation in North Indian Plains," Agricultural Economics Research Review 21:123-129:2008.

Rackham, Oliver. See post for 19 October 2014.

Wells, Christina and Desmond Layne. "Irrigation Effects on Fine Root Dynamics in Peach (Prunus persica)," HortScience, July 2005.

_____, D. Michael Glenn, and David M. Eissenstat. "Changes in the Risk of Fine-root Mortality with Age: a Case Study in Peach, Prunus persica (Rosaceae)," American Journal of Botany 89:79-87:2002.

Zheng, Yunfei, Gary W. Crawford, and Xugao Chen. "Archaeological Evidence for Peach (Prunus persica) Cultivation and Domestication in China," Plos One, 5 September 2014.

Photographs:
1. Replacement peach trees, planted 19 May 2012.

2. Tree of left the next year, 19 June 2013.

3. Earliest picture I have of the main peach, 6 August 2006.

4. The worst thing that happened to my peach was a Russian olive hid in the middle, forcing its branches outward, 4 May 2012. After the olive was cut down, the tree was invaded by aphids in 2013 and the bark began splitting.

The Four Humors

Weather: Snow still visible in the Jémez, though with larger patches of dark; I’m told the lakes at San Juan are thawing; last slight snow 1/8.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; June, pampas, and cheat grasses.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues, alfilerillo, purple asters.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

The man trimming my trees cut down the winterfat that was sheltering the ground squirrel. We found an area of branches filled with debris that apparently was an awning, and a deep tunnel opening.

Weekly update: Any understanding of medicine in an historic period is limited by the sources that survive. Often, that means treatises. They’re as useful in explaining people’s responses to disease as the constitution is to describing modern presidential elections.

The primary source of information for the Four Humors is Aelius Galen, who lived in modern Turkey around 200 ad. That’s about 1500 years before Miguel de Quintana moved to Santa Crux from Mexico City in 1693.

Surprising, there’s a Chinese novel written in the mid-1700s, just a few years after Quintana died, that reproduces the texture of life when health was so precarious everyone had to know how to react to sudden changes.

In Cao Xeuqin’s The Story of the Stone, there never were enough qualified doctors, even to serve a family one stratum below the emperor’s household. They based their diagnosis on reading the pulse at two points on each wrist. Since men weren’t allowed to see their female patients, they only saw the arms through a curtain, and received any descriptions of symptoms from male relatives.

When medicine failed, Cao’s characters resorted to experts in the supernatural calling upon Buddhist divination and contra witchcraft magic. This hierarchy of cures based on their efficacy was little different than the world described by José Ortiz y Pino in Galisteo in the 1930s where people first saw the curandero, and when that didn’t work consulted the brujo. The same movement from the known to the unknown exists today, only now it occurs when people like Annette Funicello, who suffer from diseases that have no cure, become willing to try anything, no matter how experimental.

In the past, both groups of professionals, the medical and the supramedical, were sustained by sets of ideas passed within families. Today, family lore is supplemented by advertising and mass media dramas.

In Cao’s novel, when Bao-yu, the adolescent male hero, says he prefers cold wine, a female cousin his same age warns him: "Wine has an exceptionally fiery nature, and therefore must be drunk warm in order to be quickly digested. If it is drunk cold, it congeals inside the body and harms it by absorbing heat from the internal organs."

Everyone in his household, male and female, servant and master, divides the world into hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus a maid tells Bao-yu’s mother, he "kept complaining that he felt dry. He wanted me to give him plum bitters to drink, but of course that’s an astringent, and I thought to myself that as he’d just had a beating and not been allowed to cry out during it, a lot of hot blood and hot poison must have been driven inwards and still be collected round his heart, and if he were to drink some of that stuff, it might stir them up and bring on a serious illness, so I talked him out of it."

Later, Bao-yu himself intervenes in the treatment of a young servant girl. He looks at her prescription and says, "He’s prescribing for her as if she were a man. However bad the congestion is, you can’t expect a young girl to stand up to drugs like thorny lime and ephedra."

On his recommendation, another doctor is called. He reads her pulses and makes the same diagnosis as the previous one, "but there was no ephedra or thorny lime in his prescription: their place was taken by milder drugs such as angelica, bitter-peel and white peony root; and the quantities were smaller."

Knowledge of the four humors is so pervasive, it allows a mere daughter-in-law to tell the matriarch of the clan, she’d told her a joke because "laughter makes the humours circulate. We’re going to be eating crabs shortly, and I was afraid that the cold of the crab-meat might settle on your heart. If I can make you laugh and stir your humours up, you’ll be able to eat as much crab as you like without taking any harm from it."

After reading Cao’s novel, I still don’t know any more about how Miguel de Quintana coped with his pain, but I have some idea how ideas so alien to mine were transmitted. The greatness of the novel is the exotic seems so familiar because I met so many of his characters at summer camp where antidotes for mosquito bites were passed on the same way and the camp director served stewed prunes every Wednesday morning to ensure we weren't constipated when our parents arrived on Saturday.

Notes: Cao is also called Tsao Hsueh-Chin. The novel’s title has been rendered Dream of the Red Chamber and A Dream of Red Mansions. I read the five volume translation by David Hawkes (v1-3) and John Minford (v4-5). I can’t judge anachronisms and other cultural lapses, but the two English scholars did a wonderful job of creating a narrative that meets our culture’s expectations of great literature. It’s role in establishing a vernacular literary tradition in China is comparable to that of Dante in Italy.

Sources for quotations:
Wine - volume1, chapter 8
Plum bitters - volume 2, chapter 34
Prescription - volume 2, chapter 45
Laughter - volume 2, chapter 38

Other notes: Funicello suffered from multiple sclerosis. José Ortiz y Pino III discussed Galisteo medicine in Don José, The Last Patrón, 1981.

Photographs:
1. The telltale sign of winter maintenance, the raw cut seen from a distance; peach tree in my yard, 31 January 2016.

2. Ground under the cut-down winterfat where the ground squirrel lurked, 31 January 2016.

More Rheumatoid Arthritis Cures

Weather: It’s been cold enough the gravel is still frozen in my driveway and snow is visible in the Jémez; last slight snow 1/8.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; June, pampas, and cheat grasses.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds. There probably was a hawk sitting on my gate Thursday morning. I only saw something about 10" long with brown speckled feathers underneath when it flew off.

Weekly update: Leonora Curtin was told plants like gumweed, sunflowers, and prickly poppy were used to treat rheumatism in northern New Mexico in the 1940s. None have been analyzed by scientists and none are reported as cures for joint pain by any group of Native Americans in the United States.

In fact, when you look at the list of antirheumatic plants compiled by Dan Moerman, you discover at least 225 have been used externally and 120 used internally. At the genus level where he created his index, just over a third were reported by more than one band. The most commonly mentioned were artemisia, discussed last week; stinging nettles, which were introduced from Europe, and yarrow, described in the post for 7 June 2015.

The other common herbal plants in Moerman’s index were evergreens in the spruce, pine, juniper, and hemlock genera. Curtin found locals ground dried piñon pitch and rubbed the powder on rheumatic joints. Pinus edulis sap is widely used by natives in New Mexico, but mainly as a band-aid to seal sores from exposure to the air.

Local native groups who mentioned externally applied cures for arthritis or rheumatism were the Isleta and the Zuñi. Those who took medicines internally were the Jémez and the Navajo. Keres speakers and the Hopi did both.

Since so few plants were known by more than one band, I wondered if rheumatoid arthritis was in fact an introduced disease that had been met with a variety of responses. Instead, researchers believe it was a New World malady taken to Europe. Bruce Rothschild discovered bone lesions on remains from 35 pre-Columbian sites, but said they weren't reported in Europe until 1785. He believed what had been attributed to rheumatoid arthritis before was actually spondylarthritis.

Since he first published his findings, others have reviewed evidence from bones, paintings, and literature. A group in Guadalajara noted the first distinction between rheumatoid arthritis and gout was made in México in 1578. In the early 1600s, Thierry Appelboom said Peter Paul Rubens and other Flemish painters were depicting deformed hands. He suggested the disease had been imported through the port of Antwerp that then was under Spanish rule.

Today, rheumatoid arthritis is not equally distributed among all groups of Native Americans. The highest incidence is among the Mille Lacs Chippewa of central Minnesota and the Pima of Arizona. It also has a significant presence among the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska and the Yakima of cental Washington.

Medical specialists agree that it is an immune system problem with an unknown precursor. They’ve identified the genetic factor that controls its appearance. However, they’ve found that the allele only defines who can, not who will, develop the disease.

Some researchers suspected processed sugar, flour, caffeine, and tobacco were the activating culprits. The first two didn’t exist before the Spanish, and the other two probably were used in different forms. Many now think such dietary factors influence the progress of the disease once it has been launched, but don’t initiate it. So far, no one has been able to identify the virus or bacteria that converts "might have" to "do have," though they’ve eliminated several suspects.

This all leaves the question, could Miguel de Quintana have developed rheumatoid arthritis in Santa Cruz in the 1730s? The fact it spread to Europe meant there was some microbe or animal that migrated in bodies or cargoes or shipboard grime when Spanish sailors returned to European ports. He could have been afflicted in Santa Cruz, or he may have been affected when he still lived in Mexico City. That there’s no evidence of antirheumatic cures among the northern Tewa speaking pueblos means little more than no anthropologist asked the right question at the right time.

The few barbers who came north in the 1690s, or the common knowledge shared among the colonists from Mexico City, recognized the difference between gout, which was a blood condition, and rheumatism, which was a spleen problem. However, the fact I’ve found so little on-line about arthritis cures within the schema of the Four Humors suggests the best doctors in Europe didn’t then have ready treatments.

That means, if he had any medical treatment, and it’s hard to believe he didn’t try things to relieve his pain, they were still in the experimental stage of trying everything and seeing if anything worked. His diet may have helped, if he ate peppers, and may have contributed to his problems, if he ate sweets or smoked much tobacco. Probably nothing happened systematically enough to have produced positive or negative results.

Notes:
Aceves-Avila, F. J., F. Medina, and A Fraga. "The Antiquity of Rheumatoid Arthritis: a Reappraisal," Journal of Rheumatology 28:751-7:2001; based in Guadalajar.

Appelboom, T. "Rubens - One of the First Victims of an Epidemic of Rheumatoid Arthritis That Started in the 16th-17th Century?, Rheumatology 44:681-683:2005.

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

Ferucci, Elizabeth D., David W. Templin, and Anne P. Lanier. "Rheumatoid Arthritis in American Indians and Alaska Natives: a Review of the Literature," Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism 34:662-667:2004. She was primarily interested in the far northwest, and used the Arctic Health Literature Database and the American Indian and Alaska Native Health Bibliography. Those sources may not have covered this part of the country comprehensively.

Halberg, P. "The History of Rheumatoid Arthritis," Dansk Medicinhistorisk Arbog :173-93:1995.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.

Ortiz y Pino III, José. The Herbs of Galisteo and Their Powers, 1971.

Rothschild, B.M. and R. J. Woods. "Does Rheumatoid Polyarthritis Come from the New World?," Revue du Rhumatisme et Des Maladies Osteo-Articulaires 57:271-4:1990

Silman, Alan J. and Jacqueline E. Pearson. "Epidemiology and Genetics of Rheumatoid Arthritis," Arthritis Research 4:S265-72:2002.

Photographs:
1. Gum weed by the side of the road, 19 July 2012. Fresh green Grindelia nuda plants were crushed and applied to ease rheumatic pains. Curtin said it was called yerba del buey.

2. Prickly poppy in my yard, 15 July 2013. Dried Argemone hispida roots were powdered and applied in Cuyamunge. Curtin said entire cardo santo plants were boiled for baths.

3. Native sunflower in my yard, 13 October 2014. A bath was made from green or dried leaves of Helianthus annuum for rheumatism and pains in the bones in La Bajada. Curtin said they called it castillo.

4. Native sunflowers by the road, 12 September 2013. Ortiz y Pino said áñil was used for baths in Galisteo when he was a boy. He also remembered cardo santo.

Miguel de Quintana’s Possible Treatments

Weather: More mornings with low temperatures; last slight snow 1/8.

What’s still green: Juniper, other evergreens; leaves on yuccas, grape hyacinth, garlic, vinca, hollyhock, winecup mallow, pink evening primrose, snapdragon, anthemis, golden hairy asters, most low or buried; June, pampas, and cheat grasses.

This week I called a different tree trimming company to remove dead branches. This one has work backed up because it subcontracts to a utility company that’s doing its trimming now.

What’s blue-green or gray: Leaves on Apache plumes, four-winged saltbushes, pinks.

What’s red or purple: Stems on roses, young peaches, sandbar willows; leaves on coral beard tongues.

What’s yellow or brown: Arborvitae, stems of weeping willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Rabbits, small birds.

Weekly update: The four humors were predicated on the ideal of balance, of a golden mean. Diabetes and gout were caused by excesses of blood, arthritis and rheumatism by too much black bile. Good health was the consequence of a balanced diet and physical activity, on the avoidance of extremes.

The connection between diet and health probably existed in people’s minds before it was rationalized by medical practitioners. The perception of some relationship continued after the four humors were replaced by the molecular chemistry based medical theory that prevails today.

Jens Kjeldsen-Kragh has said, "The notion that dietary factors may influence rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has been a part of the folklore of the disease." He added, the connection was hard to prove because human beings weren’t inclined to follow dietary regimens and were inclined to lie about their failures.

He and his team followed patients with rheumatoid arthritis who were eating foods used at a Scandinavian health farm in the early 1990s. They began by fasting, then ate a gluten-free vegetarian diet for 14 weeks. Participants then were able to add dairy products. At the end of a year, clinical tests showed the biochemical factors related to the disease showed improvements.

Members of his team contacted participants two years later. Those who stayed with the diet said their symptoms got worse when they ate meat or sweets, or drank coffee.

Following some ideal balanced diet was a luxury in the early eighteenth century when Miguel de Quintana lived in Santa Cruz. He was restricted to what would grow in this arid country, and to things imported from Chihuahua by mule train that weren’t perishable. It’s likely he ate corn or wheat, beans, chiles and probably some eggs, cheese and meat. We can gather from last week’s post he ate sweets when they were available.

We can only guess how diet influenced the pain felt by Quintana, if he in fact had rheumatoid arthritis, or if any available treatments were effective. Few of the herbs Leonora Curtin was told were used to treat rheumatism in the 1940s have been studied. Pharmaceutical companies already have products that limit the damage caused by inflammation. The factor that separates those who suffer today from those who do not isn’t excess, but access to doctors, and the insurance needed to pay for care.

The two plants that have been studied, áñil del muerto and estafiate, have attracted interest for their abilities to reduce sugar levels in the blood. The first is the tall yellow daisy that blooms in September. As discussed in the post for 10 October 2006, it contains galegine, which has been synthesized as metformin to treat type 2 diabetes.

Curtin said the leaves were ground and added to cold water, or made into a tea for rheumatism. José Ortiz y Pino remembered it as a tea in Galisteo in the 1930s.

Estafiate is a generic term for Artemisia species. Curtin thought it usually was the ludoviciana mexicana subspecies that was used for a bath. Pino called it black sage and said a tea was used for internal pain, while a bath was used for rheumatism. In 1912, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley said the perennial grew then in Pecos, Farmington, and other high areas. Because Pecos and Galisteo were targets of Comanche raids in the 1740s, it may not have been easily available to Quintana.

I mentioned last week that baths as we think of them probably weren’t available when Quintana was alive, but wet cloths and teas were. Another Artemisia subspecies called mariola or ludoviciana ludoviciana, was used in a tea made with boiling water. The large sagebrushes, called chamisa hediondor or Artemisia tridentata, were used as tea, usually with piloncillo, a kind of brown sugar.

Researchers in Mexico, where estafiate has been used medicinally for centuries, found its active ingredients were able to alter glucose absorption and liberate insulin in mice. In a separate study, the group determined an essential oil blocked the first steps in the transmission of pain messages to the brain.

Artemisias contain a number of ingredients, common to many members of the genus. Rachel Mata’s group thought estafiate’s effects came from different chemicals attacking different problems simultaneously. Depending on species and where it grew, any found in the Santa Cruz area could have had some of the effects discovered by her team.

While the four humors classified diabetes and arthritis as opposites, Daniel Solomon found there was a tendency today for patients with rheumatoid arthritis to develop diabetes. He hypothesized inflamation was the link, because patients given some modern drugs containing an anti-inflammatory drug containing hydroxychloroquine were less likely than others to develop insulin resistence.

Note: The chemicals in both the yellow flowered Verbesina enceloides and in Artemisias can be extremely dangerous. As mentioned in the 2006 post, sheep have died from insulin shock after eating the first. The second may contain thujone, whose fatal properties were mentioned in the post on tansy for 21 January 2007. When the Norwegian researchers experimented with diet, they insisted their patients continue taking their prescribed arthritis medications.

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

Escalante, A. and I. del Rincón. "Epidemiology and Impact of Rheumatic Disorders in the United States Hispanic Population," Current Opinion in Rheumatology 13:104-10:2001.

Haugen, M, D. Fraser, and O. Forre. "Diet Therapy for the Patient with Rheumatoid Arthritis?," Rheumatology 38:1039-1044:1999

Kjeldsen-Kragh, J. "Rheumatoid Arthritis Treated with Vegetarian Diets," The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 70:594S-600S:1999.

_____, M. Haugen, et alia. "Controlled Trial of Fasting and One-year Vegetarian Diet in Rheumatoid Arthritis." Lancet 338:899-902:1991.

Mata, R., G. D. Anaya-Eugenio, I. Rivero-Cruz, R. Bye, and E. Linares. "Antinociceptive Activity of the Essential Oil from Artemisia ludoviciana," American Society of Pharmacognosy, 2015 Annual Meeting.

_____, _____, _____, and J. Rivera-Chávez. "Hypoglycemic Properties of Some Preparations and Compounds from Artemisia ludoviciana Nutt.," Journal of Ethnopharmacology 155:416-425:2014.

Ortiz y Pino III, José. The Herbs of Galisteo and Their Powers, 1971.

Solomon, D. H., T. J. Love, C. Canning, and Schneeweiss. "Risk of Diabetes among Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriatic Arthritis and Psoriasis," Annals of Rheumatic Diseases 69:2114-2117:2010.

_____, et alia. "Effect of Hydroxychloroquine on Insulin Sensitivity and Lipid Parameters in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Without Diabetes Mellitus: a Randomized, Blinded Crossover Trial," Arthritis Care and Research 66:1246-51:2014.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photographs:
1. Cultivated variety of Artemisia ludoviciana called Silver King, in my yard, 28 September 2013.

2. Áñil del muerto in my driveway, 5 October 2013.

3. Áil growing in a local abandoned field, 31 August 2014.